A message from our editor for our white readers and friends. Rape culture and toxic masculinity are intricately embedded in, and dependent upon, white supremacy. Black lives matter. Ending rape culture is an abolitionist project; we must abolish the police.
Donate to Movement for Black Lives https://secure.actblue.com/donate/movement-4-black-lives-1 or find a local organization or Black owned business to support.
~~~
For my white friends. I have been heartened by the posts and calls to action over the last several days, particularly from people I am not used to seeing such things. But, as always, it is the silence that concerns me. Because white silence is violence, I wanted to share some thoughts that have come up in conversation with other (mostly) white folks in the last few days. The thoughts are incomplete and a work in progress; so am I, so too are our relationships, our communities, our families, love, revolution, and liberation.
In case you don’t read much further… Black lives matter, abolish the police, and never forget that Stonewall was a riot.
~~~
The thing that has to be centered in this conversation is that what is happening all over the country is not really a protest. It’s an uprising. It’s a reckoning. It’s about injustice and oppression and rage.
Barely a day goes by in this country without a video circulating of a person of color, often a Black man, being murdered by the police. Not just a news story. A video. Police know they are being filmed and they have no reservations murdering a Black person. They know they can do this with impunity. Because they want to. Because they do not see Black life as worthy of living. If this is what happens on camera, just imagine what happens without even the threat of accountability.
And on days without those videos there are videos of white people threatening to call the police on people of color who are going about their lives in the most mundane ways. These white folks know that calling the police is threatening a person of color with death. They know that if the cops show up there is an incredibly high likelihood they will kill the person of color. Even if the person of color is the victim in a situation, they are likely to be arrested or murdered. White people know this and they’re willing to make the threat anyway while obviously being filmed. This is why we have to say that Black lives matter because we live in a culture that largely does not believe so.
There is literally not a single action that a Black person can engage in in this country without fear of death. Not sleeping in their own home, not running in their own neighborhood, not bird watching in the park, not driving their car in their own neighborhood, not standing on their block.
Regardless of age or gender. Black life is lived under constant threat of death.
As white folks, we will never understand what that feels like. Never.
So we have to look at what is happening through that lens. There is not a “normal” to return to, or a sense of order, or organized “peaceful” protest, or a “right” way to protest that can truly speak to this lived reality.
The US is 400 years of violence against abducted Black bodies, on land stolen through Indigenous genocide. The fire is a long time coming.
Black lives matter. Defund and abolish the police. Build community. Be anti-fascist. Ask questions, do research, commit to doing better.
Do not be silent, do not confuse momentary photo-ops of police showing a base level of humanity as representing structural change, and do not tell people who have only ever known oppression how to live revolution.
– Brett
