As an older white man, I recognize America in general in your story. I also grew up in the South, but instead of worrying about the racial aspects of behavior, we kids worried about besmirching the family. Nobody wanted to be told by our grandparents that we were acting like “trash”.
I find it ironic to run into this piece when racialized white men around the world who have been elevated to almost deity status have been shown to be evil and without a shred of respect for human dignity. This article does not reckon with the reality of white supremacy whatsoever by suggesting that if racialized black people just acted better we’d be more respected. It’s absurd, especially given the recent social media post by our President depicting the Obamas as monkeys. And I won’t even touch the undercurrent of self-loathing that exists throughout the article.
I’d like to invite the author of this piece to speak with me directly about this on my livestream. Consider it a permanent invite. Perhaps we’ll understand each other better. I have a lot of experience with the white men who run this publication ironically named Free Black Thought, however, so it’s difficult to have hope for understanding. In my opinion they’re literally doing exactly what you’re criticizing by publishing this in the first place. Let’s talk about it.
I believe I have a lot I can teach you about the nature of white supremacy that your words transparently show you have overlooked (willfully or not to be determined). Do you have the curiosity to investigate? I’ll be waiting to find out.
I do not need to be lectured on the evils of white supremacy, for on most of those points, we would likely agree, and nowhere in my article is there any denial of its reality. As a native son of the South who grew up under Jim Crow, I find it more than a little ironic to be told that you could teach me about racism, having grown up routinely experiencing inhumanity ranging from racial slurs to physical assault.
But you have missed the point entirely. This was not an essay about what white supremacy has done to us; it was about what we are doing to ourselves! Read analytically, the piece is not an attack on black people but an attempt at serious internal critique—an effort to confront cultural pathologies that I believe are now as destructive to our future as racism is.
Had you engaged the hyperlinked data, you would have encountered facts that demand concern: a severely fractured black family structure, persistently high crime rates, and weak academic outcomes.
For example, we blacks, as a population that is roughly 12 percent of the country, account for about half of all murders each year, with roughly 90 percent of the victims being us-- a fact rarely discussed because those who raise them are immediately attacked.
Labeling such critique as “self-loathing” is a rhetorical dodge that avoids engagement by questioning the critic’s racial or psychological authenticity rather than addressing the argument.
My own life did not truly change until I learned to look honestly in the mirror. I am focused on the future of my people, not trapped in the past. I am trying to put the focus on restoring intact families, lowering crime, strengthening academic achievement, and abandoning a culture of permanent victimization.
When people define themselves primarily as victims, that identity inevitably shapes outcomes.
I didn’t miss the point, and your article transparently shows that despite living through Jim Crow (like my father), you do not understand the depth of depravity of white supremacy or the proper use of statistics (20-year math teacher here). My offer still stands. You do indeed have something to learn from me if you can look past your pride. I’m glad you had a good life, but your perspective on race is flawed and does not reflect the reality of race. Again, if you’d like to discuss that face to face, the door is open. But I see you didn’t agree to do that. And naturally, you likely will not do it.
I do not believe there is anything you can teach me, because I once thought as you do. My life did not truly open up until I undertook the hardest work of all—honest introspection—recognizing that my thinking constrained me and that some of my own actions were problematic. That awakening taught me a central truth: while the world is imperfect, individuals still retain agency, and thoughts shape behavior, behavior shapes outcomes, and outcomes shape lives, for better or worse.
Your argument remains narrowly fixated on victimology, and if that framework is being taught to other black people as a primary explanation for their circumstances, I find it deeply troubling. What many of us are trying to convey instead is that black Americans are not helpless subjects of external forces but moral agents capable of directing their own destinies.
You appear to overlook a critical historical distinction: the white supremacy of the Jim Crow era operated by force of law and imposed hard, legally enforced barriers, whereas contemporary racism does not function with that same coercive power in today’s informational society.
To ignore the role of a fractured family structure in producing poor academic outcomes and high crime rates is to miss one of the most consequential variables shaping our future. You should examine the statistics I hyperlinked.
I have no interest in performative conversations with anyone or being instructed as though I were a novice to my own history or experience. Finally, I reject what looks increasingly like participation in the racial grievance industry, an industry that profits by persuading black people that their lives are overwhelmingly controlled by others and that personal agency is futile.
Sir, your belief that I have nothing to teach you does not make that true. I do not think you have any clue how I think. I'm not sure what gave you the impression that you do.
There's absolutely nothing narrow about the antiracism work that I do. It necessarily must be expansive due to the nature of white male supremacy and how it operates. White male supremacy is a system beyond our personal experience with it. You do not seem to realize the depth of that truth. That's one thing I can teach you.
I also don't think you have any idea what Black people are teaching other Black people, nor what Black youth are experiencing in their present lives. No one has ever said that Black Americans are helpless subjects of external forces except for you. That is no one's argument. It's a straw man you created so that you can write this essay and justify your beliefs, not remotely a significant reflection of actual reality.
You're also wrong about how white supremacy is operating in the law. It retains its coercive power still executed just as easily. There is a significant amount of literature to that effect. Some laws are quite explicit without directly using racially categorical language. We may not have signs labeling water fountains with colors, but we have a justice system that covertly maintains racial hierarchy in many ways. I've seen some first hand as a lawyer trained in criminal defense. That's something else you can learn from me.
You continue to suggest I'm ignoring family structure, academic outcomes, and crime rates. Then you assume I haven't looked at the statistics you linked. Why are you making these assumptions? You have zero grounds to do so, and it's disrespectful to someone who actually spent decades of their life educating Black youth and fighting for their rights and lives. And I teach math. Ignoring that is crazy disrespectful. I've had students older than you.
The conclusions one can make from statistical analysis are often narrow. Certainly, sweeping statements about so-called "dysfunctional black behavior" would require a rigorous analysis of Black people nationwide. Is that the statistical evidence you're relying on? Who collected the data? Is the data reliable? How can we know one way or the other? What's the methodology? What does racial comparison of crime data tell us? What about for education stats? Is it relevant that the President of United States replaced the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics to find someone who would put out number more favorable to the regime?
You have not investigated the answers to any of these questions. If you did, you wouldn't be writing what you're writing. So don't claim I didn't give you a pathway to follow.
