This article is a tough one for me to write. I normally keep out of social media frenzies, storms of outrage, political power struggles, and up until recently debates about racism and systemic oppression. I dislike conflict in any form and still do, but in this rarest of occasions I had an epiphany regarding my position on racial politics in this country in light of the mass protests and riots in the name of the most recent case of an African American being brutally murdered unfairly and cruelly. I feel obligated to speak about my realization not because I think my thoughts on the matter are any kind of world-shattering ideologies that will radically alter the hearts and minds of any who read it, but rather because my personal realization was so simple yet challenged so many of my preconceived notions that I wanted to document it here. Before I get to where I am now, I think it's only appropriate to speak about where I was.

I feel it is important for reasons i'll make clear later that I am a white man. I am not African-American or any other ethnicity or minority and therefore the contents of this article are from that perspective. I make absolutely no assumptions of understanding what it is like to be a member of any other ethnicity and will not attempt to do so in this article. It may even seem counter-intuitive to the title of my article that i'm even writing this now as the overall topic concerns NOT using words but I digress. The following think piece is strictly the opinions and story of someone who is not the target of systemic racism in America and therefore is unfamiliar with the day to day struggles of living as someone that is. If you are looking for an example or perspective of someone that is, you might be better served going elsewhere. With those disclaimers out of the way, let's get into what i'm actually here to talk about.

As stated previously I am a white male. I was born and raised in a conservative Christian household in the middle of farming country in Western New York. I went to elementary school for my first few years of education but then was homeschooled right up until my college years. In that entire first stretch of my life virtually every single person I ever saw or knew in my neck of the woods was white like me. The only person of color that made any major presence on my childhood was my elementary school bully who harassed and tormented me for most of my public school education. I went to church for all of my life and again the vast majority of the congregation in every church I attended as a kid that I am capable of remembering were also white. I say all of this not to be indicative of who I am now, but rather to make it abundantly clear that for most of my childhood I had little to no frame of reference for interacting with anyone who wasn't like me.

Fast forward to my teen years and things had started to change slightly. My family and I had broken out of the Baptist church circuit we inhabited for most of my life up to that point (there were several reasons why but none that relate to this topic so I won't bore with the details). We started attending churches of other denominations, volunteering with a local outreach ministry, and I began participating in the what were then still squarely called the Boy Scouts of America. I also started taking classes at my local community college instead of going to high school. Through these and other experiences I slowly would begin meeting people of a more diverse ethnic background including some that I worked and/or became friends with, but even with all of this taken into account the large percentage of people I knew and actively maintained relationships with were still white like me. Thanks to a detailed education of history given during both my homeschooling years and my early years at community college I was taught the history of race relations in America and the highs and lows of it for African-Americans as well as people of color as a whole. Because of this education, I considered myself "informed" and remember several point where I thought "well what's happening today isn't remotely as bad as what happened back then" and used that as my go to thought the few times I was confronted with debates of racial discrimination and prejudice.

This general process would continue through my higher education in Upstate New York with one notable exception. While it has been far too long for me to adequately remember all the details surrounding this event, it does stand out as the first time I was caught in the middle of an all out localized series of protests over racial politics. In summary my college campus was rocked when the student newspaper published an article that contained horrifically racist imagery. While I won't share the image here for sake of taste and not promoting it in any way, I will state that the article contained an "artistic" depiction of an African American student (with borderline blackface levels of exaggerated features) walking through their home neighborhood in a graduation cap and gown. The neighborhood in question was depicted as a horrific slum with graffiti on the walls, buildings in various states of dilapidation and disrepair, boarded up doors and windows, destroyed public property, and even a car suspended on cinder blocks which, given the nature of the image, was likely intended to imply criminal theft. What followed was all out mania on campus. While I was unaware of any riots to the degree of these recent events in 2020 there were marches, protests, outrage, further racism on social media, the works. The article made national news, the editors of the newspaper resigned and, eventually, things did settle down and return to normal, but it stands as the first time I saw first hand the pain and shock such an issue causes within a community.

Yet even despite all of this, my mind had not matured to the point where this impacted my standpoint on the matter in any real sense. I was a white, Conservative, Christian, not even legal to drink male who had, at least for my money at the time, far more important things to worry about. I never participated in any of the marches, protests, or outreach that stemmed from the issue in any way. I simply kept my head down and finished my classes and ultimately my degree without any proactive action against the publication that I myself had even briefly wrote for. I graduated in 2016 and within a few months, relocated down to Indiana with my older sister to start over somewhere new. To fully do service to how my life has been radically altered both good and bad since coming to Indiana would require another article onto itself and I've already touched on several of my experiences in previous articles. Suffice to say, it's been a difficult last few years for me and just as things began to really look up....2020 happened. You can fill in the details yourself on that one. All of this backstory brings me here where we all are now. Halfway through the year with one disaster after another. I have matured in many ways including my faith, my work life, my responsibilities, and more but it wasn't until just a mere couple days ago I was challenged with the revelation that this entire article has been building to.

