Black History Month has us learning about racial equity, but can we make real change?

The fatal suffocation of George Floyd under the knee of a white police officer last May brought millions of Americans to the streets in anguished protest. In the months since then, an outpouring of writing, television programming, podcasts, seminars, reading lists and study groups dug in to teaching and learning about the role of anti-Black racism in American history.

So this year, Black History Month has never felt more alive and immediate — especially for white people, who largely comprise its newest students.

Here in Thurston County, it seems as if every local nonprofit, service club and professional association has formed task forces or committees to address racial justice and Black (also known as American) history. Local governments did too. Lacey and Olympia both hosted well-attended virtual town halls, and over 400 people attended the first of Olympia’s. Now both cities are also establishing commissions to address equity issues and advise their city councils.

All this talking, reading and studying is vitally important. It’s remedial education for the white majority that grew up without learning the hard truths of American history or experiencing its contemporary consequences. As one Black friend said, “A lot of white people now know what we’ve known all along.”

Still, one local service club member, who signed up for a task force on racial justice, was surprised by the pushback from other club members who just don’t believe there is such a thing as systemic racism. That pushback illustrates the sad fact that the people who have the most to learn are often the most resistant to education.

The truth would surely have a better chance of setting us free if we all embraced it.

Side by side with all the white people trying to learn our way to being better allies of our Black neighbors, there’s a national resurgence of white supremacist militias so extreme they laid siege to our nation’s Capitol. Along with far too many others, they want to “take our country back” to the day when white majority rule was the unquestioned norm, and when people of color and women had less power to fight their subordination. For them, multiracial democracy is anathema.

Progress and backlash collide. Last month, on the very day when our state legislature swore in a record number of legislators of color, our Capitol was surrounded by chain link fences erected in fear of our own, home-grown armed white militias.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that Black people and other people of color are skeptical about how much progress is being made, and what’s to come. While caring white people are talking, planning, learning, and thinking, people of color still don’t see the changes they need.

Too often when they are asked how they feel and they reply honestly, they still get shut down. “White people just play defense. There’s a lot of ‘yeah but.’ That’s why I most often just avoid those conversations,” says a Black elected official. In diversity training sessions, a respected Black leader reports that the subject too often turns to LGBTQ issues and evades racism. “We still have a lot of closet racists around here,” she says.

Our Black friends celebrate the growing number of Black people in medicine, law, politics and other influential professions, and of Black success in film, music and other arts. Well-informed white allies are essential and welcome, they say, but Black people will always be the lead characters in their own story.

Their questions for us have been about results, metrics, and systemic change.

They want to see data showing significant reduction in racial disparities in criminal justice, education, income, health care outcomes, life expectancy and homeownership rates. They want to see the historic Voting Rights Act restored and protected. They want public schools get to work rewriting their curriculums to tell all students the full truth about slavery, reconstruction, the century of Jim Crow segregation, and the long backlash to the progress made by the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

And though we didn’t think to ask, it’s a pretty safe bet they’d like to see the withering away of the white militias and the culture of white racial resentment that still has such a powerful grip on this nation.

So our question for 2021 Black History Month is this: Ten, 20 or 100 years from now, will history record this year as time when we made strides toward dismantling systemic racism or just talked about it?