I never claimed that you're a novice to your own history and experience. I claimed you have a lot to learn in the race context, and you're showing the truth of that assessment. Anyone who does not consistently look deeper into the system of white supremacy will fall into ignorance and become a willing participant of the hierarchy. At least that's how things presently stand. That's how you ended up publishing an article setting up a false dichotomy between supposedly "Black" behavior and apparently what you else you think is racialized - respecting people and working towards a better life, in a journal run by racialized white men using a Black name. Just completely unserious stuff in my opinion.
Your article deletes from existence hundreds of thousands of Black Americans. It reflects a closed mind. It's also ironic that you're calling me performative. You cannot even accurately describe the work that I do, which has nothing to do with convincing people that their personal agency is futile. Rather, my work gives people back the personal agency that was stolen from them by the United States government and its agents. It's empowering. That's according to both me and them.
You need to ask yourself why you desperately need me to be someone I'm not. Why you desperately need to believe that your narrow view on a topic with multiple dimensions fits every billion possibilities in the world. It has nothing to do with me or what I'm doing. I'm not performing for you or anyone else. I'm living and helping others live as I always have.
Also, you're likely a white man using a Black man's face. That would make sense since that's exactly what the entire organization of so-called "Free Black Thought" is. There's also evidence in the writing style and argumentation. But who knows? You were never going to show your face under any circumstance. People who write articles like this never do.
Before I say anything else, I want to acknowledge my position. I am white, and I want to apologize upfront if I overstep. Because this conversation is fundamentally about white supremacy and how it operates, I felt it was important to respond from the perspective of someone who benefits from that system whether I want to or not. Silence from people like me is part of how the harm keeps reproducing itself.
I agree with you. Fully.
What I see in that article and in the responses defending it is a familiar pattern where structural violence is flattened into personal failure, and where statistics are wielded as moral weapons instead of analytical tools. That move does not confront white supremacy. It serves it. It takes outcomes produced by history, policy, law, and material conditions and reframes them as evidence of inherent cultural deficiency. That framing has been used for centuries to justify abandonment, punishment, and dispossession.
You are absolutely right to challenge the idea that this is merely an internal critique divorced from white supremacy. There is no such thing. When data about Black communities is stripped of historical context, power analysis, methodology, and motive, it becomes propaganda whether intentional or not. Numbers do not speak for themselves. They are collected by institutions, filtered through policy decisions, and interpreted through ideology. As you pointed out, conclusions drawn without interrogating who gathered the data, how it was gathered, what was excluded, and how comparison groups are constructed are not rigorous. They are convenient.
The insistence that racism no longer has coercive power because it is no longer explicitly coded in law is especially dangerous. It ignores decades of scholarship, case law, and lived experience showing how racial hierarchy is maintained through facially neutral mechanisms. Sentencing disparities, policing practices, prosecutorial discretion, housing policy, school funding, environmental exposure, and economic extraction did not disappear when the signs came down. They evolved. Pretending otherwise is not optimism. It is denial.
I also want to name something else you are getting at that matters deeply. The false dichotomy being constructed between agency and structural analysis is not just wrong. It is manipulative. Recognizing systems of domination does not erase agency. It contextualizes it. In fact, honest analysis is what restores agency by making the constraints visible. Telling people to simply look in the mirror while refusing to examine the cage around them is not empowerment. It is abandonment dressed up as tough love.
From where I sit, what you are doing is not grievance performance. It is precision. It is refusing to let white supremacy hide behind respectability politics, selective data, and recycled myths about Black pathology. And as a white person, I see clearly how often those myths are comforting to white audiences because they absolve us of responsibility. They let us believe the system is fair and that suffering is earned.
You are not erasing complexity. You are insisting on it. And that insistence is necessary.
I appreciate you naming the disrespect in how your expertise, your lived experience, and your work were dismissed. That dismissal is also part of the pattern. When someone challenges the narrative effectively, the response is to reduce them to a caricature so their arguments can be ignored.
For what it is worth, I am grateful you spoke up. People like me need to hear this said plainly and publicly, not filtered through language designed to make us comfortable.
I very much appreciate the thorough reply. You have just as much a right to comment as the author has to write this essay. I think it's great you decided to reply. It was well written and well said. I feel seen.
“Also, you're likely a white man using a Black man's face. That would make sense since that's exactly what the entire organization of so-called "Free Black Thought" is. There's also evidence in the writing style and argumentation. But who knows? You were never going to show your face under any circumstance. People who write articles like this never do.”
🎯 I atarted thinking he was a white dude half way thru his bullshit post.
I was never trying to change your thinking. And this wasn't a conversation. You have not shown you know what I think whatsoever. You're comfortable incorrectly assuming you do, just like the white men who run this pathetic publication. That cannot reasonably be said to be a conversation.
You are afraid to have a conversation because you're afraid of change in general. You're afraid of living despite believing you have discovered some enlightened way of approaching life. That's your responsibility to deal with, not mine.
But I won't allow you to characterize my beliefs improperly and assign them to me to justify your willful blindness. I'll always stop anyone from assigning an illusion to me for their own juvenile purposes.
Whether you change or not has nothing to do with me. Personally, I don't have hope for anyone who believes they're the special Black person who figured it out nor do I have hope for the racialized white person using a Black avatar to promote white male supremacist ideology. I reserve my hope for people with open minds and open hearts.
Will, you have the patience of a saint. I'm ½ way through and I agree with his “friend” who told him he needs counseling. I think you might be the first person who has ever pushed him to reflect on a single thought he's ever had or statement he's made.
Great post ! I’m a white teacher teaching in all black schools. I only teach in charters now where all children are held to a higher standard of conduct. The black teachers and administrators are a lot like the teachers you grew up with I bet. The white teachers hold the kids accountable too though in slightly different ways. I try to teach the kids to translate their speech into proper English- and they catch on after a while. I have been asked if I’m Mary Poppins and of course I say yes. If the kids can’t learn to speak with correct grammar they will not get good jobs. It’s our job to teach them how to be productive citizens.
These are very tough times for us oldsters who live by and believe in different mores. Embarrassment and despair are often our response to bad behavior but don't be too hard on the purveyors; it's in many ways, what they've been taught. To assimilate into the larger culture, to them, is to capitulate to its bigotry. To allow "whiteness" to reject them, erase them, and so, they double down.
Now that what began as "Black is beautiful" has become " Black Matters" the mode or meme, is "Make my day". Give me an excuse or reason to act out, or for that matter, take it as a given.
