Here, in the United States, protests have swept the entire country after George Floyd’s tragic death.
I have thought about writing about this for a while and then stopped myself. Who am I to say anything as a brown woman so far removed from this experience? And what exactly can I say in a situation where words shrink into nothing?
This is a moment for all of us to turn inwards and look at our own biases and prejudices. This is a moment to think about how some lives are more fragile than others. And this is a moment to learn.
So, I wanted to share some voices from whom we could all learn.
Books and Conversations
I came across these quotes recently that I wanted to share.
From the Book How to Be an Anti-Racist by historian Ibram Kendi:
“The opposite of racist isn’t ‘not racist.’ It is ‘anti-racist.’ What’s the difference? One endorses either the idea of a racial hierarchy as a racist, or racial equality as an anti-racist. One either believes problems are rooted in groups of people, as a racist, or locates the roots of problems in power and policies, as an anti-racist. One either allows racial inequities to persevere, as a racist, or confronts racial inequities, as an anti-racist.”
From the book The Person You Mean to Be by organizational behavior professor Dolly Chugh:
“We redefine what it means to be a good person as someone who is trying to be better, as opposed to someone who is allowing themselves to believe in the illusion that they are always a good person.”
Here is a list of 95 books that focuses on titles by black authors. It includes everything from fiction to poetry to nonfiction and includes works by Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Roxane Gay, Zadie Smith, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and many others.
Electric Lit has a collection of interviews called Black Writers Discuss Being Black in America that delves deep into issues of racial inequality.
One of the advocates I came across recently is teacher and diversity trainer Jane Elliott. Here she is talking with Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show and here she is talking almost three decades ago with Oprah on The Oprah Winfrey Show. Her Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes anti-racism exercise is both chilling and illuminating and shows how easily prejudice can be learned and taught.
These are just a few of the voices that have spoken to me recently. My hope and prayer is that we all learn from people like them and that the terrible pain and the grief in the collective transform something deep within each one of us. We may be just small cogs in a wheel, but collectively, cogs move the wheel.
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