Great opening quote that accurately sets the tone. Racism is a divisive topic that should be faced, and feelings should be hurt. It’s a very hurtful topic. But although pockets of racist exist up North where I was raised, there was a strong tradition of white anti-racism and abolition dating back to the colonist period starting the mid-1600s. The Quakers who founded Pennsylvania wrote anti-slavery documents and abolitionist slavery for their members. They educated freed blacks from their core belief that each person had the same light of god in them (hence the term “this little light of mine”). The first black almanac is produced by a Quaker educated Benjamin Banneker and published. Because of this constant moral “white” agitation by Quakers and Puritans in the Northeast the supremacist attitude of the monarchy we have James Gronniosaw writing the first autobiographical slave narrative in 1772, one of the first black churches being founded in 1773, King George II in 1751 actually feeling pressured to repeal the Virginia Act of 1705 that declared slaves real estate, the first abolition society being founded in 1775. The list goes on “whites” agitating constantly against slavery, abolishing it. You do do see the forces of white supremacy of course reversing decisions, eliminating manumission, declaring and demanding fugitive slaves be returned. That early period was tense and the tension only rose.
The brainwashing today eclipses the state by state advancement of white abolition in the first 90 years after American was founded. The tension between these two sides was constant, not federal. Black Americans in the South have great cause not seeing good whites, not seeing whites fighting for equal rights, deeply distrusting whites who have seemed to have done nothing by murder, beat, and lash out against slurs against all blacks.
But growing up in the North, we openly talked about racists in our family, and many groups continued to seek civil rights because of a strong, it perhaps somewhat smaller tradition of civil rights and deeply helped beliefs in equality and justice for all.
My mother is a Quaker who shows her beliefs by engaging all equally, meeting and behind a peace activist for decades. Sadly, peace does not make the news, and the vast Americans discount peace activist and consider violence normal and seem to laugh at pacifists, which is actually the chief foundational necessity to ensure democracy. It’s not that I ask people to believe “some whites are good” as a concession to a brief presentation of facts about a key strain of whites struggling for abolition and recognition of equality of races in practice, not just principle. But only that this deep division of a minority of whites struggling for that recognition of equality is real and foundational to American democracy. The loud, violent supremacists though take up all the white oxygen in the room. Fear gets all the focus but it contains wrongful beliefs which are easy to perpetuate.