This breakdown is everywhere, not racially divided or decided anymore, it's more a sign of rejection of now, period; by a large percentage of the world against the old ways, the old people, the old world, largely but not exclusively, white.
Has the Black breakout prevailed or has the dominant culture broken down? Not sure. In any case, it's not a good place for anyone and it's incumbent on the destroyers to build something better. They broke it; they own it, and it's theirs to fix. For everyone.
Sadly, there will be a time of reckoning and retribution against the old; the breakdown is not done. There will be a lot of rubble. And we won't be around to clean up. That's on them, the next establishment. May they build well and better.
I hate to tell you this, but it's not just isolated instances here and there being played again and again on social media. On a moment's notice you can find thousands of such videos of black folks behaving astonishingly badly. Often the worst offenders are women. The term for them is "Shaniquas."
And it's not just the online world. If you regularly interact with black people in public you are guaranteed to get the treatment from some angry, entitled jackass. Double this if you are an older white person. Double it again if you are male. They'll play the race card in a heartbeat. They seem to have zero sense of accountability.
It's bad enough that people will go out of their way to avoid any concentration of black folks. It's segregation 2.0, and it's completely organic.
Urban culture is riddled with pathologies. If it were confined to the black community it would be one thing, but it affects us all, and people are losing patience. Decades of good will are being destroyed.
Fifty years ago when I was young, I had many black friends. I lived for a time with black roommates in an all-black community. We knew we were different but we learned to get along. This would be unthinkable now.
This is obviously a bigger concern in the black community, but as an old white guy there were similar admonitions by family when I was growing up in the 50's. How you conducted yourself when out and about was a reflection on your family and you were expected to act accordingly. Showing respect and consideration for others was also drilled into us by the nuns. While it has greater consequences in the black community, that breakdown is evidenced everywhere.
Excellent article. White non-American here. This is a very complex topic (said from the outside looking in). Black achievement in America is astonishing, there are countless examples of black American genius. Intellectual life, the arts (jazz music is one of the greatest artistic achievements of the 20th C), sports, public life, spiritual life. There are countless brilliant black Americans.
But then there is the flip side. Violence, crime, certain behaviour that offends non-blacks. I believe the answers must come from within the black community. It requires the leadership of people like Mr. Washington.
Excellent piece. Thank you. As a 77-year old WASP retired professor (“center-right” if there is still a center!), I can sense your exasperation and I wish for all of us there was more help from the surrounding culture for the problems you address. I think the most prominent “influencers” in the youth culture—e.g. Hollywood stars or famous figures in sports, entertainment, and major media—certainly do little to revise the image. On the contrary, their attitude, in my opinion, only stokes the flames, the underlying message being that the “white” culture they are, so to speak, poking in the eye deserves it. The way I try to deal with all of this in my own old age is not to take it personally (harder for you obviously!), but to step back and try to understand it. Although in terms of life experience we are obviously very different people, I can tell by your short bio that you are someone I respect and someone whose values I probably largely share. All we can do is tend to our own gardens and hope that the ambient culture eventually evolves in the right direction. But, again, thank you for your excellent post.
Brilliant articel connecting uplift suasion to today's image challenges. The tension between collective responsibility and individual freedom gets at something deeper than just optics. I grew up in a similarpace where public behavior reflected on everyone, not just oneself. The erosion of that collective guardianship seems less about rejecting white approval and more about losing any shared framework for judgmnet.
Shoutouts to Mr. Washington for living an honorable life. Regarding the piece, short of violence, my concern is that what is considered disagreeable or distasteful by different classes often boils down to, “that’s not what we do here” or “that’s inappropriate”. There’s rarely an argument put forth for why things are the way they are culturally speaking and if questioned what you typically hear is “that’s just the way it is”. That’s insufficient for most of the so-called deviants.
Having decorum and dignity needs to be both an inside job and a societal norm. It doesn’t work to frame respectability as a tool to help racists shift their view on the entire Black race.
In other words, respectability cannot be about the “White gaze.” It has to be about self-efficacy, and it has to feel as normalized as a fish in water in order to stick. Upstanding Black people are deliberately framed as either invisible, or the exception, in media.
bell hooks spoke a lot about the notion of “outlaw culture,” based on the notion of accepting the villain archetype that others relentlessly project onto you, when there’s no counterbalance to support and reinforce a positive self-concept. A recent example in pop culture is the film, Wicked. The people of Oz were determined to see Elphaba as evil, no matter her actual personality. I think that psychology informs the mentality of a lot of the Black folks who behave deplorably, and it starts young and by design.
The school to prison pipeline is an example of a social engineering campaign that targets the kids whose profile makes them the most susceptible to this brainwashing: fatherless, living in poverty, no positive self-concept mirroring in their environment. By third grade, their life trajectory is set, unless a major intervention happens to shift that entrenched negative self-concept.
Another point about outlaw culture: these kids see the societal hypocrisy, which further incentivizes them to check out of the social contract and behave poorly. They see that the current president behaves poorly and is celebrated for it. They see all the White people throughout US history who behaved atrociously and got away with it, or were even rewarded for it. They see the most dignified presidential couple ever, being reduced to ape memes. They see the most hard-working, dignified immigrants from a tiny island that fought their colonizers and won, being demonized as cat and dog eaters. And these are just recent examples of blatant, widespread hatred.
Which brings me back to the point that respectability cannot be about how White people perceive Black people as a class. There are far too many White people that are committed to believing the worst about Black people, no matter what.
Respectability must be about upliftment and positive collective self-concept within Black American culture, no matter what.
Two groups that provide a good example of what that looks like are the Jewish Americans and Chinese Americans. They are largely untouchable to White Americans (to their chagrin). Negative stereotypes don’t stick because they have such a strong collective self-concept, and an infrastructure to reinforce that self-concept: their own neighborhoods, media, family traditions. If anything, they’re seen as too powerful, too insular, too smart.
It only takes one generation to make that kind of profound psychological shift. I sense that this shift is already quietly happening among a critical mass of our young people. They no longer care about being marked as “simps” and “oreos” and “whitewashed” for embracing emotional intelligence, decorum and dignity.
Thank you for your thoughtful response to my article. But did you look at some of the sats that I hyperlinked? If so, they should have shocked you.
The statistics on crime, academic failure, school suspensions, and father absence are real, troubling, and cannot be explained away—but acknowledging them is not an indictment of black people as a race, nor a concession to racist narratives. These figures do not show up historically; they worsened after the late 1960s, when family structure, school discipline, and communal norms eroded under specific policy in the 60s, due to a breakdown of the black family.
