American exceptionalism is a one-way ticket to xenophobia. Vigilance is our path to restorative justice. Choose wisely.
By Sahra Ali
In communal cultures, the younger generation is often co-reared by the generation prior. This means even if you are ten years older than your new baby brother, you care for them in some respects as both a sibling and parent. When Americans hear of this, in my experience, they are surprised by the sharing of what they know to be a strictly adult endeavor, across generations of people living in the same home. While individualism is embedded in the actualization of American society, the dissonance occurs when we recognize that the conception of this country has not and will never belong to just one generation or set of individuals. The Founding Fathers were more like framers than fathers. Early successes in militarism encouraged U.S. patriotism to harbor a faulty narrative that is most protected by old white men who have historical vendettas from their wartime years. Last month, such an old white man in Ohio, where I partly grew up and my family still resides today, approached my younger sister at work, spewing such American exceptionalism antics tainted with racism and a mix of calculated intimidation. This is the story of how a nation that contains multitudes reduces itself to cemented ignorance and how the notion of “trigger happy” became synonymous with path of least resistance. I will draw on the experience of my little sister in particular as well as other sources who have been both vilified and victimized by senseless attacks on their character and bodies during the 2024 election cycle in Ohio.
As global nomad, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion consultant working in multiple sectors, I split my time between a few continents and perspectives. I also have a very large community and family in the states whom I love and actively advocate alongside. It sickens me to field calls from them halfway across the world on how to handle weaponized intersectional discrimination in the year 2024. I did it in 2016, 2020, and sadly here we are again. I aim to unpack the hot white rage that has impeded on our safety and dignity as Black, Brown, Muslim, and anyone who occupies both identities.
The Consequences of Historical Amnesia in Modern Day Affairs
For the purpose of this essay and as to not conflate, generalize, reduce, simplify or group together the sets of harmful prejudices that have targeted many communities in the United States not limited to Black, Indigenous, Indigenous, Muslim, Arab, Asian and Pacific Islander, LGBTQ+ (specifically trans Black Women within the trappings of misogynoir), and anyone who holds multiple identities that carry specific prejudices, I will evoke Kimberle Crenshaw’s term intersectionality along with historical Black thinkers such as bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Walter Rodney, and others who have shaped my views on these interconnected, enduring social justice issues.
Understanding our history is crucial when unpacking the limitations of language and storied past. Historical amnesia has the United States not just rewriting legislation but also unshelving books about how Black people came to be in the Americas through the slave trade. What is deeply hurtful is the willful miseducation of an entire generation that would rather return to days where whiteness prevailed (and white women couldn’t vote through the heavy hand of segregation and exclusionary practices that once deemed a Black person 3/5ths of a person). I once read somewhere that no group of people could own another without an embedded superiority complex. While I agree that such heinous degradation of human rights do fuel grandiose beliefs, I reject the notion that enslaved people from history and those amongst us today (as some form of slavery is still practiced in parts of the world) are somehow betrothed to this miscarriage of justice by way of identity. No one is born enslaved and,furthermore, any human being who has ever owned another has a deep distorted misunderstanding of what it means to be a human themselves. It is unnatural to possess another; so unnatural that it carries with it a generational trauma that has been harnessed by angry white people during another campaign trail in Ohio.
When that man went to my sister and remarked about the dark pigmentation of her skin while telling her that “his friends” who were all veterans like him, would not take kindly to her existence, he was channeling this grandiosity. What makes a person so bold? I will tell you. But first let me juxtapose it with the unpacking of white silence, for I truly think white silence and white aggression are inextricably linked, no matter what the nice white people who no longer talk to their in-laws due to racism tell you. I think the biggest elephant in the room is what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called the silence of “nice white folks.” Those who don’t want to rock the boat but also have no literal dog in the fight and therefore are ambivalent to the watchdog who only insists on hurting their Black neighbor. Here is a passage from King’s autobiography,where he talks about the nice whites of Birmingham Alabama.
“Certainly Birmingham had its white moderates who disapproved of Bull Connor’s tactics. Certainly Birmingham had its decent white citizens who privately deplored the maltreatment of Negroes. But they remained publicly silent. It was a silence born of fear—fear of social, political, and economic reprisals. The ultimate tragedy of Birmingham was not the brutality of the bad people, but the silence of the good people.”
