and turned off by GD back 20 years ago, but as the Lesson quieted down and GD grew a bit, I started reading over here more, though I'm mostly quiet. Unless the subject is beer or gardening.

Demos: white, lifelong mid-Atlantic suburbanite, mostly white upper middle socioeconomic area and background, college, now running the family insurance agency. Not a lot of Black people in my day to day life; a few of my daughter's less-close friends, couple families I know from coaching Little League or running a Cub Scouts den. Not many Black clients, all of whom are members of or referred by a single mixed-race family. Caregivers for my dad, all of whom are immigrants.

My only experience as a minority was living in Japan, which (while my experience included a whole lot of getting stereotyped as well as rare negativity) is not the same thing as being a non-white here.

>Alot of white people post on this board (many under the cover
>of anonymity) and oftentimes have felt very comfy to offer
>critiques about issues that directly affect the lives and
>livelihood of Black people...

I don't generally *think* this applies to me.
I did occasionally get criticized in The Lesson due to my approach to older Black music - I'm especially interested in roots music, including Black old-time and blues, especially pre-war stuff, and occasionally ruffled some feathers with my writing about that.

>with that said, the world is now seemingly (read: seemingly)
>starting to reckon with how insidious systemic and widespread
>racism and anti-Blackness is...

I am both shocked that more people remained oblivious to it after the multiple high profile, videotaped police-custody killings of the past decade, and pleased that now even the less virulent racists can agree that the situation is appalling.

>For the white people that post here..who are you? are you
>allies to this struggle?

I am... sympathetic isn't quite strong enough, but I feel like 'ally' isn't the right word, like that would be assuming a role I haven't done anything to earn. I feel like 'ally' might imply a depth of understanding that I don't anticipate ever having, no matter how empathic I may feel.

>are you truly doing the work of
>wrestling with how you benefit from your privilege and taking
>actions to unlearn your internalized white supremacy and be
>more antiracist?

I try to be self-aware.
I try to make sure my older kids are self-aware. They're far more likely at their age to have friends from a diverse ethnic (and even gender identity) spectrum than I was, and that's a very positive development at a young age.

>If the answer is yes, and you have the courage, please reveal
>yourself and talk about it. How have you stepped up in this
>moment? What more would you like to be able to do? How are you
>educating yourself?

I am not an activist. I gather as much information from trusted sources as I can, I read, I listen, I think, I weigh, I talk to my kids about what is right and what is wrong and what goes on in the world and why things that happen happen and what they can do to make those things less likely to happen.


As for what more I'd like to be able to do, here's a sidebar that's kinds personal.

I wrestle with the Italian in-laws from S. Philly, who run the gamut from not-self-aware (the nephew who went out to 'defend' the Columbus statue) to negative stereotyping (one actually said 'but he was wearing a hoodie!' to me about the Trayvon Martin murder) to (less frequent) outright racism. It's difficult, because they're family, and I (mostly) love them, but when the awfulness comes out, it's jarring.

I try to be understated but clear whenever race relations come up (which is not infrequent) because tempers run high and opinions generally don't change, and because I'm an outsider there too, though there's been some softening. The argument that inevitably gets made can be pretty powerful: formative experiences across 50 years including rapes of friends, needless fights, chases, home invasions, Uncle Ernie getting bashed on the head with a bat just for riding his bike in the wrong neighborhood. I (the conversation goes) don't get it because I have never been down there, never dealt with it, have always lived in a cushy suburban setting. And that's hard to counter without getting all logic-y, which doesn't work when emotion dominates the other party's thought process.

So while they would mostly say "I'm not racist," while they all "have Black friends," and you know what, they may well have more Black friends than I do, it's hard for them to put that negative emotion from personal experience aside, to consider historical context and the role of their own community in those poor relations. It's also difficult to convince them that applying their negative experience to the Black community as a whole is illogical, since elements of their their own community regularly act in ways that are also objectively bad, but are normalized because they come from within.

So if there was something I could do, it would be to help these people see that anti-racism does NOT invalidate their negative experiences, but rather would help foster an atmosphere where such would be less common in the future for everyone. Or something like that. If you have pointers, thoughts, outrage, want to lay into me, etc., feel free to share.