Facebook Publication Date: 6/9/2020 11:06

Breaking out this comment from community and Sustainer Circle member and Laura Berwick.

***NEW NORMS APPLY***
***NO FEWER THAN 300 COMMENTS***
***REPLY TO AT LEAST TWO OTHER COMMENTS***
***ABSOLUTELY NO REACTS.

I have been asked, directly or rhetorically, what I’m doing for this cause or that public issue, but I have never had anyone ask me what I, a white woman, am doing to demonstrate and advocate for my own basic humanity and equality. I got that for being born. Everything here makes an “obvious” sort of sense to me, and yet at the same time makes me look at the literal centuries of white supremacy in a new way. For over four hundred years of white colonization of the Americas, people that look like me have projected inferiority and inhumanity on millions of people. Those people have had to fight for every day of life against that, when all of my days come to me for the waking up to them. We white people really really did create this garbage. And yet we’ve always expected someone else to take it out.

Seeing here how that expectation of OURS that black communities will fix the problem of our white people racism has been internalized… seems like part of the issue. It seems like a way white supremacy creeps into even non-white psyches. But let me not be too grandiose about that. In a system where white people are actively denying humanity to non-white people, of course the non-white people are the ones who bear the brunt of the struggle to be seen as human. And I don’t find it surprising that even after most white people believe racism in the abstract is wrong, most white people still believe it’s someone else’s problem to fix. So after we pay our lip service to disavowing white supremacy, we consider ourselves excused, and do no more work toward undoing the system than when we were actively building the system. Leaving the work to be done by the people with literal skin in the game, and the highest stakes on the table.

So, I get this now. And I get it in an entirely new way this morning. What do I do with that? I need to do more of the work that needs to be done. I need, in my naivete with regard to that work, to listen to, believe, and follow the leadership of those who have become experts in it by necessity, i.e., black people. I need to press for other white people to recognize this and act. I need to recognize the privilege it is to just wake up and be enough for my country as I am to enjoy all rights and privileges.

These are abstract. I will continue to give money to and will follow the lead of black-led groups doing this work already. I will continue being vocal to my peers and to my elected representatives about my responsibility and conviction to do better, and the REQUIREMENT that this be implemented as policy and practice at all levels of our society. I will do my internal work here so that I can be in my life who I want to be, to reduce and mitigate the harm done to black and brown people by white people. *I* will not expect black people to do the work to prove they are human and equal. Because that’s bullshit. They just are. They are enough.

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