The past few months have been quite a learning experience! I woke up y’all. I have been walking around for most of my life half asleep. I have always known that racism existed, but what I did not know was how pervasive it still is. Once I really started reading into the forms it has taken, I realized how I have actually taken a part in it all these years. The way that made me feel, it actually made me sick to my stomach for days. I have always believed in equal rights for all and, until recently, I thought, in regards to skin color, it had been actualized.

Oh, how wrong I was! So, it was time to change things. I knew it was not going to be easy, but I really had no clue how hard it was going to be. I have been pretty outspoken for quite a long time. I have never really had too much of a hard time calling someone out for being, what my Mammaw calls, an eejit. I think all those times of doing so prepared me for what I was about to encounter.

The first thing I had to do was put my pride of self aside and take a hard cold look at my views and how they differed from people of color. Thanks to an amazingly inspirational woman that I met through my husband, I opened myself up to learning about systemic racism. She approached my feelings of how I had perceived myself of being discriminated against with such patience and grace that I see now God was truly working through her.

No matter how bad my feelings got hurt on those few occasions, it really does not compare to what people of color experience on a day-to-day level. It is not easy at all for a person, no matter who you are, to imagine that someone else’s pain is greater than our own. The reason is because you have to say to yourself, “Right now you don’t matter.” If you are honest with yourself, you will admit that, to our core, we are pretty self-centered. It takes maturity to put that to the side and become “other focused.” If you cannot do this, then you will not be able to comprehend any portion of the experience of living as a black person in our country.

I have to admit this was not easy at first for me. I watched a video on YouTube of Jane Elliott’s Blue Eyes-Brown Eyes exercise. Just watching this video was life changing. I could not imagine actually being in the class!

My first thoughts were “Oh my god! Is this how my friends have felt all their lives? Did I actually have, even for a moment, a thought like that?” Being honest with myself, the only answer that I could give was, sadly, "yes." Am I a horrible person for this? No. Being that I came to the realization of what forms racism takes in today’s society, I had to make a change in my life.

After a long talk that my husband and I had, he agreed that we could not be silent to the negative thinking that we would see from family and friends. We had already made changes to the people we associated ourselves with and the people left were all wonderful people. They have beautiful hearts and a great capacity to love. However, we knew, when it came to this subject, many would not be able to see how apathetic they really were to the racial inequality going on. The church I had been attending had always talked about how our jobs as Christians is to love God’s people. Jesus even tells us that love is the most important thing in 1 Corinthians 13:13. “Three things will last forever -- faith, hope, and love -- and the greatest of these is love.”

Within the week following this eye-opening, Orlando experienced the mass shooting of the Pulse nightclub. It was dubbed the deadliest mass shooting by a single person, and the deadliest attack against the LGBT community, in the history of our country. Being that the attacker swore allegiance to ISIS, it also became the worst terrorist attack since September 11. Everywhere across the country and all over social media people were praying for the friends and families of the victims. Almost immediately following, we heard about the police shootings of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling.

Again, all over, we saw the outpouring of prayer for these awful incidents. So many were hurting after these three incidents. I remember the Today Show even talking about how the pulse of the country was feeling saddened by it all. The Black Lives Matter hashtag began making its way across all social media and the news outlets. Several of the Christian speakers that I follow posted articles about how to go about healing after these tragedies and how churches can help their parishioners. Then the #AllLivesMatter became the retort of those who just could not understand the purpose of BLM. Following that was #BlueLivesMatter. What the majority of white people could not see, that by using these hashtags they were subconsciously (for some blatantly) telling the black community that their pain is not greater than anyone else’s. One of the best pictorial representations of this is of a black woman with tears falling that had a white hand covering her mouth.

Continued in Part 2 .