Note: I feel the need to explain myself, like a kid with their hand stuck in a candy jar, stumbling for an excuse. I feel the need to explain myself as a white person. I feel the need to say I’m sorry. But this post isn’t about that. This post isn’t about another white person apologizing for their privilege. Because sometimes we’re so busy covering our asses and clearing our consciences, repainting our houses and mowing our lawns, that we forget to check for cracks in the foundation.
I stood with a crowd of heavy hearts. I rotated my candle to keep the wax from burning my white hands red, but the small flame was not for me; the flame is part of a much bigger fire, a fire that continues to burn brown and black bodies to the ground and fade melanin to ash.
The candlelight vigil was organized to honor Alton Sterling and Philando Castille, two black men who were killed by police officers in the same week. Two more. Too many. Instant headlines. Instant headaches and instant heartbreak. Two more black men reduced to names in the paper and biased press. Too many opinions on something that is not simply conditional, but instead a product of how we have been conditioned. Two black men killed without justification, by two different police officers, in two different states, within two days, is not a coincident. These headlines pop up like reports of spreading viruses. One more affected in Louisiana, and another in Minnesota. Different conditions, same diagnosis. Racism is a disease, sometimes dormant, but always existent, and it kills.
My friends and I walked up to the vigil lugging heavy cases of water bottles in our arms, wondering what weight the rest of the evening would bring. The Facebook page asked group members to think of the gathering as “a public funeral and the people of color in our community as the grieving family. They need support, solidarity, and space to feel and express.” The page also indicated that extra water bottles would help combat the heat. I figured donating some water would be the least I could do. But that’s an understatement. If I walked away from all of this, content with donating the water cases we bought at 3 for $10, then I may as well have stayed home. In a blindly optimistic version of this night, one of the coordinators may have accepted the water and said “Thank you, white person, for helping us. These three cases of water are just what we need to end racism once and for all,” and I might have gone home and gotten an ignorance-is-bliss night of uninterrupted sleep. But contentment is the opposite of progress. And as a woman of color informed everyone later in the night, “Nice isn’t the opposite of racism.” There is no point in showing up for a Black Lives Matter gathering/protest if we are not willing to stand up for black lives every single day, even when not surrounded by an equal-minded, supportive community.
On a typical night of my white American life, I’m sitting in my living room watching America’s Got Talent. Four black men on the TV are singing together, their harmonies sending chills down my back. The show humanizes some of the performers before they step on stage by introducing them with their background stories. From singer-song writers to comedians to acrobats, everyone has stories of what they had overcome to get there. The four men called ‘Linkin Bridge’ grew up in crime-filled neighborhoods, one of their mothers was in prison, and some of their friends were killed in the street. Their childhood lessons were survival methods. Rough and tough took priority over prim and proper. One headline reads “Linkin’ Bridge Surprises Everybody on America’s Got Talent”. Four black men overcame adversity to sing beautiful music together and my dad and I, and many audience members, were brought to tears. But what if, instead of standing on stage performing, these men were lying in the street dying? Would we all still shed tears for them? For what they had been through, for what they had overcome? Or would we use these stories to condemn them as criminals, to justify the brutality of a man with the dangerous combination of bottled up rage and hate, who is “just doing his job”? We cannot cry and give a standing ovation for black men who entertain us and at the same time stay seated and dry-eyed when they die because of us, because of our refusal to see that they are dying because of all of us.
One of the men at the vigil repeated this line throughout the night. “I’m dying.” This line isn’t simply about the inevitability of death, so don’t go edit it to “we’re ALL dying.” This is about the people who are born with targets on their backs. This is about the black, brown, queer and trans* who are confronted every day with bigotry and violence.
And this is about those of us who stand idly by. Those of us who are given 32 thumbs up on Facebook for adding a filter to our profile pictures. Those of us who are used to easy rewards.
We need to stop giving kids extra credit for simply watching the news. Ask them for a history report instead. Don’t ask for content without context. We need to stop reposting feel-good cop videos at the same rate as violent police videos. This isn’t just a good-cop/bad-cop situation. We can’t applaud everyday good if it means we are ignoring the bad and the ugly, the violence and the bigotry.
Thank you’s can be dangerous because they often come at the end of a conversation. We say “you’re welcome” and we go home. This is why, for those of us who are always doing the least we can do, with the most possible resources, we don’t need any more thank you’s. What we need, is to do more.
