"Silence is Violence"

Today I am grateful for sunshine, games like Yahtzee and Go Fish! and time with our grandsons--in person and over FaceTime.

As I continue reading and reflecting on Me and White Supremacy: Combat Racism, Change the World, and Become a Good Ancestor, I continue to feel discomfort but also growing awareness. I wrote in a recent post about bristling at some of the points raised in the book. 

Have I directly committed acts of racism? Not on purpose, and hopefully not at all. I am coming to understand how I have white privilege though. I worry about my son when he leaves the house, like any mom does. But I don't have the added layers of worrying about who might target him because of his race and what bad things could transpire because of that. 

When I need medical or legal/financial/tax services, I have never worried that my race would work against me. When I learned about my nation's heritage, I learned that whites made it what it is. These are just some example of white privilege. And they make it easy for me to turn away from the work of helping to end systemic racism. If I am not part of the solution, I am part of the problem. 

I bristle, and it becomes a barometer. When I bristle, I better lean in and take a look at what is leading to my unease. Further into the book, the words "white silence is violence" are used. These are definitely strong, and definitely will send some of us away from this work. Leaning in means considering these words below from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

"We will have to repent in this generation not merely 

for the hateful words and actions of the bad people 

but for the appalling silence of the good people." 

It can mean staying silent when something overtly racist is said, or when someone says "I don't see color, I just see  people." But such instances don't happen regularly. White silence is subtle, and it is harmful to all of us.

Today, I choose to use one avenue always available to me--my writing--to share some of my own struggles with how I have been complicit in perpetuating harmful systems and stereotypes. Just like the silence can be subtle, the breaking of the silence doesn't need to start with a microphone in hand.