I thought this week would pass without me doing my Sunday blog post. I felt like any of the issues I wanted to focus on were far overshadowed by the events in Ferguson. It went beyond the events in Ferguson to racism that I saw in response to this tragedy that showed our collective racism. It just made me sad, angry and filled me with an overwhelming sense of hopelessness. I decided to go ahead and try and address it in my own very subjective way, however imperfect, because being silent is not an option.
I have seen this racism all around me, and yes, I acknowledge that I am racist. I cannot get away from it. I grew up in a town where the overwhelming majority of people were white. I grew up in a family where I heard racist jokes, and knew they were wrong, but did not know how to stand up against them. Although I went to college in a place far from my small town in Wyoming, it was still overwhelmingly white. I ended up in a city, which was one(and may still be) of the whitest cities in America. Then, I chose to raise my kids in another very white town, maybe not quite as white as the one I grew up in, but nonetheless very white. I can honestly say that I have had only one black friend in my entire life. Although, I may strive not to be racist, I know that it is nearly impossible for me to escape the insidious and subtle racism that permeates our culture.
As a young child, from the time I learned about slavery,the genocide of Native Americans, and the Holocaust, I was ashamed that I was a white skinned girl of European ancestry. This shame went deep and contributed to my life long depression. I somehow could not separate myself from my ancestors. The violence and hatred was in my bones and it filled me with an overwhelming sense of despair. Although, this may make me sound like a whiny white girl, it is the truth of my experience.
Later, I was still a whiny white girl with a big sense of sadness about being a white girl, but I learned a small bit about oppression being bisexual, a person with mental health issues and a physical disability which caused some fairly significant limitations. This small bit of oppression is nothing though in the scheme of things. I cannot know what it is like to send my girls out in a world where I fear for their lives if they are pulled over by police. I cannot know what it is like to be targeted while shopping because of the color of my skin. I cannot know what it is like to be passed over for employment because of my name or the color of my skin. I cannot know what it's like. I just can't.
But, what I do know is that I feel despair when I see how much deep racism still exists in our country. I am sometimes startled by it, as if waking from a dream, or waking from a false reality only to come into the reality of the nightmare that exists. Anyone that denies that the lack of an indictment in the Ferguson case does not display our racism as a country is in very deep denial. I honestly don't know how one can look at the facts of the case and not be dumbfounded at the fact that there was not an indictment. Seriously.
I don't know what else to say except we need to wake up. We need to have conversations and dialogue about race in this country. We need to act to make changes together. Something is very wrong and I don't see it getting better. We see it in our prison system, in disparities in our education system, and in black people getting murdered by police on a weekly basis. Yes, murdered. I am angry and as with all 'big' wrongs in our country, it fills me with a sense of hopelessness as I don't know what the answer is. There doesn't seem to be anyway to change the deep racism; where people dig in their heels and turn a blind eye to it. As a whiny sad white girl in my white town, what can I do to be an ally? Arguing over social media doesn't seem to do anything to help as all I see are people stuck in their positions and not opening their minds, even a little.
I guess all I can do is try and articulate it and speak out. I have learned from various psychological traditions that anger is something to be avoided, that it can only lead to personal destruction. I think I need to question this because there is a lot to be angry at. I still believe that anger can lead to change and I cannot deny I am angry. I cannot deny that this anger can be funneled into something constructive and help facilitate change. Maybe we all need to get a little angry and let the force of it bring us into greater understanding and dialogue. Sometimes I wonder if the mostly white forces that decry anger use it as a tool to suppress real dialogue. I feel sick that black people in urban areas and white men with mental health issues in rural areas are disproportionately murdered by police. There is something wrong. We need to get angry. We need to get sad. We need to step out of our little self imposed boxes and be willing to be uncomfortable with our own racism. We need to open our minds and our hearts to listen to and learn from each other. We need to feel all that is screwed up in this world and most importantly, we need to act, to speak out and make real changes.
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