A Letter To My Fellow White Men

At Important, Not Important, we work diligently to uplift diverse voices. But — and we have always sought to be transparent about this — we are a bootstrapped, “indie” company run part-time by two white men of privilege and a white, queer human of privilege. We are able to do what we do because of that privilege.

And because of that privilege, we must seek to be the best allies we can be.

We talk a lot about climate justice in our newsletter and on our show, but if it’s never been clear before, let me make it abundantly so: climate justice and racial justice are intimately linked. Black Lives Matter. 

Black Lives Matter. While the world stands on the horizon of an affordable, renewable, sustainable future, America has failed to reconcile its past because the white men who have disproportionately been empowered to lead our country have refused to recognize that past. Our nation, our economy, and our way of life, are constructed on the bedrock of our original resource: cheap, disposable Black bodies.

White men who look like me believe themselves to be experts at a variety of vocations, but no calling has come as effortlessly through the generations as that of depriving people who don’t look like us of any resource we would prefer to have, even if doing so threatens their survival—even the land they live on. Even the bodies they live in.

We pillage these fundamental resources in every way imaginable, and then we protect our stolen goods, tangible and not, with a security force skilled in brutality, and murder. 

Trayvon Martin. George Floyd. Breonna Taylor. Jazzaline Ware. David McAtee. Ashanti Carmon. Chynal Lindsey. Ahmaud Arbery. They were not murdered by me, but have no doubt: their blood is on my hands and the hands of every person who looks like me.

It is incredibly uncomfortable to confront that fact, but it is undoubtedly still magnitudes more comfortable than being suffocated to death by a police officer whose salary you contribute to, and who is otherwise, unless you are Black, employed to protect, and serve.

You are feeling guilty. I am, too. This is the least we can do. A good start, if barely a start.

But it is not the job of our Black friends to assuage our newly discovered guilt, to make us feel less ashamed that this guilt could possibly be newly discovered. 

Possibly, because people that look like me have spent two hundred and forty-four years worshipping at the altar of a group of ambitious young white men (they would be Millennials today) who worked diligently to build anew, with one eye to the future. These men declared the rights to life, liberty, and property as inalienable. And yet — many of the white men in this group owned Black people as property.

Two hundred and forty-four years later, we must confront our guilt, starting now, starting yesterday, on our own. And then we must turn towards action; we must finally turn away from those men and choose to be significantly better white men, while similarly aiming towards the future, or as my friend Bina Ventkataram puts it, to being “better ancestors”. All of this while understanding that we cannot continue to canonize white men. Our new leaders must look different than we do. 

But before we commit to action, we must fully understand the context of the situation at hand: Black people are once again risking their lives to march in the streets. This, in the midst of the first pandemic in a hundred years. Because they have to. To paraphrase Lincoln, if this isn’t wrong, then nothing is wrong.

You may have joined these marches. So many thousands have. But we are not the leaders of this movement, and shouldn’t be.

***

White men — benefiting from white supremacism whether they choose to or not — often profess to understand systems thinking: that is, understanding how things influence one another within a whole.

For all of white men’s many failures in the actual application of that thinking (see climate change), we have succeeded in designing one system — racism — that is complete. 

We have, through diligent effort and at the cost of so many bodies, perfected an apparatus that is so comprehensive that there isn’t a part of American life where racism has not been implemented. We have them surrounded.

Let’s look at our current moment for deeper insight:

Because of centuries of systemic racism, even more efficient since the Industrial Revolution, and, again, designed nearly entirely by white supremacists who look like me, the prevalence of underlying health conditions from dirty air and water, health conditions that are overwhelming risk factors for COVID, is more than double for Black people than for whites and Asians.

We set them up for failure, once again.

And yet, Black people continue to stand up. To go outside. To protest, endangering themselves further. Again they protest, for the right to breathe. For a more equitable world. They care desperately for their own lives, and those of their children, but also for this singular world we are all so lucky to inhabit. 

As the incredible Black marine biologist Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson said last week: “How can we expect black Americans to focus on climate when we are so at risk on our streets, in our communities, and even within our own homes?”

If SARS-CoV-2 is a virus novel to humanity, the outcome — a mass of dead Black bodies — is not. And nor will the outcome be for the next great human challenge. Humanity is unprepared, and yet white people are already so much safer than Black people. 