Thanks to the quarantine, I came into contact with someone who I now consider to be very dear to my heart. We met rather randomly and inconspicuously through a PC game we both happened to have, and spent a great deal of time playing together, talking to one another, and getting to know each other. Overtime I learned that she is an African-American woman from several states away and, while we never really talked about race that often, it did come up a couple of times and her perspectives and describing her feelings towards her life in this country really started to make me examine my own thoughts and feelings on the subject in such a way even the aforementioned campus crisis never triggered. It this came to a head when the recent protests and riots over the death of George Floyd took off. Here we were again. I had seen and heard about a great number of these incidents before and was never spurred into action by any one of them. I always had plenty to say whenever someone confronted me on the subject before ranging from the defaults I mentioned earlier in the article up to and including denial of racism in America. In these last couple of years though, even I began to notice the increased frequency in these tragedies be they police brutality, mass shootings, or even just racist and distasteful encounters shared online. I never considered myself racist, but as a Conservative leaning individual with the history that i've shared, you can imagine I never actively threw myself into the ring on either side. This time is different however. This time there was a new element in play I never really had before. I had someone I cared about who lives every day of her life in an America where she IS directly impacted and potentially under threat from EVERY one of the horrors and tragedies we've all heard about time and time again. Every. Single. One. It was at that point it hit me to do something I had never really done before....

I stopped talking...and I started listening.

Through my conversations with her I was introduced to a world of different mindsets and perspectives on the issue...not from some other white SJW who took it upon themselves and their white savior complexes to become a champion for people they may not even know...but from someone whose reality is constantly and drastically impacted by all of this. She even told me a story in her past where she was subjected to a horrific example of racism from someone like me in front of dozens of other people and virtually no one did ANYTHING! As a result of these stories and more I began to draw back on my own experiences, but also the discussions about everything I had previously dismissed as liberal guilt-tripping like white privilege, systemic racism, police brutality, and I began to see things completely differently. To my shock I realized that there isn't just some truth to these topics...it's all true. I as a man of Caucasian descent, the walking example of a person that is considered to be the most normal and acceptable type of person by American society, had been speaking to her about my feelings of social isolation, depression, rejection, and more like it was a big deal for me completely ignorant of her background and the fact that these feelings and more are daily occurrences in her life. I have been through the ringer in my own right over the last few years and I will not dismiss that my feelings towards what I've gone through as invalid due to this realization, BUT I also was never so confronted with the idea before that the feelings that I consider to be some of the worst i've felt in my entire life are commonplace for people like her. Worse still is that white people in America, if what we've seen recently is anything to go by, has demonstrated that we STILL would rather talk about how how racial politics make US feel before even entertaining the idea of listening to someone with a story not like our own or that doesn't confirm all of our personal biases or systemic advantages.

Now this isn't to say that I am dropping my Republican upbringing and am doing a complete 180 turn in every single one of my political views as despite my findings and realizations there are still several things to keep in mind. As bad and as public as all of these incidents are, and as often as the powers that be open their mouths to state their ill-informed or even outright racist viewpoints on this situation...their examples do not make the majority. Not every cop is racist, not every white person is racist, and i'd even be so bold as to believe that the majority of people in America are not racist in any intentional way, but lack of malicious intent doesn't excuse us. What is ruling the majority ESPECIALLY among white people however is ignorance, stubbornness, and above all a lack of tolerance and ability to step out of their own perspectives and embrace the idea that maybe we might need to zip our collective lips for once and let other people that AREN'T white speak...and more important believe them. I was listening with disgust yesterday at the coverage of the riots as white people from newscasters to celebrities tried to claim they understand what people of color go through in this country every day....but if my experience is anything to go by...how could we possibly understand? We won't as long as we just keeping talking over the problem.

I make absolutely no claims that because of this perspective shift i'll suddenly get everything right. I'm still a product of my upbringing and will sometimes miss a trick and not listen when I should or not take action when it's needed. I won't even attempt to claim that there will never be another point in my life where I, indirectly or otherwise, accidentally perpetuate thoughts or behaviors that aren't beneficial or healthy to the discussion of equality and ending discrimination in America. What I CAN say however is that I have learned a great deal about how easy it is to be blinded by the status quo you've come to except, to be inert when people need you to act, and most importantly to be deaf to the cries to those around us just because we do not share in their experiences. White people in America won't ever know the kind of struggle it is to be rejected, hated, and victimized by the mere color of our skin, but we can help. I do not know if this issue will improve in the years to come or even in my entire lifetime, but now more than ever I have been made aware of what I can do in the present for those that need it. The best thing I can do....the best thing that ANY of us can do...is to shut our mouths, open our ears and hearts, and listen.