Good morning! (Yeah, these are dropping in the morning now instead of late at night! If you hate that, let me know!)
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It’s MLK Day! A day that corporations, politicians, and white people with one black friend whose hairstyle they can’t quite describe will say is a day about togetherness + peace + love!
Even the NFL, an organization that treats wokeness like a weather vane, has emblazoned their end zones with CHOOSE LOVE for the holiday. Yes, if only the 63% of Americans who disapproved of Martin Luther King Jr in 1966 had chosen love, we wouldn’t be in this mess today.
So in honor of MLK, here’s a special list, called:
Things About Racism I’ve Had To Explain In Depth To White Friends (But In 2026 They Could Probably Learn Them On Their Own!)
Now, before we go any farther (further? better? stronger?) do not get hurt feelings my dear Caucasian friends. One, because I’m not trying to hurt your feelings, and two, those hurt feelings are borne out of white fragility and I shan’t be explaining that today!
The Civil Rights didn’t get a wave of legislation through in 1968 because of political compromise, but because of overwhelming electoral wins in 66/68. If we’re going to move anything forward again in my lifetime, the secret sauce is not wasting breath on a bunch of white racists who are “just asking questions” about if interracial marriage makes things too complicated for the kids.
The truly chilling part of racism as a Black person in America is not the threat of violence. That part is horrible. Open abject racism is horrible — getting called the N word, getting threatened with violence, being arrested and detained without cause, or just being murdered by a neighborhood watch. All very bad (and 3 of the 4 personal experiences for me! fun!) The chilling part of racism is when any of the aforementioned things happen to you, and when you tell a white person you know they find a reason that what happened wasn’t racism. Maybe they just say the racist in question is “an idiot” or “a jerk,” maybe they wonder if you hit the rare bad apple police officer. But you’re in a situation that feels akin to when a vampire shows their teeth and then the one member of the Mystery Gang has to convince everyone else that Old Mr Thompson has a horrible secret. Which is just to say… go watch Sinners.
Stop saying you love biracial babies because they’re “so cute.” Babies are so cute, that’s why Anne Geddes has a career. Specifying it racially is creepy and weird; you’re not adoring your neighbor’s labradoodle.
You do not have to use a person of color’s race when you are telling a story. In fact, challenge yourself not to! Tell that story, but describe that person using any other descriptors and see if you can do it! We don’t need to know that the guy in the convenience store buying a cooler full of red vines was asian!
An education in fighting racism does not require asking your Black friend. There are in fact history books, sociology books, civil rights books, and an entire internet out there explaining things like redlining, hair discrimination, white privilege, white fragility, white guilt, white flight, and — if you’re learned about all those — white chocolate mousse, which isn’t racial but is a nice little dessert.
Black people do not have an extra muscle in their leg. That’s not a thing. BUT ask your white friends if they’ve ever heard it — you’re gonna be surprised!
DEI was not about Black people making structural gains, it was about white corporate America finding a way to feel like they ‘fixed’ racism without firing any racists. That’s why most companies followed this pattern: hire one Black woman not to have any real corporate power but to be the Head of DEI, where she could do trainings explaining what racism was to people who already knew because that’s how the workplace ended up with only one Black person working there… in the Racism Department. That’s why it folded so quickly when assaulted by the Trump administration, because there wasn’t anything there to hold together.
And the last and most important one, that really is why the rest exist:
The greatest failure in America’s history was the failure to complete Reconstruction.
You can read about this in a plethora of books, but the short version is this.
The South loved slavery. They loved it so much it was in the original articles of secession, it was talked about by Jefferson Davis, it was repeated over and over as something worth fighting for. It was the heart of Bloody Kansas!
The South lost a war against The United States of America over slavery.
Because both the North and the South were full of intermingled white people, and because white people really dislike cutting ties with other white people, the North was primed to find a way to let white southerners back in to America.
The South created the Lost Cause myth, pretended they fought the war for good reasons, and were misunderstood, but were actually on the right side.
The North, to its eternal shame, bought this crock of shit and let the South back in.
The South immediately used its new power to end Reconstruction - a wave of American justice that had put Black people in the US Congress in the 1800s. 30 years after being beaten into submission by the United States, the unrepentant white supremacists of the south took Plessy v Ferguson and created Jim Crow, building a wave of racist persecution it would take another 70 years to defeat.
We should have crushed their necks into the dirt, thrown them in the wilderness of the American West, and given every abandoned plantation to a formerly enslaved family. We showed mercy where it wasn’t deserved and Black people paid the price — but not just Black Americans, because those divisions are what sit at the heart of the Red/Blue fights of the past 75 years, and they are the core fuel for MAGA today.
As we move forward, if we get another one of those 66/68 election duos, we cannot repeat the mistake of the past. Do not give white supremacists an inch, or they’ll come back like poorly treated cancer.
It’s MLK Day. And if you want to imbue it with some meaning take a half-hour of the holiday and read Dr King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail. Every year the Dream speech pops up, quotes about togetherness and love and mercy pop up, whatever is sanitized and non-demanding enough to be pleasant pops up. This is none of those.
How many “nice” people, how many “woke” politicians, how many supposedly anti-racist people fall into this category?
I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councillor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says, "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can't agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically feels that he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by the myth of time; and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a "more convenient season."
…
Frankly, I have never yet engaged in a direct-action movement that was "well timed" according to the timetable of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word "wait." It rings in the ear of every Negro with a piercing familiarity. This "wait" has almost always meant "never."
Everyone loves to quote that the arc of history bends toward justice. They don’t quote this one as much:
It is the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually, time is neutral. It can be used either destructively or constructively. I am coming to feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.
You really should go read the whole thing. I mean, it’s this guy’s holiday. But one more quote to wrap up.
I had hoped that the white moderate would see this. Maybe I was too optimistic. Maybe I expected too much. I guess I should have realized that few members of a race that has oppressed another race can understand or appreciate the deep groans and passionate yearnings of those that have been oppressed, and still fewer have the vision to see that injustice must be rooted out by strong, persistent, and determined action.
So with all this, now 1000 words past what I thought I would write, one simple question. Not one that will fix everything. Not one that solves racism or explains it all. But one that’s a starting point.
WHO, today, is the ‘white moderate’ MLK is talking about?
And not vaguely. Specifically. A good question to ask. A scary question to answer. I’m gonna guess it’s the person who came up with this:
-Greg
