Part 2 of the BLM Rally.
The speeches were good, but the signs spoke to me (as you
can see in the first post in this series).
The title of this piece is the first from that list: “Systemic Racism
is Killing Us Am I Next?” Understanding the sign is straight
forward. Racism is systemic in America. That is what led to the killing of George
Floyd. There is not space in a blog
post, nor even in a textbook, to address how complete that truth is. This is another answer to why Black Lives
Matter over and against why every lives matter.
Systemic Racism is killing blacks, not everyone. It is a singling out of one group of people
among all people that is endemic in this nation. But then the sign gets deeply personal. Shall we look into the face of the young African
American woman who was carrying the sign and personify what it asks. Is She Next?
As a privileged white, it is not too difficult to blow off the
first part of that message. Dismiss ‘systemic
racism is killing us’ as rhetoric or hyperbole.
The second part is a little harder, especially if there is a face to tie
to the message. We must shut down our
empathy to blow off that part.
But here is what this sign did for me. It pierced through the abstract of ‘white
privilege’ (and abstracting ‘white privilege’ is an excellent way of denying
white privilege) and made me see one place where white privilege was active in
my heart.
So let me confess that the first reaction I had to the sign
was a gut wrench reaction to blow it off.
It made me feel uncomfortable (which means, for me, that the truth was gnawing
on my denial). If I were a blowhard white
supremacist, I would probably embrace my ignorance. But I am not.
I am a white liberal, self-identifying with an open mind and open heart in
a poor attempt to be like Jesus. But
there was knee jerk disbelief that came spitting out of some deep place of my soul. It is a racist streak wrapped up in a liberal
utopian attitude.
What? Well, America
is a good place. Yah, we had slavery,
but the Good Guys won the Civil War. We
lost the Peace, but that was corrected a century later. Justice was triumphant in the Civil Rights
Movement. Sure, racism is still there,
but it is more like the Xtreme Sports in our freedom of speech. Reaching into the past, the utopian word ‘colorblind’
comes bubbling to the surface. America’s
eyes have gone colorblind, we no longer see the color of skin, so is violence
due to skin color really a thing? Maybe
in isolated cases…because we liberals are utopian and not everyone has gotten to
our enlightenment quite yet.
Liberal Utopianism.
Ignorant racism.
The concrete expression of my white privilege was the assumption
that we have grown into what Thomas Jefferson wrote, that “all men (and I use ‘men’
with the old fashioned ‘inclusive’ meaning) are created equal”. But the reality is that all people are sure
as hell not treated as equal. From a
place of white privilege, my espoused blindness to color allowed me to deny the
reality of the systemic racism that systematically snuffs out black lives in
the nation that I love.
But what does it say about the power of privilege when it
takes the application of classical empathy, ‘walking in another person’s shoes’,
walking in the shoes of a person who lives in the daily reality that a wrong
moment or a bad set of circumstances with law enforcement or a white crazed on
the drug of ‘supremacy’ can bring their death?
Let me tell you about some real privilege I have received
from the Black Lives Movement. African
American friends have shared stories of their experiences that are summed up in
this sign. We are in a time when things
are changing enough to create the safe spaces where these stories can be told
to whites. If only we whites can truly see
through our privilege to the reality of our nation, so we can undo the system
of racism that holds sway.
Rev. Peter Hofstra
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