I blame those of you who deny the influence of race and gender on the lives of women and POC

[Amimnoch]

83. These are the shoes one can never walk a mile in.

White privilege is one of those things that if you have it, you likely don't see it.

A bit of my own personal experience. I'm a gay white male in an interracial relationship of 20 years this past New Years eve.

I was much younger when my husband and I met. I was more idealistic. I fully and absolutely believed that I was a man of equal opportunity. I abhorred racism. I also absolutely believed, and vehemently asserted that I was in no way shape or form a racist.

I still vividly recall the first conversation my boyfriend (at the time) had our first real discussion about racism. We were watching the television series Designing Women. There was an episode where one of the ladies in the series daughter was dating a fellow student in her class who was black. The mother was okay with it, the father however had issue with it. Without recapping the whole episode, towards the end there was a line that really struck me that basically said "everyone is racist, the question is, what are you going to do about it." I thought it was a ridiculous notion that everyone is a racist.. certainly I wasn't.. I couldn't be.. Here I was sitting with my boyfriend who was of a different race than I was and I had no issue with it. Again, I could go on a VERY long digression here of that particular conversation, but suffice it to say.. he proved me wrong. Oh, for certain I wasn't a KKK or white supremacist type of racist.. but I did live with preconceived notions that proved the point.

Fast forward 14 years into our relationship. I relocated down to Rio Di Janeiro, Brazil for work, and my husband relocated with me. One evening, after coming home from work, I was commenting to him about how scary the police force was in that city. They are so corrupt, and the general notion in my office is that it's better to be robbed by an honest criminal than to be robbed by the police.. it was safer. To this he laughed (as an aside he has one of the Greatest and most infectious laughs of anyone in the world that I've ever met.. but again I digress).. He pointed out to me that I'd just had my first real view of what white privilege in the US is. See, in the US, I've never known what it's like to actually FEAR an engagement with law enforcement. If I get pulled over for speeding, there's no voice in my head wondering if I'm going to die from this. In Brazil, I learned what it was like to fear law enforcement.. to feel that I can't really go to them with my problems without taking on additional risk to myself.

This is just one example, and even armed with these bits of insight, I STILL can never fully know what it's like to walk a mile in my husbands shoes.. I might be able to experience tidbits here and there like I did in Brazil, but I can't go back in time.. see what it's like being raised, and having my childhood formed around those kinds of experiences.

Here's a few pointers I'll respectfully recommend for others:
* Quit insisting that you "understand". You don't. You can't. You never will.
* Acceptance doesn't require you to understand.
* If someone says they feel they are being marginalized.. they are being marginalized.. not may be, not could be, and it's not just their imagination.
* As that quote from above said: "Everyone is a racist, the question is what are YOU going to do about it?"