Martin Luther King Jr.’s passage feels both timely and haunting. The reverberations of ancestral silence have ricocheted into the present day. I think of Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower series and how she set it in the 2020s. Butler painted a dystopia that feels eerily close to home. The complicit silence must end. Moreover, whites have a responsibility to shield the rest of us from the wrath of their fathers and uncles. This is not a kind favor for a neighbor, but rather a moral imperative that white folks pitted against the history of their silence and the reality of today’s activated white supremacy. It all culminates here. There is nothing sexy about civil war. Just because America is in the business of war, does not mean we must shed our capacity to affirm life. Toni Morrison called racism a distraction; she also said it is white problem, to which I agree. A white problem left so unchecked and neglected that old age has exposed the hateful rhetoric of yesteryear.
The Burden of Proven Silence
Silence is many things. Silence shapeshifts into unknown terrains and bleeds into unexamined perceptions and unchecked biases. Silence festers inside someone when they do not give words to what they are feeling and thinking. Let’s consider Dylan Roof when he decided to target a Black church for his racial massacre. Do you think he conceived of carrying out this act in one day or mere hours or did it dwell and swell inside him like a parasite? I reckon the latter. The hate inside him stirred and I am sure he did not go around telling the world his ultimate dream was to murder innocent Black worshippers.
The loudness of his thoughts may as well have been as deafening as the negligence of his community and silence of his loved ones. Only in America can a troubled white teen find solace in the violent crevices of white supremacy and neo-Nazi rhetoric. This is why Nazism is ever popular. It is no longer just about Aryan goals of ethnic cleansing, but a commitment to resurrecting something akin to eugenics. I am not talking about white kids being left alone or a careless grandfather who says racist shit when he drinks, I am saying that the disease of whiteness has range.
There’s a Lyndon B. Johnson quote that feels very apt here. “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.” Those white pockets are still being emptied today, only this time, it is being anchored by the incisive language of civil rights era racism. Racism is so boring and unimaginative that it cycles in and out of belligerent, performative delusion evoking with it a cacophony of the weary and unthinkable. It’s fascinating that those most enraged are also those committing the most senseless acts of violence in the name of white supremacy. They are fighting themselves and the victims become collateral damage.
The man who repeatedly harassed my little sister till she told me and eventually reported, could very well be Dylan Roof’s grandfather. He can be an uncle to the hateful police officer who had devised to murder Sonya Massey in her moment of need. The man who looked at a vulnerable Black woman and decided to take her life. Just like that. This is how silence festers inside the diseased mind. This is how whiteness works and how Black people pay the price, sometimes with their life. All of this is connected. In fact, it is the abandonment of the connective tissue between us that has morally corrupt whites to the point of ideological delusion. Solidarity without action is compliance. It’s like watching your neighbor’s house burn with your brother’s match and closing your blinds. We can learn a lot about our country and neighbors by reflecting on King’s description of the silence of the nice white folks of Birmingham. We would do better collectively if such grave mistakes could be avoided.
Dignity Over Dissonance and Death
It feels rather odd to advocate for decency by way of dignifying and affirming life when humans have existed as long as we have, but there are still some among us who choose to inflict violence on people they deem different than them to satisfy their displaced anger. Truthfully, centering these white folks is not my style. But the elephant in the room has invited other elephants, and I fear the whole thing has now erupted into a categorical mess. A stalemate of senseless proportions where egos run supreme and murder is too attainable. Blackness and Islamophobia bring with it a dynamic level of disdain from white supremacists who wish to keep their neighborhoods and gene pool white.
