White Out ‘A reflective prompt to check Whiteness in the shadow of Black rage’

I am just curious from my friends who identify as white – where is all of this sitting within you? What is it about this moment that is activating you when there was so much silence in 2014-2016? If you voted from Trump or marched against him, are you participating in the manifestations happening today?

March for Justice for Ezell Ford, Los Angeles, CA 2014

Is your grief over George Floyd or the loss of your property? Have you been honest and thanked God for the privileges that you have had to date at the hourly sacrifice in the loss of Black lives?

While I appreciate former president George Bush’s words of “listening” to African Americans in this moment – I disagree in the sense that racism has ALWAYS been a conversation between white men with material and lethal effects on everyone else. So instead of listening to Black folks- are you using this time to turn inwards to your own communities? Are you hosting conversations with each other about how this form of hatred has been able to fester in your hearts across generations and projected on the world for nearly 500 years? Even as this hate originated through your own hurts and wounds by the brutality of warring factions in Europe. It is one thing to be socially cool and post some statement of Black lives mattering on SM and your website – but are you having the tough conversations with your parents, faith communities, children, neighbors? Have you asked a fellow white person – how are you feeling? How is this impacting you (not only your Black friends and staff)?

I appreciate you standing up. But if you are still standing from a place of Saviorship and not your own personal power of healing and redemption; standing from a place of hiding in the crowd but not want to socially be seen; from a place where you and your ego are still in the center and unable to rise up out of your own comfort to stand in a place of discomfort, unknowing, and dis-ease – I ask that you please don’t stand.

I am in my own minority with my community on this one – but I DO NOT want you to read Malcolm and Martin and Angela and bell and other hero/warriors that have helped me stand tall each day even when the fly swatter of white supremacy tries to swing me down in the most minute micro-aggressive action or overt expression of hate.

Instead – I request that you have a “White Out” and read White Fragility, White Rage, The Invisible Empire, Noted on the State of Virginia, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, Expansion and American Indian Policy, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, The Half Has Never Been Told, Slavery By Another Name, Troubling the Waters, and Without Sanctuary. Re-watch Birth of A Nation, Happy Days, Father Knows Best and John Wayne Cowboy films with critical eyes created by what you have witnessed and experience today.

I want to trust you but history –events that happened up to an hour ago – is making that hard. Too often your response to our pain and outrage is simply a soundbite, blood on your door to be passed by, an H.R. check box, an IG screenshot, or misplaced guilt.

I need you to get educated, to see for the first time how deep white supremacy is embedded in the culture that we live and breathe everyday so that when we talk about dismantling systems, you understand what we mean and that we are not going away on June 9th with the burial of our beloved George Floyd.

I arrogantly want assurance that just as you have placed your privilege on the concrete this week through massive demonstrations – you place your true being into position to feel a response when you read the text of intentional policy formations that are creating the fatal outcomes of today. Racism is not biological. It is constructed into the minds of men as a form of social control and justification to horde global resources.

I need for you to start speaking to how these policies have impacted you and what measurements from a place of whiteness will be changed in the transition to a more equitable world so that we minimize loses and maximize gain.

I need you to start co-creating new language that does not define people in approximation to you, but based on our common humanity and sharing of this one planet (for now).

I need, I need, I need to know what is your commitment to the co-creation of a new world order that is fair and just for all – even when we “return” to work post-COVID.

I love but am tired of being emotionally rape under the banner of solidarity. I am grateful to be alive, but have too many scars and angst from white fragility responses when you are silent in everyday settings. In speaking up, you may lost friends, but we lost lives.

I am truly praying that we are all rising up to meet this moment through unearthing the limiting beliefs that have stunted the growth of our nation and breathing out the readiness of a new field of consciousness for planting heirloom seeds so future generations can “be” and not simply tolerated.

To me this is the real work. Are you with me?

In love, light, freedom, and liberation.