Please Stop Being a Good White Person (TM)
No, it doesn't mean you should be a Bad White Person. Just that you shouldn't be polite around racism. Racism isn't causing our children to be in danger, so we don't have the same sense of urgency, but maybe we need to work on our sense of urgency. People are dying because of this. Lots of people.
http://lilywhitemama.com/a-piece-of-the-puzzle/
I’m reminded of a document I read in my 11th grade history class. It was a document from a vehicle manufacturer to some muckety-muck in the Nazi regime. The document was outlining why this company’s transport vehicles would be better than the competitor’s for transporting people to-and-from the camps. It was all very bureaucratic—X number of miles to the liter, such-and-such type of wheels for rocky terrain—but in the document there was an added benefit to the company’s transport vehicle: reinforced and insulated cab so that the driver does not hear the screaming. This document remains one of the most frightening things I’ve read in my lifetime—and I’ve read some scary things. I’ve always wished I had saved a copy because it illustrated so well how governments and corporations can camouflage incredibly terrible, horrible, violent practices against a group of people in the language of bureaucracy.
And that is what has happened here in the U.S. Racism and violence against People of Color has been hidden from the average white person and then concealed in the language of bureaucracy so craftily and cunningly that many white folks—and even some People of Color—do not see or hear it. I’m not saying it’s the Holocaust, but it is ugly and awful. The terrible, horrible, violent practices of racism have been cloaked in the bureaucracies of our justice system and our school system and our government and just about every other system, and we white folks are riding around in an insulated, reinforced cab of white privilege where the sounds of the screaming from our fellow Americans of Color cannot be heard.
For example, the few weeks ago I mentioned something about the protests in Baltimore and Freddie Gray to white friend. She sighed, clearly overwhelmed by the sadness of the situation, and asked “which one is he?” She then added that she really needed to go home and read up on all “that stuff”. I nodded. She added, “you know, being a parent leaves so little free time.”
My friend is a wonderful, caring, liberal white person. However, her sense of urgency is drastically different than mine. The children and young adults being brutalized and murdered by the police in the U.S. look like my son. Children who look like her daughter are not being harmed. When something happens to a sweet, 12-year-old child like Tamir Rice, the abject fear I have for my son’s safety in this country rises up in my being. As a parent, I vow to do everything I can to protect him and children who look like him. When my friend reads about Tamir Rice, it’s a sad story and completely reprehensible, but so are stories about earthquakes and famine. As she states, she has many other things to do. In this case, our senses of urgency are completely different. To help solve the puzzle, I need to find a way to bring her up to my level of urgency (or at least closer).
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