The thing is my little sister was born in Columbus, Ohio, and while she has had many instances of racism over the years; this one really broke her faith in her community. It took her innocence. My little sister grew up in suburbia full of midwest “nice” white people. She uttered her first words in Zanesville and went to school in Pataskala after that. She gets white humor and can talk to any small-town person on the plane. Each time she visits me, all over the world, she makes friends with random people. I would joke with her that she has an Ohio twang accent. I taught her country music when she was a kid, and she still listens to Rascal Flatts and Sugarland. She once joked after we belted out another rendition of “Living on a Prayer” by Bon Jovi that it should be on the U.S. citizenship test. She is undoubtedly as American as she is a multifaceted young Somali woman. When she told me of the incident, she was shocked by the man’s words. She just kept saying over and over “But why would he say that?” and “What did he mean by that?. I told her there was no rationalizing this kind of racism. The kind that finds you at your job and threatens your existence while seemingly being enthralled by your features. The man was playing mind games with her. He needed to assert the power of his race. These are the consequences of not talking about irrational hate. No one should lose their life or be made uncomfortable based on how they look.
Humans are complex, convoluted, emotional, fickle, and prone to impulsive disposition. We rarely agree with one another. All of this can be true, and we can still not kill one another over our held beliefs especially if those beliefs are deeply misguided. I propose debate and dissent instead of blind rage that can kill. These white people who seem to be obsessed with race should debate one another on why they insist on flexing an old immoral muscle. It’s a tired, worn-out muscle that never grows and is always hungry. Nice white folks should talk to the barbaric few that continue to wage war within their own towns and create division. The disdain can be replaced with dissent. Dissent does not have to equate to death and white people can learn something from their public display of dissonance. The schizophrenia of whiteness is well documented. We see the royal Karen lashing out at Black teens and it’s all funny until one of those teens gets shot by Karen’s brother in law. There must be some kind of recourse that does not have the burden of proof and resolve fall on the victim.
The endemic of violence in the United States is second to and propped up our militarism. My whole American life I have heard “America is number One.” I never understood it. Our military industrial complex seems to be a hero at home. I have talked to countless white people who said they went into the military to fight “bad guys”. They went to countries like Somalia to fight bad guys. Perspective is a funny thing. How come when people are in other countries they are bad; but when white people commit terrorism and inflict violence in immigrant communities or murder a Black person, they are not the bad guys? I think of GI Joe and the othering that happens when children play fight or play war. What the U.S. does in the name of security is questionable at best and deeply violent and genocidal at worst. To evoke the military in service of your white agenda is a disgrace to all the Black people who serve in the military. We know now that many of the Black men who went to fight in Vietnam were deeply mistreated. Black Americans were also always involved in the military in some fashion despite historical erasure. When you evoke racism within the confines of military powers and say that your “military friends would not be as nice to you as I am. They are evil” you are projecting your brand of racism into it, thereby disrespecting those who served alongside you. White militarism and conspiracy theories that say some rich old white man is running the whole world, are both very weak and uninspiring ideas. They reinforce a group of people from a colonial time when the world has collectively rejected such colonial and imperialist conduct and aspires to decolonize and restructure.
An imbalance is afoot, but we can turn things around without having to wait for generations to cycle out. Ideological wars need ideological reforms and redirection. The same way democracy is changing; so are the white supremacist tactics of the before times. Eventually, the man who threatened my little sister was dealt with by management. When called nice white people showed up and were troubled by his remarks and behavior. One such white person, a supervisor, told my sister that he was particularly sickened by the man’s behavior because he too was once racist and has since reformed. He lamented that his family was like this growing up. My sister learned a lesson I wish she did not have to and while I am glad that her white colleagues were receptive; her case was a chilling form of harassment. I shudder to think of all the people who are ignored. I remember the long calls my sister and I had talking about her course of action. Aiding her through her confusion, her hurt, her own dissonance.
This is how racism diseases the mind and warps reality. It tethers the victim to the delusion of the perpetrator because hate is an unnatural, uncomfortable energy. It is not life affirming. I believe all life affirms life. We lose this when we choose to take another’s’ life. A collective vigilance creates a conscious society. I would rather have an activated ally than one who shares ANTIFA posts. To my little sister, I love you, and I am sorry you had to go through this. To the white people of Ohio and beyond, your failure to make nice with your neighbors is statistically killing a portion of society. Your silence is the curtain. American exceptionalism is a one-way ticket to xenophobia. Vigilance is our path to restorative justice. Choose wisely.
Sahra Ali is an international writer, consultant and tech developer. She splits her time between Alaska, SE Asia, and East Africa, while her family resides in Central Ohio. Ali is a fellow at the Virginia Tech Institute for Leadership in Technology.
