Under the baobab: Why white supremacy is a hard habit to break, and how to do it

Habits are hard to break. The longer you practice them the more difficult it is to stop them.

Back in the ‘70s I struggled to give up smoking. It was difficult. This was before nicotine patches. It was cold turkey or substitution. The hardest part wasn’t the chemical addiction, it was the social aspect. Most of my friends smoked. Half of the adults in the country still smoked. As my behavior grew more erratic, my friends would pressure me to abandon the effort. “Have a cigarette, you’ll feel better and you won’t be so crazy.”

I concocted a plan. I started an internship in Congressman Rangel’s D.C. office. A couple of weeks before I started the job, I stopped smoking. I started my new job clean. None of my new colleagues knew me as a smoker. They attributed my bizarre behavior to the fact that I was a kook. At times I would pound the table and storm out of the room. Or I would run around the reflecting pool. Once I even jumped in. Fortunately, I was reasonably efficient in my job or Cheryl, my supervisor, would have sent me packing.

The plan worked. After five months in Washington, I was free of the chemical and social addiction. I haven’t smoked since.

The false belief system of white supremacy generates brutality, oppression, and sometimes uses terrorism. It is also a habit, a really bad habit. It is an addiction that has plagued the people of our country from the beginning. It will be a difficult addiction to break.

Much of the social underpinnings that make up the bedrock of structural racism appear too often as “normal.” Many times, we can think of the elevation of white culture as superior to all others as “just the way things are” because that’s “the way things always have been.”

For instance, there is a debate over the naming of sports teams that refer to some aspect of what they believe is indigenous ethnicity. Some folks think they have the right to use allusions that are derogatory references to Native American culture because it always has been that way. It hasn’t. The socially constructed image of indigenous people as “warriors, braves, redskins or even Indians” is a direct product of a belief in white supremacy. Wait, you may ask, how is calling a team the Washington Redskins or Bellefonte Red Raiders any different from the Fighting Irish? The difference is the Irish community of Notre Dame named themselves.

There are a half dozen folks of color running for local political office this year. In the past, there have been few local folks of color who have been elected to office. A few more of us have served in the borough’s ABC offices. Is this exclusion due to conscious manifestation of white supremacy or habit?

Recently there has been national debate about the removal of Confederate monuments. Many argue, as a remnant of a time of racial terror they should be removed. Others say they represent a standing testament to a time of past glory and should be retained. They say you should not erase the past because it is past. Some argue with Faulkner that the past is not even past, or even more potentially dire, with Antonio, that it may be prologue.

Perhaps the way to break the habit of white supremacy is to begin to hang out with new people, ones who can look at us with new eyes, who can see us for who we truly are not who we habitually have been. Reflected in those mirrors we can begin to transform ourselves into who we all must become.