What Is Wrong with America Is Us White People

by K. Jason CoKer

This message is for white people. I am a white, heterosexual, 43-year-old man from Mississippi. There is a crisis of belief among what has felt like the vast majority of our white sisters and brothers throughout the U.S. Historically, we don’t believe people who are not white.

We also don’t believe the white people who believe nonwhite people. We don’t believe in statistics that say nonwhite people are disproportionately policed and incarcerated. And when I say nonwhite, I’m mostly talking about African Americans, as well as the Latinx community, along with so many other nonwhite communities.

When we do believe the statistics about policing and incarceration (and health, economic and educational disparities and and and), we blame nonwhite people. There must be something wrong with them to invite so much policing or for them to be sentenced to such long prison terms.

Their culture is broken, we say. They must be more criminal, less committed to living a healthy lifestyle, less intelligent, less capable of upward economic mobility. They must be the problem.

If they are more criminal or less intelligent by nature, the flawed logic goes, then “we” must police and incarcerate them more and make sure they never move up in our society because they are so deficient.

“We” must suppress their capacity to vote in “open” elections, not spend too much money to educate them, not pay them too much for their labor, not worry too much about them being shot and strangled to death by the police.

There is a devastating lie somehwere.

Many white people believe this. There are probably more white people who do not, yet are still more bothered by the “looting” and “senseless” destruction of property than the killing of George Floyd. They are white people who say, “We don’t know the backstory.” The backstory must so horrible that it somehow can justify the killing.

Floyd must have done something terrible for a police officer to hold him down like that with his knee on his neck, right? Because we can’t believe that a cop would do something like that without good reason— because we don’t believe nonwhite people when they tell us over and over again that this is exactly what happens.

White people believe that police are here to protect us. They are there when we need them most. And in our lived experience this has been true. When we call 911, help is on the way! That’s exactly how the system works for us.

Our experiences with law enforcement, banking, real estate, education, health care, etc., are generally good. These institutions are put in place for us to live at peace and even get ahead—that’s been our lived experience. We live in one of the greatest countries in the world where you can do better by working harder. Where we are rewarded by doing the right thing.

K. Jason Coker writes that many white people cannot believe America is great and also believe nonwhite people when they describe their lived experience in the same country. This must change, he says.

Photo by John Cameron on Unsplash

Our experience in the U.S. has been pretty good. If someone is not having such a good experience, it must mean that there is something wrong with them. We can’t believe that America is great and also believe nonwhite people when they describe their lived experience here. We can’t believe in our country and their experience at once—they are truly incongruent. There is a devastating lie somewhere.

Will we white people believe in America, or will we believe nonwhite people?

The majority of white people choose to believe in America. That is the white choice, and it is also the wrong choice. It is wrong because America cannot be great until there is real equity in lived experience across all our different identities. America cannot be great just for white people. If that’s the case, then it is not a great nation.

Here is what absolutely amazes me. So many African Americans and other nonwhite people believe in this country, too! Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream was of an America that lived into its professed values of liberty and freedom for all. The Mississippi civil-rights icon Medgar Evers fought for this country in World War II but could not vote for the governor of Mississippi or the U.S. president when he returned.

Even now, when there is concerted effort to suppress black voters through voter registrations, gerrymandering and the closing of DMVs in predominantly African American towns where one has to show their ID cards to vote, many black Americans still participate in the systems and seek to change the inequities that have been historically piled on their backs.

Their belief in America is so astonishing that white people should be inspired by African Americans’ belief in this country and work to move toward its best ideals.

What is wrong with America is us white people. The crisis in our belief puts too many people at risk. If we truly believed that George Floyd was as good as any good white person we knew, we would be devastated. If we believed George Floyd was as good or as human as our white sons, we’d want to blow something up or set something on fire. If we believed, we could change what’s wrong.

K. Jason Coker is coordinator of the The Cooperative Baptist Fellowship of Mississippi.