“I don’t know what most white people in this country feel, but I can only conclude what they feel from the state of their institutions.
I don’t know if white Christians hate Negroes or not, but I know that we have a Christian church which is white, and a Christian church which is black. I know as Malcolm X once put it, “The most segregated hour in American life is high noon on Sunday.” That says a great deal to me about a Christian nation. It means that I can’t afford to trust most white Christians, and I certainly cannot trust the Christian church.
I don’t know whether the labor unions and their bosses really hate me. That doesn’t matter, but I know that I’m not in their unions.
I don’t know if the real estate lobbies have anything against black people, but I know the real estate lobbies keep me in the ghetto.
I don’t know if the Board of Education hates black people, but I know the textbooks they give my children to read, and the schools that we have to go to.
Now, this is the evidence. You want me to make an act of faith, risking myself, my wife, my women, my sister, my children, on some idealism which you assure me exists in America, but I have never seen.”
Some great common sense advice for the next time a white moderate or a racism denier tries to deflect for a fellow white person caught being racist, and says, “Well who can really say what’s in someone’s heart?” Black people are constantly asked to take the “good” word of white people, and ignore our common sense and lived reality.
In every occurrence of police brutality and racism in America, inevitably we are asked to clear the impossibly high bar of becoming a reader-of-hearts before we can condemn obvious racists. Instead of simply looking at the damning evidence staring us in the face. As if our experiences with institutional racism in America is imagined.
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