If someone wants to label me sarcastically as a virtue signaling “woke” white person then that’s a really small price to pay when some really fucked up stuff is happening in my country. I can’t sit here and pretend this is ok.
I won’t ignore what is right in front of us all in my country.
It shouldn’t be up to POC to hold white hands and patiently educate us over and over again on the present and active evils of white privilege, racism, and supremacy.
Our country has never truly faced these original sins, sins that were with us from the outset. Our forefathers fashioned insidious religious AND (fallacious) scientific arguments to underpin racist policies, and today there is still a legacy of gaslighting, denial, and hostility to admitting this past or addressing the legacy of disadvantage, injustice, and dehumanization that continues fully ablaze in the present.
It’s profiling and mass incarceration. It’s for profit prisons. It was slavery. Redlining. Police brutality, lynchings and public execution.
This is not about “one bad cop”. It’s about entire embedded structures, narratives, legacies of fear and exploitation.
It only stops if we make it stop. But first we have to admit it, face it for what it was and still is. Just like an alcoholic has to start by admitting there is a problem.
An iceberg of white privilege/racism/supremacy1
Footnotes
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Image Source: Safehouse Progressive Alliance for Nonviolence (2005). Adapted: Ellen Tuzzolo (2016); Mary Julia Cooksey Cordero ( @jewelspewels ) (2019); @theconsciouskid (2020). ↩
