
While scrolling through Facebook yesterday, I was struck by the volume of posts written on the Baltimore protests. Luckily, my newsfeed has been flooded with the countless liberal voices I’ve met since coming to Boston University. But there were still a number of posts reflecting the ignorant and racist views of the people from my small hometown, Bellingham, Massachusetts, where our Dunkin’ Donuts to Democrat ratio is a solid one-to-one.
Now, I normally try to ignore the ignorant posts, in favor of sharing and supporting ones that better reflect my views. After all, half of the people throwing around the word “thugs” on my newsfeed could hardly find Baltimore on a map, never mind understand the incredibly complex monster of racial injustice in our country.
But one post in particular caught my attention among the deluge of misinformed opinions.
It was a picture shared by one of my Facebook friends who is as aggressively white as he is conservative. The picture was split down the middle. The top half showed Martin Luther King, Jr. leading the 1965 protests in Selma, Alabama overlaid with the caption, “This is a protest.” The bottom half showed a person of color smashing in a car window, captioned, “This is a riot.”
The reason this picture caught my attention is because it is a perfect example of the ways in which white people in our country manipulate the truth and misrepresent people of color and their words through media. King wrote on the topic of urban riots in a 1967 speech entitled “The Role of the Behavioral Scientist in the Civil Rights Movement.”
King argued, “The policymakers of the white society have caused the darkness; they create discrimination; they structured slums; and they perpetuate unemployment, ignorance and poverty. It is incontestable and deplorable that Negroes have committed crimes; but they are derivative crimes. They are born of the greater crimes of the white society.”
In this way, white people have transformed King from the leader and racial expert he was into a tool for making a point. To many of the white people in our country, King’s name has become synonymous with “peaceful protests” rather than “racial equality,” despite the fact that King cared far more about the latter. If you’re going to use King to make some point about Baltimore, use his words.
The Daily Kos, a political blog, published a great article on this topic, entitled “Dear White America: Please Stop Talking About Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Baltimore ‘Riots.’” The blog writes, “In these times of troubles, it is easy and intellectually lazy for people to mouth-breath [sic] some selection selectively misquoted and misappropriated from the I Have a Dream speech, as opposed to meditating on King’s analysis of systemic power and inequality as embodied by his observation that ‘a riot is the language of the unheard.’”
The Facebook post in question, however, points to a larger problem in discussions about Baltimore and race relations in general in our country. While white conservatives are misrepresenting the voices of people of color, white liberals are often attempting to speak over those voices while trying to support racial equality.
To my fellow white liberals: the best way to support the protestors in Baltimore and racial equality in general is to shut up. Black voices matter just as much as black lives, so put black voices in front of your own.
I’m not trying to tell white people to stop talking about Baltimore because, after all, I’m a white person talking about Baltimore. But when disseminating information and sharing perspectives, ensure that the focus is always on what people of color are saying about what is going on. As news of the Baltimore protests occupies our social media platforms, the “retweet” and “share” buttons are your new best friends.
As a white person, I will never understand the feeling of being a victim of racism and racial injustice. White people need to remember that when we talk about Baltimore and racial injustice, we are entering a conversational space that is occupied by people who are infinitely more qualified to speak on the matter: people of color. They are the experts. They are the experienced group.
The Baltimore protests are not about white people, white opinions or white experiences. Effectively — and I know this weighs heavy on the fragile pride of privileged white Americans — our white opinions don’t matter. If you want to really make a difference with police violence, the death of Freddie Gray and the subsequent protesting, use your privileged position in society to push black voices to the front.