And If You Don't Know, Now You Know

I struggled to title this post. "Fuck the Police" was my initial choice, but it is too simplistic. The issue is far beyond all police officers being racist pigs. I wish it was that simple. The reality is far more intricate, invisible and repulsive. While it is undeniably true that many police officers are racist and crocked and that the profession itself will tend to draw power-hunger, hateful people, many cops sincerely want to help people when they sign up for the job. The racism in our country can be seen in the split-second decisions to murder Black people. Some police definitely kill Black people on purpose, but I think that many pull the trigger multiple times due to a nameless fear that has been bread into them since they were children: Black people are dangerous. This fear is honed and made explicit in the way we train and police our communities. PLEASE READ The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander . Everyone should know the history and current state of our "justi...

I wrote in the previous post that I believe it important that white folks do their initial learning on their own or in all-white spaces. I recommend this because once you start learning just how fucked up our world is and just how fucking hard it is for people of color, you are going to want to cry. It's a perfectly natural reaction, for white people. Done alone or in company of like-minded white folks, crying can be healing and restorative. But here's the thing: crying is a privilege, an almost exclusively white privilege. It's ok if that doesn't make sense right now, but I hope it will by the end of this post. White privilege is too often misunderstood. I will be posting a three-part essay on this soon, but for now suffice it to say that white people only see their privilege if they are actually getting something (even then, we often deny our privilege). Instead of viewing privilege this way, try thinking about white privilege as a shield that keeps us isolated fr...

If you're reading this, and you've read the first post about Allyship , you may be wondering where to start and what, exactly, you are supposed to do. How do you take the leap from passive progressive to active ally? My own journey began with a week-long conference: NCORE , The National Conference on Race and Ethnicity in American Higher Education. If you work in higher education in any capacity, fill out the forms and get your college to pay for your attendance at the next conference. Their tagline is "Start the Conversation." For me, it wasn't so much like starting a conversation as it was being thrust into the middle of a generations-long conversation, one which I had thought myself well versed in yet suddenly found I knew almost nothing. I sat in many uncomfortable conversations in rooms where I was often the minority; where people of color in the audience were freely expressing their outrage, despair, and fear; and where the presenters were opening a top...

Ok, so the English teacher in me demands that I concede that "allyship" is, technically, a noun, not a verb. The important point is that allyship is not an identity. For most of my life I assumed that I was actively helping oppressed people simply because I thought that oppression was wrong. I identified as a liberal, a bleeding heart,a good white person. The problem with this is that I placated myself with this identity and thought it was enough. I never actually DID anything to help end oppression and injustice. Enter, allyship. According to The Anti-Oppression Network allyship is "an active, consistent, and arduous practice of unlearning and re-evaluating, in which a person of privilege seeks to operate in solidarity with a marginalized group of people." Allyship is NOT an identity; it is the collection of actions that we take every day to demolish systems of white supremacy; it is self-evaluation, it is re-learning history, it is speaking up when you are to...