Violent crime, including homicide, is highly concentrated among a small group of young men. At the same time, the vast majority of black men are law-abiding and are disproportionately victimized by that same crime rate. For example, we commit over half of the murders in the US, with 90 percent of the slaughtered being us!
The standards that I am talking about are not imposed for white approval but are required for any community to function safely and advance.
History and the experience of other minority groups, which you mentioned, show that strong internal values, intact families, and educational discipline do not appease racists; they make stereotypes indefensible. Confronting these realities is therefore not respectability politics, but to straighten out the failures that keep us from the Promised Land.
I think it is more accurate to say "fatherless to prison pipeline." Two parent families usually supply much needed stability, finances, etc. and contribute to more success in school and self-concept. Schools can't provide what fathers can to their children.
I think "fatherless to prison pipeline" needs to be emphasized because it is, I think, a little less loaded than just going after one community for a lack of fathers.
There is a secret word hidden in the text of this post: Responsibility.
There is a constant drone of insistence on rights, even when the claimed rights stomp on other people's rights. But responsibility is rarely spoken of.
You write "Why do we keep doing this to ourselves?" I am reminded of the classic joke about the Lone Ranger and Tonto. A group of Indians are riding hard to confront and take out the two. The Lone Ranger ponders annihilation, turns to his old friend and says "Well, Tonto, old friend, it looks like we're in real trouble this time." Tonto turns to the Lone Ranger and says, "What do you mean 'we,' white man?"
I have nothing in common with the rowdies on the cruise ship. We don't even share the same heritage as fighting was anathema to those around me growing up, as you did, in the New South in the 1970s. I view these incidents from a distance. My opinion may be very unpopular and that's ok. A forced or presumed alliance is what Tonto felt in the joke. Are "we" guilty of the same misalignment when we presume a "we" based on nothing else but skin color? It is early in the morning and I am a little cranky, and up in years (smile). Like other commentators, I felt this essay was courageous and insightful. I wonder if some have forfeited the privilege to be part of a "we" due to harmful and stereotypical conduct in the public square?
Dod Cosby get "punished" because he tried to promote the uplift? Yes, he was deeply flawed but he was pointing the culture in the right way. I never want to meet my "heroes" in person....
A terrific and brave article about a VERY sensitive subject, Mr. Washington! Especially as a black man and a center-left liberal. The viewpoints you expressed here aren’t popular but they are correct and true. The fight that broke out in Galveston, Texas at the Carnival Jubilee Terminal went viral and sadly put forward a very, very unflattering image of black America to the rest of the country. It also emboldened racists and white supremacists. It reinforced their belief that black people are inherently inferior. It was played over and over again in the conservative media as it affirmed the right’s belief that the black community is full of degenerates, welfare queens, criminals, gangsters, drug addicts, alcoholics, two-bit thugs, goldbrickers, deadbeat dads, and violent and proud hotheads. Like it or not, bad behavior by individual black people reflects poorly on the race as a whole.
Fairly or unfairly, the behavior of black people in public are what the public will come to associate with them. When John was a little boy his teachers in school taught him and his classmates and rightly so, that black people’s racial self-image was everything. The racial image becomes immediate and consequential. History teaches us that an image, whether accurate or distorted, carries real consequences. The brawl represents how some wish to see black people. The right and far-right live for that kind of stuff because it gives them ammunition and proves everything they say and believe about blacks. Black people without even realizing it, supply them the raw material they need to build their coffin.
Internal issues that plague the black community don’t help matters. The statistics on father absence, low academic performance and high crimes rates only serve to reinforce those stories. When John was in school in the Jim Crow South which was staffed by all black teachers, he and his peers were raised in an environment where racial self-image was never taken lightly. The black community in America was taught to view themselves as a noble and resilient people. Descendants of people who had survived slavery, endured trauma and were on the verge of ending racial segregation. If they misbehaved, the entire race paid the price for that. Defeating racial stereotypes required excellence, dignity, and discipline. That is not blaming the victim! That is being honest and sensible! Bad behavior on the part one black person is a barrier to advancement for all black people.
Black Americans sought not just legal equality but honor, respect, and recognition of their moral worth. Nobility has to be earned as they learned, through restraint, self-respect, and achievement. Black children need to be taught to be polite and courteous, treat themselves and others with respect, don’t behave in a “ghetto” or “ratchet” way, don’t sag your pants, don’t use the n-word, speak proper English, pick up your trash, remain nonviolent, don’t listen to “gangsta rap”, stay away from gangs and drugs, have self-control, don’t use profanity, prioritize your education, don’t gamble, smoke or drink, don’t fight the police, don’t steal, and dress well. As awful a person as Bill Cosby is, his 2004 Pound Cake Speech to the NAACP was 100% on point! He was right when he said that black people today are forgetting the sacrifices of the brave activists in the Civil Rights Movement. The black community needs to reach a level of maturity where self-criticism is accepted without the other person being accused of being “Uncle Toms” or “House N*****s”.
I understand why Mr. Washington was embarrassed about that black soldier speeding and blaring rap music like a jack*** in Germany. The German civilians laughed at that seeing that hot shot as a representation of all black people. Mr. Washington is right that that kind of behavior can not be tolerated in the black community anymore. If that young soldier had driven responsibility and obeyed the speed limit and listened to his music at a reasonable volume, those Germans would’ve come to see black Americans in a completely different light. Think about it this way, if civil rights protesters in the 1950s and 1960s had carried guns, used profanity and anti-white racial slurs in press conferences, beaten Southern policemen or KKK members to a bloody pulp, bombed government buildings, took Southern whites as hostages, demanded reparations, vandalized Confederate flags and monuments, and assassinated segregationist politicians, what kind of image of black people would that have created in the minds of the American people?
Great article. The substance of your post and your feelings on the matter, I feel, can be quickly summarized by a satirical headline from the onion a couple years ago: “Breaking: Sale Of BET To White Supremacist Group Results In No Changes To Programming”.
As an older white man, I recognize America in general in your story. I also grew up in the South, but instead of worrying about the racial aspects of behavior, we kids worried about besmirching the family. Nobody wanted to be told by our grandparents that we were acting like “trash”.
