"My Wife Is Black. My Son Is Biracial. But White Supremacy Lives Inside Me"
I urge everyone to read this, especially those who feel that they "don't have a racist bone in their body" or believe that having a black friend or significant other immunizes them from harboring any racial bias:
My Wife Is Black. My Son Is Biracial. But White Supremacy Lives Inside Me
https://www.wbur.org/cognoscenti/2020/06/22/protests-george-floyd-racism-haiti-children-calvin-hennick
To protect my son, and every other Black boy and girl in America, white people must change the way our own eyes see the world. We must do the work of stamping out white supremacy where it lives: in our systems, and in ourselves.
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When I realized what was happening in my own brain, I shuddered. I wasn’t what anyone would describe as a racist. I was engaged to a Black woman whom I would marry later that year, and who would become the mother of my two children. But white supremacy had infected me in ways I’d never realized.
I’ve lived my entire life in a world filled with literal monuments to racism, a world where we regularly make unspoken justifications for living on land stolen from indigenous people, for honoring slave owners on our money, for tolerating enormous racial gaps in wealth and education and health outcomes. Even my awareness of Chiara Levin’s murder is an example of white supremacy in action; if she’d been Black, I doubt the news media would have latched onto her story. Journalists saw her white face, and the same thing that happened in my brain happened in theirs. Of all the murder victims in Boston, this is the one who matters, the white supremacist inside them whispered. This is the tragedy we will talk about for weeks, while the names of murdered Black men and women go unspoken.
I confess that there’s still a part of me that tries to look for “reasonable explanations” when I first hear of a Black person dying in police custody. A part of me looks to explain away the horrible things I don’t want to confront. If I’m going to be a part of the solution, this is the piece of me I need to destroy.
...
I’m going to more actively look for ways to get involved, rather than hide in despair when the news makes me afraid for my children’s futures. I’m going to take my cues from Black activists who know what actions will make a difference in their own lives. Perhaps most importantly, I’m going to recommit to listening to and amplifying Black voices — and I’m going to try to sit and stay quiet during my own moments of discomfort, when their stories challenge the things I thought I knew.
I’m particularly interested to relearn American history from the perspective of the people who lived through it. The version I learned in school was so sanitized, so paternalistic: White people enslaved Black people, but then we saw that it was wrong, and we stopped. We forced Black people to live as second-class citizens in their own country for another century, but then we saw that it was wrong, and we stopped.
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