Wednesday, August 20, 2014

I have faith in you, fellow white people.

Dear fellow white people, 
For my white friends who think I am being dramatic in writing the posts I've been writing…please read this link (at the end of my post). It gave me goosebumps and brought tears to my eyes. The author does an infinitely better job than I could do at contextualizing what I've been trying to explain to you, because she is an actual person and this stuff is personal to her in a way that it simply cannot be for me. I have been writing the Racism posts this week because I think it is SO IMPORTANT as white Americans that we understand the effects of not only the structural and institutionalized racism of the systems in place, but more immediately our poor interpersonal race relations, on actual human beings. The offhanded remarks of clueless friends, both in real life and on social media, is causing real damage to real-life relationships. The lack of effort to deeply engage with uncomfortable realities is showing up all over social media, and I hope you know your black friends and acquaintances are seeing you not try. The lack of sensitivity so many white people are demonstrating in regard to the recent Ferguson events is damaging all of our current and potential future relationships with people who don't look like us. It is reinforcing the false social constructs of race and supporting the segregation St Louis is so (in)famous for. To truly show up as an ally, you have to stop saying unhelpful, intellectually lazy things both in your everyday life, and on this semi-public forum, and instead, maybe sit down with a black person that you know and have an ACTUAL CONVERSATION*.
*Please note: not every black person you know is going to have the patience or emotional bandwidth to take on these conversations, and you also have to be respectful of that. To some extent, it is your responsibility to learn this stuff, and it is not their responsibility to teach you. Minorities often find themselves doing a lot of the heavy lifting in these conversations, and it isn't really fair. Please note also that there is as much diversity among black people's opinions on all this as there is among whites'. One black person's opinion isn't all black people's opinions. You don't get to have one conversation and be all, "oh, I get it now!" Revisit the concept of white privilege if that doesn't make sense.
This is all REALLY HARD to understand for some of us, and I get that. Our vantage points as white Americans are so skewed by privilege that we often simply cannot see beyond it. But that's not an adequate excuse anymore, if it ever was. Given what's coming up for so many people right now, if we want to be decent human beings, we have to dig in and get our hands dirty and maybe even get our feelings hurt in order to even BEGIN to really understand what's happening and why it matters so much.
Before you dismiss me as suggesting it's "just that easy", I will say that I get that I have an advantage here over most of you. I have the benefit of having been raised by liberal, well-educated parents who didn't teach me bigotry, so I didn't have any unhelpful or narrow attitudes to unlearn. I have a Masters degree in Social Work, so my educational context is different than many of yours. I have the added personal, real life benefit of having been able to safely navigate meaningful dialogues about race with black people who love me and know my heart. But I am still a privileged white female from an all-white small town in Illinois. I still came from what many of you came from. There was literally not A SINGLE BLACK PERSON IN MY HIGH SCHOOL. Really. 
My point is that I wasn't just born knowing about race and class and privilege and being comfortable challenging people on it. I was, however, born caring about other humans, and so I made dismantling racism an intentional, brick-by-brick process of asking questions, listening, reading, thinking, talking. I had to do the work. You can do that too. I have faith in you.

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