White privilege. A term that I don’t even think I knew about
until less than ten years ago and honestly didn’t really believe in until
becoming a public health nurse six years ago. I am ashamed that I once
believed, not too far into my own history, that white privilege was something
that existed only generations ago and had been eradicated.
Now, in my current work, I go into the places in my
community with the most desperate of poverty and people of every color. I now see the evidence of white privilege every
single day. Every.single.day. I can no longer turn away and ignore that my pale
coloring keeps me safer, allows me an easier time of gaining education and
employment and allows me freedom from the fear of being harmed or killed
because of the color of the skin that I was born with.
I woke this morning to the news that in the past 24 hours police murdered
two black men in our country. I say murdered because the evidence that we have
in regard to both cases appears to show that neither man were doing anything at
all wrong. I watched the Facebook Live video of the immediate
aftermath of the police shooting of Philando Castile, a 32 year old black man
who it appears had done nothing more wrong than have a broken tail light.
Yesterday, I watched the heart-wrenching video of a 37 year-old black man,
Alton Sterling, shot while pinned to the ground and then watched as his teenage son broke down and wept as his mother cried out for these shootings to end. This trend of black men being
shot down by white police officers is not a new trend—in fact it is rare for a
week to go by in this country without seeing such an event.
It’s a sickening realization that my white privilege allows
me many things. However, the best of these privileges may be to not fear being shot down by
those that are supposed to protect me.
For many years, I have stayed relatively quiet about the
things that I have seen happening around me in this country. I have felt that
these losses weren’t mine and I did not have the right to mourn these black men
or feel enraged at the injustice against those of color in our court and jail
systems or weep with great sadness after a day of schlepping through a
low-income neighborhood full of undereducated people of every color but white
knowing that the bright minds of the children I serve will likely never get a
college education because of many factors, one of them being their very skin
color. I have felt that it was unfair of me, as a white woman, to try to use my
voice over the voice of those impacted as for too many years in this country we
have allowed white people to be the voice of all.
What I am realizing today is that I can no longer be silent.
The ideas that have kept me silent are ideas of separation and to eradicate the
horrors of what are happening today, we must all stand together.
I stand and acknowledge that I have privilege over others in
this country simply because of my skin color. My children have those same
privileges. My oldest child is getting
his learner’s permit and is learning to drive. Soon he will drive on his own. I
will worry about him as all mothers do. I will not, however, lie awake in my
bed wondering if he will be pulled over for a busted tail light and end up
dying in his own blood while his girlfriend and her daughter watch the life go
out of his eyes. My son’s privilege means that he will be frustrated to be
pulled over but will not fear for his own life. My privilege means that my son
can be pulled over and I will not fear to lose him, one of my children that I
love more than myself. I will not fear that my son will be shot for selling CDs
as he has done for years. I will not fear so many speechless things that
mothers and fathers and sons and daughters must fear everyday. Mothers and sons
all over this country do not have the simple privilege of knowing that the
police are there to protect and not harm you. Even as we all acknowledge that
99% of our police force are honorable men and women in an intensely stressful
job, we also must acknowledge that the 1% of racist and dishonorable men and
women police officers are allowed to exist in a old boy’s club where we have
been taught to look away when wrongs happen.
I can no longer look away, even safe as I am in my white
skin, safe as my children are in their white skin. I cannot look away even
though there is a great underbelly of racism in the white community that is
deeply angered and sometimes violent if we broach the subject-- My fear does
not hold a candle to the fears that so many feel everyday. If we look away, we
become a part of the problem as surely as though we held the guns ourselves.
Young men are being murdered by those sworn to protect them. I will not look
away. I will not. Not until every mother in this country can sleep with the
knowledge that their sons will not be murdered for any tiny infraction. Not until the murders, modern day legal
lynchings, have ended. Not until every child has the same rights as my own.
I am white. I am privileged
in many ways including that I do not
fear that police officers will take my life on a sidewalk or routine traffic
stop, even if I have done nothing wrong. I will not be silenced until
everyone has those very same privileges.
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