I find it ironic to run into this piece when racialized white men around the world who have been elevated to almost deity status have been shown to be evil and without a shred of respect for human dignity. This article does not reckon with the reality of white supremacy whatsoever by suggesting that if racialized black people just acted better we’d be more respected. It’s absurd, especially given the recent social media post by our President depicting the Obamas as monkeys. And I won’t even touch the undercurrent of self-loathing that exists throughout the article.
I’d like to invite the author of this piece to speak with me directly about this on my livestream. Consider it a permanent invite. Perhaps we’ll understand each other better. I have a lot of experience with the white men who run this publication ironically named Free Black Thought, however, so it’s difficult to have hope for understanding. In my opinion they’re literally doing exactly what you’re criticizing by publishing this in the first place. Let’s talk about it.
I believe I have a lot I can teach you about the nature of white supremacy that your words transparently show you have overlooked (willfully or not to be determined). Do you have the curiosity to investigate? I’ll be waiting to find out.
I do not need to be lectured on the evils of white supremacy, for on most of those points, we would likely agree, and nowhere in my article is there any denial of its reality. As a native son of the South who grew up under Jim Crow, I find it more than a little ironic to be told that you could teach me about racism, having grown up routinely experiencing inhumanity ranging from racial slurs to physical assault.
But you have missed the point entirely. This was not an essay about what white supremacy has done to us; it was about what we are doing to ourselves! Read analytically, the piece is not an attack on black people but an attempt at serious internal critique—an effort to confront cultural pathologies that I believe are now as destructive to our future as racism is.
Had you engaged the hyperlinked data, you would have encountered facts that demand concern: a severely fractured black family structure, persistently high crime rates, and weak academic outcomes.
For example, we blacks, as a population that is roughly 12 percent of the country, account for about half of all murders each year, with roughly 90 percent of the victims being us-- a fact rarely discussed because those who raise them are immediately attacked.
Labeling such critique as “self-loathing” is a rhetorical dodge that avoids engagement by questioning the critic’s racial or psychological authenticity rather than addressing the argument.
My own life did not truly change until I learned to look honestly in the mirror. I am focused on the future of my people, not trapped in the past. I am trying to put the focus on restoring intact families, lowering crime, strengthening academic achievement, and abandoning a culture of permanent victimization.
When people define themselves primarily as victims, that identity inevitably shapes outcomes.
I didn’t miss the point, and your article transparently shows that despite living through Jim Crow (like my father), you do not understand the depth of depravity of white supremacy or the proper use of statistics (20-year math teacher here). My offer still stands. You do indeed have something to learn from me if you can look past your pride. I’m glad you had a good life, but your perspective on race is flawed and does not reflect the reality of race. Again, if you’d like to discuss that face to face, the door is open. But I see you didn’t agree to do that. And naturally, you likely will not do it.
I do not believe there is anything you can teach me, because I once thought as you do. My life did not truly open up until I undertook the hardest work of all—honest introspection—recognizing that my thinking constrained me and that some of my own actions were problematic. That awakening taught me a central truth: while the world is imperfect, individuals still retain agency, and thoughts shape behavior, behavior shapes outcomes, and outcomes shape lives, for better or worse.
Your argument remains narrowly fixated on victimology, and if that framework is being taught to other black people as a primary explanation for their circumstances, I find it deeply troubling. What many of us are trying to convey instead is that black Americans are not helpless subjects of external forces but moral agents capable of directing their own destinies.
You appear to overlook a critical historical distinction: the white supremacy of the Jim Crow era operated by force of law and imposed hard, legally enforced barriers, whereas contemporary racism does not function with that same coercive power in today’s informational society.
To ignore the role of a fractured family structure in producing poor academic outcomes and high crime rates is to miss one of the most consequential variables shaping our future. You should examine the statistics I hyperlinked.
I have no interest in performative conversations with anyone or being instructed as though I were a novice to my own history or experience. Finally, I reject what looks increasingly like participation in the racial grievance industry, an industry that profits by persuading black people that their lives are overwhelmingly controlled by others and that personal agency is futile.
Take care.
Sir, your belief that I have nothing to teach you does not make that true. I do not think you have any clue how I think. I'm not sure what gave you the impression that you do.
There's absolutely nothing narrow about the antiracism work that I do. It necessarily must be expansive due to the nature of white male supremacy and how it operates. White male supremacy is a system beyond our personal experience with it. You do not seem to realize the depth of that truth. That's one thing I can teach you.
I also don't think you have any idea what Black people are teaching other Black people, nor what Black youth are experiencing in their present lives. No one has ever said that Black Americans are helpless subjects of external forces except for you. That is no one's argument. It's a straw man you created so that you can write this essay and justify your beliefs, not remotely a significant reflection of actual reality.
You're also wrong about how white supremacy is operating in the law. It retains its coercive power still executed just as easily. There is a significant amount of literature to that effect. Some laws are quite explicit without directly using racially categorical language. We may not have signs labeling water fountains with colors, but we have a justice system that covertly maintains racial hierarchy in many ways. I've seen some first hand as a lawyer trained in criminal defense. That's something else you can learn from me.
You continue to suggest I'm ignoring family structure, academic outcomes, and crime rates. Then you assume I haven't looked at the statistics you linked. Why are you making these assumptions? You have zero grounds to do so, and it's disrespectful to someone who actually spent decades of their life educating Black youth and fighting for their rights and lives. And I teach math. Ignoring that is crazy disrespectful. I've had students older than you.
The conclusions one can make from statistical analysis are often narrow. Certainly, sweeping statements about so-called "dysfunctional black behavior" would require a rigorous analysis of Black people nationwide. Is that the statistical evidence you're relying on? Who collected the data? Is the data reliable? How can we know one way or the other? What's the methodology? What does racial comparison of crime data tell us? What about for education stats? Is it relevant that the President of United States replaced the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics to find someone who would put out number more favorable to the regime?
You have not investigated the answers to any of these questions. If you did, you wouldn't be writing what you're writing. So don't claim I didn't give you a pathway to follow.
I never claimed that you're a novice to your own history and experience. I claimed you have a lot to learn in the race context, and you're showing the truth of that assessment. Anyone who does not consistently look deeper into the system of white supremacy will fall into ignorance and become a willing participant of the hierarchy. At least that's how things presently stand. That's how you ended up publishing an article setting up a false dichotomy between supposedly "Black" behavior and apparently what you else you think is racialized - respecting people and working towards a better life, in a journal run by racialized white men using a Black name. Just completely unserious stuff in my opinion.
