Black Lives Matter is an organization of activists fighting for the civil rights of Black people. It’s also a true statement, and a fact that people, especially white people, need to be reminded of. Again and again and again.
I woke up today, and before 8:00 there were already two stories in the news about Black men, one who was threatened with violence, and another who met with violence to the point of death. There have been other recent stories in the news about Black people dying violently at the hands of white people. These stories are, unfortunately, not exceptional, and these incidents keep happening. It is unacceptable.
As Ibram Kendi said on Twitter, “We should be drawing a straight line of racist terror from Amy Cooper [the woman who terrorized Christian Cooper] to this Minneapolis cop [who murdered George Floyd]. Too often, she is the beginning. He is the end.”
This is only going to stop when we commit to making it stop.
White people, it’s time to get our shit together. When you say “I’m not racist,” it discredits everything you say following that. Racism and white supremacy might not reflect your values, but we live in a culture where those values are indeed embedded and that we are taught early on. We are all racist, whether we admit it or not. The system we live in benefits white people, while it oppresses others. This in and of itself doesn’t make white people bad, but if we don’t recognize it and work to change it, we perpetuate it.
We have to commit to end institutional racism, work to understand what it means to be anti-racist, amplify Black voices and Black experience, advocate for Black people, call racism out, hold people accountable, speak up against injustice, and understand that this is work that must be done continuously, without end. We must work to understand the legacy of slavery and white supremacy, the inter-generational trauma that it has caused.
Here is a link to some anti-racist resources.
I would add to this list (I will be adding more to this post going forward):
Paradoxologies 