White violence.
What images does that elicit? What circumstances come to mind?
Are you included in any of them?
I doubt it, simply because it takes cognitive effort to recognize how we as white people are armed with violent weapons in our every day thoughts, actions, and communications.
I want to think I am different from “those people” who commit atrocities.
Question, is it more atrocious to kill someone quickly or slowly? Because we are suffocating Black people.
Which leads me to sharing this video by Sterling K. Brown.
I share this carefully. I don’t share it so we white people can steal the pain for ourselves and cry/feel heartbreak/grieve what isn’t ours to grieve. Hear me, please.
If you feel that welling up of emotion and dare to focus only on your empathy (something I question that we as white people can even truly and fully have for the experience of “wearing a mask” as described here), you are doing nothing to make this world a place for BIPOC *for especially Black people* to live and breathe freely.
Our emotional reaction is far too often where it stops.
If my heart “breaks” at this, then I better be fully prepared to also hold the mild twinges of discomfort when my privilege, my racism, my power over is confronted and called out. If I dare grieve for what is lost, then I better be fully prepared to lose my own comfort and safety to make sure this never happens again.
If I look into his eyes with a thought of helping, I surely must be ready and willing to recognize and do the work with myself, my children, my friends, my family, my white peers to disarm ourselves. I better be ready to tend to my own dirt before I demand a better world where love abounds.
And I better be ready to stand by my claimed belief that Black people matter. If the narrative presented to us shifts (and oh, we know that it will because we are always finding reasons to deny Black people humanity), our backpedaling of support is a suffocating mask. If I am only reactive to stories that feel outrageous enough to me, then I am focused on my emotions/guilt, as well as keeping parameters for determining someones humanity.
White violence is complacency. White violence is unaccountability. White violence is volatility. White violence is distancing myself from the problem.
Love is conviction. Love is accountability. Love is mitigating harm. Love is recognizing that the harm starts right at home, in my own heart.
Again, I hesitate, because even in this I am taking Black pain and finding my own learning in it. This is still consumption. It can still be me finding a narrative that suits my complacency.
So, I am asking that as you watch this fellow white people, hold on to your emotions, your immediate reactions, your desire to quell the discomfort. Listen. Reflect. Then, change.
If we won’t, then we are as violently armed as a white man with guns.
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