But the virus — a manifestation of capitalism, an addiction to growth, the destruction of ecosystems, and inevitable warming — continues to rage.

So we ask everyone to wear masks. White people are celebrated for wearing masks. Black people are murdered for it.

We murder them for so many reasons. Often, we murder them for no reason.

We are creative and cruel and steadfast in how we murder Black people. We murder them directly — by lynching them, sending them to war, shooting them in the back, kneeling on their necks, subjecting them to lifetime imprisonment and capital punishment. We murder them indirectly, by poisoning the air they breathe, and the water they drink; by continuing to drive vehicles that pollute their neighborhoods far more than our own, by neglecting their continued efforts for fair housing, a fair education, by making our healthiest foods either unavailable in food deserts, or more expensive than they can afford, leading inevitably to health conditions that, you guessed it, kill them.

We deny hospitals in Black communities the grants they need to succeed in moments such as these, so they can buy personal protective equipment for their frontline workers — yet we incinerate our own used medical equipment right in their backyards.

Should a Black person be infected and survive the physiological manifestation of this virus, our economy will endeavor to finish them off. Because this is an economy they are barely allowed to participate in, much less benefit from — a system of finances and goods, tactile and increasingly not, that men like me were simply gifted.

***

Even on the fields of glory, we murder them. You might be curious how the NFL fits into a piece about Black Lives Matter and science. 

We recruit the best Black athletes into a uniquely American gladiator sport that eventually destroys their bodies, but even more so their brains, and their minds. In many cases, the mind eventually takes the body away for good. That’s science.

Further: these young Black men spend their teenage years and early twenties destroying their bodies for free, creating vast profits for white men -- a situation with which white men and Black people are both intimately familiar. Instead of plantations, the back-breaking work benefits prestigious universities where we would never otherwise let them in. 

A small percentage of those Black men will be deemed talented enough to graduate to the professional ranks. Only then—for a brief period of time, and on a non-guaranteed basis — do we reward an infinitesimal percentage of the best of the best of those with blood money.

And then, inevitably, with glee, we chastise them — at best — for failing to save their hard-earned cash. The ones who don’t get a chance under the lights are cast aside with — you guessed it — zero-to-little education, battered bones and neurons, and fear. So much fear. Fear of having to go home empty-handed. Fear of being unable to provide for their families, nuclear and extended. Fear of prison. Fear of taking a deep breath. Fear of going for a jog. Of sleeping in their own home.

I do not group Black people together because I seek to erase a vast multitude of interests and cultures, but because, as has become very clear, white police do not consider these things before murdering a Black human. Black is Black.

***

Nowhere is this more true than right here in Los Angeles County, where our police are among the most seasoned in suppressing and murdering Black people. Los Angeles doesn’t have the murder longevity of, say, Georgia, but Georgia also doesn’t bill itself as the bastion of the resistance and progressive politics.

Los Angeles is where Black people are more than twice as likely to die from COVID as white people, where foster children are primarily Black, where 3000 oil wells are primarily located near Black and Brown neighborhoods, where the poverty rate for Black people is three times that of whites, where pre-existing conditions rage, where more than 30% of our homeless are Black despite representing just 9% of the population, where our police are among the best in the world at snuffing out Black lives.

Of course, we have not only murdered, enslaved, and oppressed generations of Black bodies, but also Black dreams and ideas. Dreams and ideas that not only deserve the chance to flourish on their own merit, but that would be invaluable contributors to culture and progress worldwide. 

This is just another moral and practical failure of white supremacism. By suppressing the dreams and ideas of a percentage of our population for so very long, society has effectively been playing the game of civilization with one hand cuffed ruthlessly behind its back.

This isn’t to say that there haven’t been legions of successful Black artists, scientists, politicians, teachers, and voices. It’s that they’re the exceptions to the rule.

***

Let’s move into action steps.

If you’ve been online in any capacity in the past few weeks, you’ve hopefully sought out or stumbled upon some action steps for white people, thoughtfully and generously prepared by Black people. Maybe this is the first time you’ve encountered some of these actions, maybe not. Maybe you’re already doing some of these things, maybe it’s your first time proactively buying from a Black-owned business.

