speeches on white supremacy that fail to denounce systemic oppression fall short

“The New Black doesn’t blame other races for our issues,” music superstar Pharrell Williams told Oprah three years ago while promoting his hit-single “Happy”. “The New Black dreams and realizes that it’s not pigmentation: it’s a mentality, and it’s either going to work for you or it’s going to work against you. And you’ve got to pick the side you’re going to be on.”

But while paying homage to 90s game-changers at VH1’s annual Hip Hop Honors awards show, the artist must have realized that in the wake of Donald Trump and Colin Kaepernick, it’s no longer so beneficial to tell Black people to change their “mentality.” Instead, Williams had some new unhelpful platitudes to offer, imploring Americans to “open [their] eyes” to the current American political climate:

“So for everybody, everybody at home watching this and acting like y’all don’t see what’s going on out there, you gotta open your eyes,” Williams lectured. “Open your eyes. You keep saying you don’t see what’s going on television, what’s happening to us, open your eyes. And if you look like how I look, then you know how we got here but we’re here and we’re not leaving. So, what are we gonna do?”

It would be a great message, and many liberal publications lauded it as such, if it actually meant anything at all. Unfortunately, it doesn’t. The problem isn’t that people won’t “open their eyes” to oppression (and if it was, I’m sure his 2014 comments didn’t help any), it’s that when they do see injustices they just don’t care.

There are countless examples of violence against marginalized communities and they keep on piling up. Despite this, people continue telling protestors to calm down, to stop inconveniencing the public, to change their “mentality,” and to “wait for the justice system to happen.” This is a systematic problem that cannot be fixed by pretending that the people who are participants in the system just need to see a little more clearly. No, they need to reject the system in total, and if they refuse to, they are part of the problem.

Focusing only on “bad” individuals and omitting systemic oppression is a strategy that has proven to be inefficient at best, dangerous at worst. It fails to address the real issue and lets whiteness off the hook. Everyone knows it’s bad to be a “white nationalists.” But dismantling the systems upheld by whiteness (including white liberals) is another story altogether.