Your article deletes from existence hundreds of thousands of Black Americans. It reflects a closed mind. It's also ironic that you're calling me performative. You cannot even accurately describe the work that I do, which has nothing to do with convincing people that their personal agency is futile. Rather, my work gives people back the personal agency that was stolen from them by the United States government and its agents. It's empowering. That's according to both me and them.
You need to ask yourself why you desperately need me to be someone I'm not. Why you desperately need to believe that your narrow view on a topic with multiple dimensions fits every billion possibilities in the world. It has nothing to do with me or what I'm doing. I'm not performing for you or anyone else. I'm living and helping others live as I always have.
Also, you're likely a white man using a Black man's face. That would make sense since that's exactly what the entire organization of so-called "Free Black Thought" is. There's also evidence in the writing style and argumentation. But who knows? You were never going to show your face under any circumstance. People who write articles like this never do.
Before I say anything else, I want to acknowledge my position. I am white, and I want to apologize upfront if I overstep. Because this conversation is fundamentally about white supremacy and how it operates, I felt it was important to respond from the perspective of someone who benefits from that system whether I want to or not. Silence from people like me is part of how the harm keeps reproducing itself.
I agree with you. Fully.
What I see in that article and in the responses defending it is a familiar pattern where structural violence is flattened into personal failure, and where statistics are wielded as moral weapons instead of analytical tools. That move does not confront white supremacy. It serves it. It takes outcomes produced by history, policy, law, and material conditions and reframes them as evidence of inherent cultural deficiency. That framing has been used for centuries to justify abandonment, punishment, and dispossession.
You are absolutely right to challenge the idea that this is merely an internal critique divorced from white supremacy. There is no such thing. When data about Black communities is stripped of historical context, power analysis, methodology, and motive, it becomes propaganda whether intentional or not. Numbers do not speak for themselves. They are collected by institutions, filtered through policy decisions, and interpreted through ideology. As you pointed out, conclusions drawn without interrogating who gathered the data, how it was gathered, what was excluded, and how comparison groups are constructed are not rigorous. They are convenient.
The insistence that racism no longer has coercive power because it is no longer explicitly coded in law is especially dangerous. It ignores decades of scholarship, case law, and lived experience showing how racial hierarchy is maintained through facially neutral mechanisms. Sentencing disparities, policing practices, prosecutorial discretion, housing policy, school funding, environmental exposure, and economic extraction did not disappear when the signs came down. They evolved. Pretending otherwise is not optimism. It is denial.
I also want to name something else you are getting at that matters deeply. The false dichotomy being constructed between agency and structural analysis is not just wrong. It is manipulative. Recognizing systems of domination does not erase agency. It contextualizes it. In fact, honest analysis is what restores agency by making the constraints visible. Telling people to simply look in the mirror while refusing to examine the cage around them is not empowerment. It is abandonment dressed up as tough love.
From where I sit, what you are doing is not grievance performance. It is precision. It is refusing to let white supremacy hide behind respectability politics, selective data, and recycled myths about Black pathology. And as a white person, I see clearly how often those myths are comforting to white audiences because they absolve us of responsibility. They let us believe the system is fair and that suffering is earned.
You are not erasing complexity. You are insisting on it. And that insistence is necessary.
I appreciate you naming the disrespect in how your expertise, your lived experience, and your work were dismissed. That dismissal is also part of the pattern. When someone challenges the narrative effectively, the response is to reduce them to a caricature so their arguments can be ignored.
For what it is worth, I am grateful you spoke up. People like me need to hear this said plainly and publicly, not filtered through language designed to make us comfortable.
I very much appreciate the thorough reply. You have just as much a right to comment as the author has to write this essay. I think it's great you decided to reply. It was well written and well said. I feel seen.
Mad respect for this comment.
“Also, you're likely a white man using a Black man's face. That would make sense since that's exactly what the entire organization of so-called "Free Black Thought" is. There's also evidence in the writing style and argumentation. But who knows? You were never going to show your face under any circumstance. People who write articles like this never do.”
🎯 I atarted thinking he was a white dude half way thru his bullshit post.
You can never, in any of the endless universes, change my thinking, for I once thought as you do. End of conversation. Take care.
I was never trying to change your thinking. And this wasn't a conversation. You have not shown you know what I think whatsoever. You're comfortable incorrectly assuming you do, just like the white men who run this pathetic publication. That cannot reasonably be said to be a conversation.
You are afraid to have a conversation because you're afraid of change in general. You're afraid of living despite believing you have discovered some enlightened way of approaching life. That's your responsibility to deal with, not mine.
But I won't allow you to characterize my beliefs improperly and assign them to me to justify your willful blindness. I'll always stop anyone from assigning an illusion to me for their own juvenile purposes.
Whether you change or not has nothing to do with me. Personally, I don't have hope for anyone who believes they're the special Black person who figured it out nor do I have hope for the racialized white person using a Black avatar to promote white male supremacist ideology. I reserve my hope for people with open minds and open hearts.
Wait, what? This publication is run by white men??
Cowardly white men, yes. Alongside some black avatars who they manage. It’s absolutely disgusting. Convo with one of them on my YouTube channel.
Damn. That borders on fraudulent. Can you drop the link?
https://youtu.be/hWyWBr90BLI?si=Nk46tjEeYXXcvGTG
Will, you have the patience of a saint. I'm ½ way through and I agree with his “friend” who told him he needs counseling. I think you might be the first person who has ever pushed him to reflect on a single thought he's ever had or statement he's made.
Ummm. Whoa. LOL. I’m a few minutes in. I can’t.
Thank you, I’ll go watch.
Wait seriously? Run by white men? Jebus crimes, they just.. are the worst form of life.
Great post ! I’m a white teacher teaching in all black schools. I only teach in charters now where all children are held to a higher standard of conduct. The black teachers and administrators are a lot like the teachers you grew up with I bet. The white teachers hold the kids accountable too though in slightly different ways. I try to teach the kids to translate their speech into proper English- and they catch on after a while. I have been asked if I’m Mary Poppins and of course I say yes. If the kids can’t learn to speak with correct grammar they will not get good jobs. It’s our job to teach them how to be productive citizens.
First, thank you for your service.
These are very tough times for us oldsters who live by and believe in different mores. Embarrassment and despair are often our response to bad behavior but don't be too hard on the purveyors; it's in many ways, what they've been taught. To assimilate into the larger culture, to them, is to capitulate to its bigotry. To allow "whiteness" to reject them, erase them, and so, they double down.
