Your Pain

It hurts.

I've thought a lot this past week about how to best address the current situation in our country. As a straight, white, cisgender male, I know that my lived experience will never be that of a person of color in this country. My own lived experience will never echo the sights and sounds of the past week coming from the black community. I've never experienced the discrimination of being told where I can live, what schools I can attend, how I should wear my hair, how I should speak more properly to the boss, or how I should act with a police officer. I've never been passed over for a taxi ride because of the color of my skin. I've never had my place in secondary education or graduate school questioned because of the color of my skin. I've never had my position at the firm questioned because of the color of my skin. And in my handful of interactions with local police, I've never once felt that my life was in danger.

This is my own experience, unique to myself. For 13 years I have worked on social justice issues, first as a classroom teacher then up through the ranks of a political campaign and various nonprofits. I've read books like White Like Me, White Fragility, and The World Between Us. I've watched interviews with James Baldwin and read the poetry of Langston Hughes. I've had difficult conversations with black friends and co-workers after the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and now George Floyd. I've tried to be a good listener, letting those share their pain and anguish without telling anyone how to feel. Because deep down, I know that should if I were to one day have a child of my own, he or she would not have to worry about the type of world where an interaction with a police officer could result in my child being murdered. That is simply not the reality of 21st-century America.

The past week has given us a wide variety of responses from white America. From wannabe anarchists destroying property and tagging Black Lives Matter to Rose Twitter somehow believing that the protests are a response to our system of capitalism, there have been a lot of terrible takes from those on the left. But perhaps the most disturbing response has been the response that everything that is happening is ineffective. That these nationwide protests are doing more harm than good. That going out and making one's voice heard won't make a difference simply because of who's currently in the Oval Office. It is these takes that attempt to portray all action as futile with the request being "Please black folks, let's all calm down now, please?" That message, heard from certain white people, is that complacency is better than action because it is safer.

Bullshit.

Change only happens because the people demand it. That is not only the story of the United States but the story of history as a whole. Gandhi's salt march, King's march on Washington, Cesar Chavez's march to Sacramento, these actions were all active rather than passive. These weren't good-mannered citizens writing their elected officials a strongly worded letter. No, these were leaders clamoring to be heard and putting themselves and their followers at risk to do so. These great civil rights leaders knew that action held the key to public opinion and ultimately to victory. In my very own lifetime, I've seen public opinion swing dramatically in favor of marriage equality. This didn't happen because of letters to the editor but because the LGBTQIA community came out in droves and demanded to be heard. Their message was that their sexual orientation didn't prevent them from being valuable community members. Once people saw their neighbor, their stylist, their local grocer, or the actress on TV as gay it was then that they began to see these folks as fellow human beings rather than some sort of anomaly. That made it all the much harder to discriminate against them.

In times like these, I often think of the words of Martin Luther King in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail. Specifically, King said:

"First, I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can't agree with your methods of direct action;" who paternalistically feels he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by the myth of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a "more convenient season.

Shallow understanding from people of goodwill is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection."

As white people of privilege, what we're seeing might feel strange to us. But as has been pointed out on Twitter, if your first thought in seeing the protests is a concern about social distancing, then you don't understand the driving force compelling these people to take to the streets. This pain faced by the black community runs deeper than George Floyd. It runs deeper than Ahmaud Arbery or Philando Castile or Tamir Rice or Trayvon Martin or Sandra Bland or Breonna Taylor. It is 400 years of being denied justice. It is slavery and Jim Crow and lynching and the KKK and the Tuskeegee syphilis experiment and separate schools and dogs and water hoses and the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X and forced integration and voting restrictions and the response to Hurricane Katrina and the eight-hour wait times to vote in a presidential election. It is the pain of every black mother who heard George Floyd cry out with his last breath on Earth. That is the pain that we as white people will never know.

That is why we as white people must be better. We must be better listeners. We must be better actors. And we must reserve judgment over the actions of our black friends and neighbors. Some may simply be despondent. Some may want to go and tear down the confederate monument in the park. Some may want to finally leave their home to go and hug their grandchildren. And some may simply dismiss everything that's happening as another flash in the pan. All of that is fine and natural and there is no wrong way to respond to what's happening. For white people to participate in all this, we have to understand that. We have to understand that our black brothers and sisters are processing not just a single event but a lifetime of experiences. Every decision they make or don't make can potentially mean life or death. That is the reality in the year 2020. For us to pretend any different means that we don't fully understand the situation. It is not our job to tell them how to feel or how to act, it is simply our job to be there to listen.

Only then can we begin this conversation that is long overdue.