Black Racism Doesn’t Get a Pass

The first black president, numerous black members of congress and key intersectional leaders, the folks most likely to lecture us on racism, were caught hanging out with an anti-Semitic racist. And now the media is full of hatesplaining hot takes justifying alliances with Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam.

Most of them come down to two themes. The Nation of Islam does some good things. And condemning racism is a lot harder when they’re your racists. Or as Terrell Jermaine Starr writes at The Root, “They are our cousins, friends and the dude at the barbershop.” But Klan members were also the cousins, friends and barbershop dudes of white southerners. Yet they were expected to disavow them.

Why can’t we expect black people to disavow their racist cousins the way that whites are expected to?

Black activists condemning white racists isn’t anti-racism. Black activists disavowing black racists is. Anyone can condemn a racist from another race who hates them. There’s no inner struggle in that.

Absent the legal sanctions of the civil rights movement era, it’s the easiest thing in the world.

But too many black activists seem to think that ranting about “white supremacy” today is a great act of political courage. But don’t ask them to root out the racism in their own communities. That’s too hard..

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