Now that what began as "Black is beautiful" has become " Black Matters" the mode or meme, is "Make my day". Give me an excuse or reason to act out, or for that matter, take it as a given.
This breakdown is everywhere, not racially divided or decided anymore, it's more a sign of rejection of now, period; by a large percentage of the world against the old ways, the old people, the old world, largely but not exclusively, white.
Has the Black breakout prevailed or has the dominant culture broken down? Not sure. In any case, it's not a good place for anyone and it's incumbent on the destroyers to build something better. They broke it; they own it, and it's theirs to fix. For everyone.
Sadly, there will be a time of reckoning and retribution against the old; the breakdown is not done. There will be a lot of rubble. And we won't be around to clean up. That's on them, the next establishment. May they build well and better.
I hate to tell you this, but it's not just isolated instances here and there being played again and again on social media. On a moment's notice you can find thousands of such videos of black folks behaving astonishingly badly. Often the worst offenders are women. The term for them is "Shaniquas."
And it's not just the online world. If you regularly interact with black people in public you are guaranteed to get the treatment from some angry, entitled jackass. Double this if you are an older white person. Double it again if you are male. They'll play the race card in a heartbeat. They seem to have zero sense of accountability.
It's bad enough that people will go out of their way to avoid any concentration of black folks. It's segregation 2.0, and it's completely organic.
Urban culture is riddled with pathologies. If it were confined to the black community it would be one thing, but it affects us all, and people are losing patience. Decades of good will are being destroyed.
Fifty years ago when I was young, I had many black friends. I lived for a time with black roommates in an all-black community. We knew we were different but we learned to get along. This would be unthinkable now.
This is obviously a bigger concern in the black community, but as an old white guy there were similar admonitions by family when I was growing up in the 50's. How you conducted yourself when out and about was a reflection on your family and you were expected to act accordingly. Showing respect and consideration for others was also drilled into us by the nuns. While it has greater consequences in the black community, that breakdown is evidenced everywhere.
Excellent article. White non-American here. This is a very complex topic (said from the outside looking in). Black achievement in America is astonishing, there are countless examples of black American genius. Intellectual life, the arts (jazz music is one of the greatest artistic achievements of the 20th C), sports, public life, spiritual life. There are countless brilliant black Americans.
But then there is the flip side. Violence, crime, certain behaviour that offends non-blacks. I believe the answers must come from within the black community. It requires the leadership of people like Mr. Washington.
Excellent piece. Thank you. As a 77-year old WASP retired professor (“center-right” if there is still a center!), I can sense your exasperation and I wish for all of us there was more help from the surrounding culture for the problems you address. I think the most prominent “influencers” in the youth culture—e.g. Hollywood stars or famous figures in sports, entertainment, and major media—certainly do little to revise the image. On the contrary, their attitude, in my opinion, only stokes the flames, the underlying message being that the “white” culture they are, so to speak, poking in the eye deserves it. The way I try to deal with all of this in my own old age is not to take it personally (harder for you obviously!), but to step back and try to understand it. Although in terms of life experience we are obviously very different people, I can tell by your short bio that you are someone I respect and someone whose values I probably largely share. All we can do is tend to our own gardens and hope that the ambient culture eventually evolves in the right direction. But, again, thank you for your excellent post.
Brilliant articel connecting uplift suasion to today's image challenges. The tension between collective responsibility and individual freedom gets at something deeper than just optics. I grew up in a similarpace where public behavior reflected on everyone, not just oneself. The erosion of that collective guardianship seems less about rejecting white approval and more about losing any shared framework for judgmnet.
Shoutouts to Mr. Washington for living an honorable life. Regarding the piece, short of violence, my concern is that what is considered disagreeable or distasteful by different classes often boils down to, “that’s not what we do here” or “that’s inappropriate”. There’s rarely an argument put forth for why things are the way they are culturally speaking and if questioned what you typically hear is “that’s just the way it is”. That’s insufficient for most of the so-called deviants.
A few thoughts:
Having decorum and dignity needs to be both an inside job and a societal norm. It doesn’t work to frame respectability as a tool to help racists shift their view on the entire Black race.
In other words, respectability cannot be about the “White gaze.” It has to be about self-efficacy, and it has to feel as normalized as a fish in water in order to stick. Upstanding Black people are deliberately framed as either invisible, or the exception, in media.
bell hooks spoke a lot about the notion of “outlaw culture,” based on the notion of accepting the villain archetype that others relentlessly project onto you, when there’s no counterbalance to support and reinforce a positive self-concept. A recent example in pop culture is the film, Wicked. The people of Oz were determined to see Elphaba as evil, no matter her actual personality. I think that psychology informs the mentality of a lot of the Black folks who behave deplorably, and it starts young and by design.
The school to prison pipeline is an example of a social engineering campaign that targets the kids whose profile makes them the most susceptible to this brainwashing: fatherless, living in poverty, no positive self-concept mirroring in their environment. By third grade, their life trajectory is set, unless a major intervention happens to shift that entrenched negative self-concept.
Another point about outlaw culture: these kids see the societal hypocrisy, which further incentivizes them to check out of the social contract and behave poorly. They see that the current president behaves poorly and is celebrated for it. They see all the White people throughout US history who behaved atrociously and got away with it, or were even rewarded for it. They see the most dignified presidential couple ever, being reduced to ape memes. They see the most hard-working, dignified immigrants from a tiny island that fought their colonizers and won, being demonized as cat and dog eaters. And these are just recent examples of blatant, widespread hatred.
Which brings me back to the point that respectability cannot be about how White people perceive Black people as a class. There are far too many White people that are committed to believing the worst about Black people, no matter what.
Respectability must be about upliftment and positive collective self-concept within Black American culture, no matter what.
Two groups that provide a good example of what that looks like are the Jewish Americans and Chinese Americans. They are largely untouchable to White Americans (to their chagrin). Negative stereotypes don’t stick because they have such a strong collective self-concept, and an infrastructure to reinforce that self-concept: their own neighborhoods, media, family traditions. If anything, they’re seen as too powerful, too insular, too smart.
It only takes one generation to make that kind of profound psychological shift. I sense that this shift is already quietly happening among a critical mass of our young people. They no longer care about being marked as “simps” and “oreos” and “whitewashed” for embracing emotional intelligence, decorum and dignity.
