Dear Fellow White People…

Forgive me if this is a bit raw and unchained but the emotions are currently flowing like white water and I don’t have the will or desire to quell them.

What in the holy name of Christ Almighty are we doing? How much longer will we allow innocent black and brown bodies to be gunned down in the back, strangled in the street, or slaughtered for the high crime of jogging? Newsflash: Our words of support and our verbiage of outrage thumb-typed into little white boxes within the meaningless ether of social media are no longer enough. They never were, really. But it makes us feel better about ourselves to type our 140 characters into the blue bird and count the retweets, doesn’t it? It makes us feel like we “did” something, right? It helps us sleep at night knowing we tossed our two cents of hollow response into the bottomless well we pass on the way to our warm beds of goose-down privilege each night, doesn’t it? EARTH TO US: this is not enough, it has never been enough, and it is 400 years past time we actually start responding to these atrocities with the reaction it warrants. And yes, I myself am also included in this indictment, ten fold.

For ten minutes and nine seconds I, as many of you have by now, watched as George Floyd was slowly and torturously murdered. In broad daylight. In the middle of the street. In front of a crowd of people begging and pleading for his life. Voices and pleas that went wholly ignored. It is a scathing, blistering indictment of our privilege, systemic racism, and conscientious complacency that viral videos like this have become commonplace in 2020 America. A numbness that many of us have used as a shield from being bothered to stand up and dare invest one percent of ourselves or our lives in the plight of our friends and family of color — a real “well it happens everyday, its so much bigger than me, so what could I do?” cop-out back alley route back to the comfort, safety, and luxury of our white lives. But the footage within this most recent video cut into the flesh of my heart with particular velocity and venom. It’s image may as well be the marquis poster for the black experience with law enforcement in this nation, and the white role that is the author of their terror: an unarmed black man, not resisting in any way, shape, or form, pinned to the asphalt by a white police officer, one knee glued to his back and the other driven into his neck, the man begging and pleading for his life, repeatedly saying he cannot breathe, the white officer disturbingly cavalier, totally ignoring and unfazed by his cries, a diverse crowd of people witnessing the injustice, their cries and requests for someone to do something all going totally unanswered, all being held back in fact by another police officer (protecting and defending everything his fellow officer is doing behind him), all coalescing over ten agonizing minutes where time seemed to crawl, until the black human slowly and finally has his last breath strangled from his throat, and then, after his body has been tossed onto a stretcher and poured into an ambulance, his murderer, with a chilling calm about him, blankly stands up, brushes himself off, strolls back over to his cruiser with the gait of a golfer on the back nine, hops in, and drives away as if on a lazy Sunday drive through the park.

Pay attention to this video my fellow white people. Watch it. Then watch it again. Think but for a second, what your reaction would be if the roles were altered. What if it were a black officer with his knee buried in the neck of a white woman, what would our response be? I don’t think I need to tell you that this entire nation from shore to shore would collectively implode with response, action, swift justice, and fifty new programs and committees developed overnight to ensure this never happened again. I know it. And you know it. So why don’t we show up for black and brown people the same way? Why don’t we react to the murder of unarmed people of color the same way we would to the murder of white men and women? We may have a different view or stance on some things, but I struggle to comprehend how we could disagree here: if Trayvon Martin had been Tiffany Martin, a white girl walking home at night, had Ahmaud Arbery been Amanda Arbery, a white woman out for a jog, had Alton Sterling been Adam Sterling, a white man exiting a convenient store, had Eric Garner been Kyle Garner, had Michael Brown been Chad Brown, we as a race would’ve firmly and instantaneously acted to compile the resources, money, legislation, and culture improvement/education necessary to virtually cure this cancer in record time.

Fellow white people, it is time for us to reach beyond words, support, and outrage. It is time we react to the injustice and slaughter of unarmed black and brown people the way we would if it were a person with our pigment. We keep going to people of color and asking them,”What can we do better?”, “What can I do to help you and your plight?”, “Tell me how to fix this and I’ll do it”. Trust me, I’m as guilty of this as anyone. But, my fellow pale-complected humans, we must come to realize the onus is on US to fix this, not our black and brown friends. The onus of enlightenment and positive change falls to the oppressor, not the oppressed. We slap people of color in their faces every single day of their lives and then run to them to ask “How can I stop slapping you in the face?”. The focus of treatment must rest on our shoulders, not theirs. No law is going to change us. WE have to change us. We’re a race who founded a nation on stolen land with stolen people. Can any one of us white people “fix” systemic racism, criminal injustice, or minority oppression? No. Of course not. But therein lies my point. TOGETHER, we can. TOGETHER, we must. The attitude of “This is bigger than me, I alone can’t do anything, so why try?” must end NOW. We could do it quite swiftly if enough of us cared, enough of us acknowledged what’s happening and enough of us vowed to act to do something about it. Can we ever erase or adequately account for our original sin? No. Of course not. But for the love of God Almighty, now, 400 years later, while black and brown brothers, sisters, fathers, mothers, uncles, aunts, friends, husbands, wives, AMERICANS are dying in the streets underneath the boots, knees, and bullets of those sworn to protect them at a staggeringly undeniable rate — having some “uncomfortable” conversations with our white families and friends and then committing to answering a call to action, together, is LITERALLY the least we can do.

James Baldwin once said, ““To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.” While I’ll never be able to fully understand what he means, I look around today and can see the roots of this truth all around us. To my black and brown friends still processing this latest heinous act in an undending conveyor belt of heinous acts and violence, the murder of George Floyd: I am infinitely sorry. My heart shatters and bleeds beside you. I acknowledge the pain inflicted upon you and my race’s lead role in its origins. I hear you. I see you. I stand with you. I love you. And you have my continued commitment to use my voice and life to stand up and fight to enact the type of active, persistent, positive change so desperately needed in this country, every day I draw breath. To my fellow white people: we MUST do more than we’re doing. For every status you post, call your congressman and demand criminal justice reform. For every hashtag you write, google “ways to get involved” within the civil rights community in your area. For every like you click on a Black Lives Matter post, donate a dollar to organizations fighting to push the needle of justice a little further towards true north. For every second you feel outrage at the latest video of an unarmed black person being murdered by police, go sign up to participate in your city’s next march or rally for the end to racial inequity. FIND A WAY to convert what you’re feeling INSIDE into substantive action OUTSIDE. We can do this. We must do this. It is our cancer to excise. Every day we don’t, another George Floyd dies beneath the knee of another Officer Derek Chauvin. So we mustn’t let one more day slip by.