From “Silencing White Noise: Six Practices to Overcome Our Inaction on Race” by Willie Dwayne Francois III
After a rash of gun violence in a local public housing development, I took to the pulpit under the impression that our Black church fancied a sermon that addressed said violence. Ignorant of the statistics confirming the interracial nature of most violence. I spent part of the sermon railing against gun violence in Black communities as something unique to Black communities. Under the guise of religion and a commitment to Black lives, I lifted the racist theme of “Black-on-Black crime.” Dressed in an oversized blue suit and suspenders, I roared, “We need to pull up our pants, finish school, and put the guns down if we want to protect Black communities.” The boy preacher in me responded to Black hopelessness and White supremacy manifested in intraracial gun violence by preaching the white noise I had consumed. To the cheers of Black congregants, I pathologized Blackness as inherently violent. I still remember feeling emboldened by the two ministers seated directly behind me and the two sections of the sanctuary choir that flanked the pulpit.
I had internalized the idea that “those Black men” typified what was wrong with Black communities and vomited it out on a Sunday morning as Good News. There was no need for a White person to spread notions that stereotyped and dehumanized Black people that day. My church family needed only to listen to my racist proclamations, detached from any command of how concentrated poverty, racial isolation, and anti-Black ideas operate.
I communicated white noise in Black voice and Black sacred space because I trusted the myopic data my White social studies teacher taught. The detached numbers I had consumed confirmed the biases I formed in my middle-class cocoon. I normalized one of Hollywood’s caricatures as if it cast the truest representation of “those Black people” – Black men and boys trapped in airtight pockets of poverty. Films like Juice (1992) and Boyz n the Hood (1991), pictures I once said petrified me more than any movie with Freddy Krueger or Michael Myers, stained my worldview and preaching. I consumed and communicated white noise with incalculable consequences for my audience. I was sleepwalking in racism.