On Segregation. Hey fellow white person, when have you…
By: Francisco Pucciarello
Tags: White Privilege, Growth, Opportunity, BlackLivesMatter, White Fragility

Hey fellow white person, when have you had Black people in your life? What have they done to enhance the quality of your life?

Reading one quote from Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility opens our eyes to an entire perspective on what we have been deprived of as White individuals and as collective who fail to actively reject the parts of our lives that are segregated — void of Blackness.

“The most profound message of racial segregation may be that the absence of people of color from our lives is no real loss. Not on person who loved me, guided me, or taught me ever conveyed that segregation deprived me of anything of value,” she wrote.

Immediately I thought of my own life; Nellson taught me about brotherhood from when I was six years old; Mohamed taught me about generosity; Kareem taught me about intentionalism; Fatou showed me family ethics; Denroy showed me how to work hard; Phillo taught me about consistency in friendship; Cathy taught me how to harness my emotions to make change; Seth taught me empathy; Si-fu Ethan taught me how to defend myself! For years I’ve learned invaluable lessons from Black people. Throughout my entire life a Black person has been there enriching my every year.

For me and you, and the rest of humanity; we have the stop light because of Garrett Morgan in 1923; Fredrick McKinley gave us refrigerated trucks in 1940; Alexander Miles gave us automatic doors in 1887; the microphone was given to us in 1964 by James West; Mark Dean gave us colored computer screens in 1980; Shirley Jackson gave us fiber optic cables; Marie Brown gave us security camera viewable on television screens (CCTV). The list of Black men and women who have increased humanity’s quality of life as goes on and on.

Where would you be if Black people didn’t touch your life?

We can’t measure the inverse — there is no way to tell where we would be if we had a closer relationship with any one black person in particular. Thus, we rarely think about it. However, what DiAngelo mentions is profound — we are never told that there is actually a benefit from holding a more diverse group of people close to our hearts. We are never told that there is immeasurable value in welcoming people into our lives who come from entirely different backgrounds; influenced by cultures; biologically made from DNA that holds generational data different than our own. What have we missed out on by not striving to learn from humanity’s greatest resource — each other?

I’ve struggled with the idea of segregation, because for some years, I have believed that Black people would have been better off if the boats of evil-minded Europeans never arrived on the shores of Africa. I reckon that Tulsa would have involved into a magnificent Black Empire if whites never came to destroy it. I can envision self-evolved Black prosperity if the western ideas promoting capitalistic globalization never reached the cobalt deposits in Congo or the diamond mines of South Africa. So yes, I do believe that segregation would have worked if we never started to integrate in such an evil way in the first place. However, we started, and our intentions were horrible. So now tens of generations later, how do we undo the evil propagated by our past?

I don’t have the answer in full however, let’s continue to hold up the mirror and look at how deprived our lives would be if we continue to comply with the idea that Black people have nothing to offer. It is our duty to interrupt our own segregated lives and ask ourselves what we are missing out on by not trying to welcome and appreciate life that isn’t just… White.