On the homefront, Important, Not Important can do so much more to amplify diverse voices and perspectives. But it is also clear that we must simultaneously dismantle the culture of white supremacy that precludes them from rising to the top in the first place. I, and we, pledge to keep listening.

To begin, aspiring for life to return to normal is to admit your limited perspective and extreme privilege. Take a step back, and then another, and realize — that like climate change — we can no more return to normal than submit Black people to another four hundred years of suffering. We have to build anew. 

But, again, we cannot build anew without fully dismantling the system we’ve built. We cannot turn the page; we must rip it out, and burn it, and write a new one. Black people have been chipping away at this system for centuries, and they are asking us to be allies, instead of murderers.

This seems like an easy choice to make, and yet some white men continue to choose poorly. Many of these same white men also choose to disbelieve climate science. Well guess what? The science is overwhelming, and science doesn’t give a fuck what you believe: climate change is man-made, and America, led by white men that look like me, is racist.

But you and I can choose to be allies. This doesn’t mean not being a racist. This means being anti-racist. A warning, however: this is not a role to be taken lightly.

To summarize those steps so thoughtfully prepared by Black voices: we, white people, cannot simply tweet black boxes and hashtags, we cannot only educate ourselves, we cannot only join Black people in the streets; we have to do the hard work, the work of putting our bodies in between theirs and the white men we’ve hired to destroy them, and then we must defund those institutions, and rewrite the way we choose to protect each other, rerouting immense white wealth into reforming the criminal justice system, into Black education, into reparations, into housing, into clean air, into Black artists.

We have to demand justice in every way we can, with the money we have that they don’t, and in the positions of power we must cede. We cannot just pay for their bail, we must eliminate cash bail. We must tear down statues, we must give them back their votes. We must pass universal health care, and recognize that employer-based health insurance is racist. We must free Black people from our prisons, and then allow those Blacks to vote. We must design reparations. We must hold ourselves accountable for our choices. We must pay for them.

***

Every moment of white American history has been a choice, even if you, personally, have never made the choice to implement racism. But I have unquestionably benefited from racism, and so have you. And while men who look like me can never fully understand Black hardship, we have to get as close as we can, while staying very aware of our status as guests in this movement. We have to listen, to read, to earn our place — we have to earn everything from leaders who don’t look like us. 

We have to simultaneously turn inward and interrogate and dissect this system of privilege our fathers built, so we can understand how to demolish it.

We have to act, not perform, in ways and places that, for now, only we can, while amplifying the voices and needs of Black and Brown people. When the marching fades, this time, will you make your education, your actions, your donations recurring? The world is watching. 

Our company plans to continue listening, and acting. We can and must do better. We will feature and amplify more Black voices, and when we do begin to hire, we will make diversity our priority. We commit to contributing to Black-run organizations, and buying from Black businesses, we will publicly support efforts to defund the police locally and nationally, we will fight for a world where Black Americans enjoy the same air, water, and food as we do.

Black Lives Matter. The rest of us have to show up. We — the ones least accustomed to it — have to do the work. Hundreds of years have shown us that, while the moral arc of the universe may bend toward justice, it does not get there on its own. We have designed a system preventing exactly that.

This system, racism — perhaps the most successful in human history — will not just go away through individual actions, like climate change will not go away by you buying a Tesla. A couple of weeks of white people marching and bailing out Black protestors is the equivalent to planting a billion new trees. Overdue and necessary, but we also have to dismantle cash bail in the first place, we have to stop putting emissions into the air, altogether.

We, white people, and particularly white men, have to turn on and disassemble the systems that have powered industry and white supremacy for so long. We have to support the Black people, artists, ideas, leaders, organizations, and companies that have been doing the work every single day. 

To be abundantly clear: we have to do this work every single day. The process of completely rewriting society will not succeed immediately, or just on election day, or through good intentions alone. In this, as in many things, Dr. King knew us better than we know ourselves: “Progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability”. 

Black people have borne so much in the wake of Dr. King’s leadership. In this moment, try to imagine that he was talking to all of the rest of us. 

Let’s get to work.

Quinn Emmett, founderImportant, Not Important