We Need to do More

I have multiple drafted blog posts from the past few months that never got published. They felt pointless when everybody was experiencing the same pandemic. And then I remembered we are not all experiencing the same pandemic. Different communities are facing different difficulties, and all of those are valid.

In elementary school, I first learned about the history of how the United States treated people like property, like animals, to be bought and sold and used as a means to an end. In high school, I first realized that, although the civil rights movement gets highlighted as a huge success in our country’s history, many people at the time paid no attention to it or were in opposition. In college, I finally took classes linking everything from before our country was even founded to the discrimination and disparities we see today. Let me be clear, I’m thankful to have been raised in America, I know I have far more opportunity here than I could’ve if I had spent my childhood elsewhere, but that means I also know how much better we can do. I chose to do my senior thesis on the white fragility, rather than on violence against people, which surprised those of you who knew I was (and am) passionate about anti-human trafficking efforts. But I’d argue white fragility is violent. You can’t start learning about issues of trafficking and violence against people experiencing poverty in the United States without running into the role race has played in our history and how we perpetuate that narrative today.

Let me make this clear: I am white. I know I am white, and I know I will never understand what it is like to be a person of color in America. So, I started listening. I started to understand that someone else’s experience being different than mine didn’t invalidate mine, and my experience didn’t need to invalidate theirs. I started learning. I saw the ways that my perspective was reflected through our government officials, policy makers, and law enforcement, and other perspectives weren’t being heard. An easy example: I had always been taught to go to officers if I needed help, that they would protect me, that they were the good guys who would keep the bad guys away from me. I respect the desire for justice, for safety, for accountability. Others have learned to fear the police, to quickly make their hands visible and drop anything they might be holding when an officer approaches. At first that sounded dramatic, unnecessary even, until I started working in communities of color. Each person I asked had a story to share about the police that reflected something very different than I ever experienced. I started researching the history of policing in the United States, the way prisons were used to perpetuate slavery after the emancipation proclamation, the way a white woman claimed Emmett Till whistled at her was mirrored a few days ago when a white woman was made uncomfortable and utilized her privilege by calling the police. She made the color of a man’s skin a weapon, calling 911 claiming someone who was unarmed was dangerous. History repeats itself unless we learn, continuously, and are willing to change.

There is no reason, in a country where black folks only make up 13% of the population, that one in three black boys will end up incarcerated. There is no reason that a black man is more than twice as likely to get shot by the police than a white man. We cannot analyze each “mistake” each “accident” on an individual level. It is institutional. Look at our policy makers. Look at our law enforcement. Who gets to decide what is criminal? Whose voices keep being heard and whose continuously are silenced? Whose lives are being lost?

This past week, George Floyd was killed by a police officer who knelt on his neck while restraining him. George Floyd should not have died. How many black men will have to be murdered before we will finally admit we still have a problem? People of color have been calling on us to open our eyes for centuries. Why are we still holding them shut? Why do we strip the power from their voices by ignoring them? Why do we continue to defend racist acts? Change is long overdo.

I know most of you reading this are white. I can assume most of you were raised and educated with similar perspectives that I was. It is painful to undo. It is uncomfortable. It can feel like we are being held accountable to actions we were not a part of or wouldn’t support. That doesn’t mean we can ignore that we have a white experience in America that is different than the experience of people of color. That doesn’t mean that we can’t be a part of progress. We are being asked to hold ourselves accountable. We’ve hoarded positions of power by limiting who could vote. We’ve hoarded adequate education by limiting where people could live. We’ve hoarded resources by limiting who could work. We can learn to share and make space for people whose experiences are different than ours.

#BlackLivesMatter became a hashtag because black folks are still dying unnecessarily and at disproportionate rates at the hands of officers. Black lives matter because we’ve refused to see that up until now. All lives can’t matter until we start acknowledging the ones we keep taking away.

Next Steps

• Listen to black voices – especially if they seem radical, especially if it feels uncomfortable. You don’t have to agree, but you can listen.
• Donate to black-led organizations – in Minneapolis: Black Visions Collective, MN Freedom Fund, ACER (my personal favorite, I work there now while doing IJM work remotely), and Unicorn Riot (has been live streaming the protests all hours of the day – a more extreme organization however)
• Hold people in power accountable (Mayor Frey’s phone number is 612-968-4443, you can also text “Floyd” to 55156 to sign a petition asking for conviction)
• Ask questions

I’ll be compiling a more thorough list of resources that I’ve used and will share it shortly. Treating everybody equally shouldn’t be a politicized issue and we all have work to do.