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A bit of preaching to the choir here, but this should be shared far and wide.
https://www.facebook.com/masha.makhlyagina/posts/10206631233202130
"Advice to white friends and acquaintances:
Right now you are either feeling hopeless/powerless, personally attacked and defensive, or vindicated because your beliefs about my city and/or Black people seem to be upheld.
So here’s some guidelines about what to do and what not to do right now:
1) Do not make this about your feelings. Recognize that when people are discussing “white people,” they are correct historically, statistically, and factually, and yet nobody is saying you’re solely to blame. You are part of a system that benefits people who look and identify as white. You are part of it whether you want to be or not, whether you have Black friends or lovers or children or not, whether you took an Africana Studies class or not, etc.
2) Do not misquote Dr. MLK Jr. or any other Civil Rights Leader as support of your anti-looting/anti-violence stance. This is a harder point to sell people on, especially my fellow white brethren, but you were miseducated. You were given a clean, sell-able version of historical figures involved in the Civil Rights Movement. MLK himself understood the place and importance of rioting and violence. Do not bring Ghandi into this, because Ghandi was actually very much a racist who hated folks we would see as Black today. You were taught such a sanitized, pretty, and digestible version of how Black folks got the right to vote and got their freedom that you do not even know the thousands of lives lost in that movement (that never ended).
3) Sit down and listen. Do not tell people of color about their experiences. We as white people do not know what it is like to be Black in America. We just don’t. We can know what it is like to be disliked for being white, we can know what it is like to be treated strangely, we can know what it is like to be treated violently for how we’re perceived, but all this is not systemic and does not rule our existence day-in and day-out. We as individual white people may have singular experiences of violence. Black folks in our country have a continued experience of violence that never ceases.
4) Do not bring up slavery in this. If you bring up when slavery “ended,” you’re going to look very foolish because you will be missing other facts, such as the effect of Jim Crow, the War on Drugs, and the school-to-prison pipeline to miss a few. Do not be quick to assuage your feelings of being attacked or guilted by bringing up that you did not own slaves or your ancestors did not, etc. You live in a country built by white slave owners and you now walk around benefiting every day from that. Take a deep breath and realize it’s not about you.
5) If you want to show support, ask a community organizer or organization what you can do to show support. Do not tell all your Black friends that you voted for Obama and you’re in this with them.
6) If you see other white people being ignorant, disrespectful in tone or language or approach, you speak up. You show them that it is not only Black folks that need to defend what it right, but that you, as a fellow white person, do not support their ignorance or their hatred. This is the most important thing you can do—to remove the presumed responsibility of people of color to educate white people on our ignorance.
7) Do not call your Black friends and tell them how sad you are. This disillusionment that you’re likely experiencing is so boring to any marginalized folks. Our bubble has been popped so we feel sad the first hundred times this happens and we realize our country is not as just as we were raised to believe. But it is nobody’s job to hold our hand. See #1 about our feelings.
8) Walk away if you have nothing to add that will uphold marginalized people in our community. Do not bring lighter fluid to a bonfire just to see what happens. You’ll get burned."
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"Sometimes I contemplate moving to a warmer place, then the lake and skyline give me a warm embrace" © Common
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