Thank you for your thoughtful response to my article. But did you look at some of the sats that I hyperlinked? If so, they should have shocked you.
The statistics on crime, academic failure, school suspensions, and father absence are real, troubling, and cannot be explained away—but acknowledging them is not an indictment of black people as a race, nor a concession to racist narratives. These figures do not show up historically; they worsened after the late 1960s, when family structure, school discipline, and communal norms eroded under specific policy in the 60s, due to a breakdown of the black family.
Violent crime, including homicide, is highly concentrated among a small group of young men. At the same time, the vast majority of black men are law-abiding and are disproportionately victimized by that same crime rate. For example, we commit over half of the murders in the US, with 90 percent of the slaughtered being us!
The standards that I am talking about are not imposed for white approval but are required for any community to function safely and advance.
History and the experience of other minority groups, which you mentioned, show that strong internal values, intact families, and educational discipline do not appease racists; they make stereotypes indefensible. Confronting these realities is therefore not respectability politics, but to straighten out the failures that keep us from the Promised Land.
Please take care.
I think it is more accurate to say "fatherless to prison pipeline." Two parent families usually supply much needed stability, finances, etc. and contribute to more success in school and self-concept. Schools can't provide what fathers can to their children.
I think "fatherless to prison pipeline" needs to be emphasized because it is, I think, a little less loaded than just going after one community for a lack of fathers.
There is a secret word hidden in the text of this post: Responsibility.
There is a constant drone of insistence on rights, even when the claimed rights stomp on other people's rights. But responsibility is rarely spoken of.
You write "Why do we keep doing this to ourselves?" I am reminded of the classic joke about the Lone Ranger and Tonto. A group of Indians are riding hard to confront and take out the two. The Lone Ranger ponders annihilation, turns to his old friend and says "Well, Tonto, old friend, it looks like we're in real trouble this time." Tonto turns to the Lone Ranger and says, "What do you mean 'we,' white man?"
I have nothing in common with the rowdies on the cruise ship. We don't even share the same heritage as fighting was anathema to those around me growing up, as you did, in the New South in the 1970s. I view these incidents from a distance. My opinion may be very unpopular and that's ok. A forced or presumed alliance is what Tonto felt in the joke. Are "we" guilty of the same misalignment when we presume a "we" based on nothing else but skin color? It is early in the morning and I am a little cranky, and up in years (smile). Like other commentators, I felt this essay was courageous and insightful. I wonder if some have forfeited the privilege to be part of a "we" due to harmful and stereotypical conduct in the public square?
Dod Cosby get "punished" because he tried to promote the uplift? Yes, he was deeply flawed but he was pointing the culture in the right way. I never want to meet my "heroes" in person....
A terrific and brave article about a VERY sensitive subject, Mr. Washington! Especially as a black man and a center-left liberal. The viewpoints you expressed here aren’t popular but they are correct and true. The fight that broke out in Galveston, Texas at the Carnival Jubilee Terminal went viral and sadly put forward a very, very unflattering image of black America to the rest of the country. It also emboldened racists and white supremacists. It reinforced their belief that black people are inherently inferior. It was played over and over again in the conservative media as it affirmed the right’s belief that the black community is full of degenerates, welfare queens, criminals, gangsters, drug addicts, alcoholics, two-bit thugs, goldbrickers, deadbeat dads, and violent and proud hotheads. Like it or not, bad behavior by individual black people reflects poorly on the race as a whole.
Fairly or unfairly, the behavior of black people in public are what the public will come to associate with them. When John was a little boy his teachers in school taught him and his classmates and rightly so, that black people’s racial self-image was everything. The racial image becomes immediate and consequential. History teaches us that an image, whether accurate or distorted, carries real consequences. The brawl represents how some wish to see black people. The right and far-right live for that kind of stuff because it gives them ammunition and proves everything they say and believe about blacks. Black people without even realizing it, supply them the raw material they need to build their coffin.
Internal issues that plague the black community don’t help matters. The statistics on father absence, low academic performance and high crimes rates only serve to reinforce those stories. When John was in school in the Jim Crow South which was staffed by all black teachers, he and his peers were raised in an environment where racial self-image was never taken lightly. The black community in America was taught to view themselves as a noble and resilient people. Descendants of people who had survived slavery, endured trauma and were on the verge of ending racial segregation. If they misbehaved, the entire race paid the price for that. Defeating racial stereotypes required excellence, dignity, and discipline. That is not blaming the victim! That is being honest and sensible! Bad behavior on the part one black person is a barrier to advancement for all black people.
Black Americans sought not just legal equality but honor, respect, and recognition of their moral worth. Nobility has to be earned as they learned, through restraint, self-respect, and achievement. Black children need to be taught to be polite and courteous, treat themselves and others with respect, don’t behave in a “ghetto” or “ratchet” way, don’t sag your pants, don’t use the n-word, speak proper English, pick up your trash, remain nonviolent, don’t listen to “gangsta rap”, stay away from gangs and drugs, have self-control, don’t use profanity, prioritize your education, don’t gamble, smoke or drink, don’t fight the police, don’t steal, and dress well. As awful a person as Bill Cosby is, his 2004 Pound Cake Speech to the NAACP was 100% on point! He was right when he said that black people today are forgetting the sacrifices of the brave activists in the Civil Rights Movement. The black community needs to reach a level of maturity where self-criticism is accepted without the other person being accused of being “Uncle Toms” or “House N*****s”.
I understand why Mr. Washington was embarrassed about that black soldier speeding and blaring rap music like a jack*** in Germany. The German civilians laughed at that seeing that hot shot as a representation of all black people. Mr. Washington is right that that kind of behavior can not be tolerated in the black community anymore. If that young soldier had driven responsibility and obeyed the speed limit and listened to his music at a reasonable volume, those Germans would’ve come to see black Americans in a completely different light. Think about it this way, if civil rights protesters in the 1950s and 1960s had carried guns, used profanity and anti-white racial slurs in press conferences, beaten Southern policemen or KKK members to a bloody pulp, bombed government buildings, took Southern whites as hostages, demanded reparations, vandalized Confederate flags and monuments, and assassinated segregationist politicians, what kind of image of black people would that have created in the minds of the American people?
Great article. The substance of your post and your feelings on the matter, I feel, can be quickly summarized by a satirical headline from the onion a couple years ago: “Breaking: Sale Of BET To White Supremacist Group Results In No Changes To Programming”.