Remember that movie from the 90’s, The Sixth Sense?
Bruce Willis played a child psychologist—Dr. Malcom Crowe—who takes on a new client. A boy named Cole, who comes to see him because he sees “dead people.”
((SPOILER ALERT… I’m about to ruin the ending, so proceed with caution! ))
As the viewer, we feel so much compassion and concern for this little boy who is haunted by these terrifying visitations from ghosts. We feel relieved as the capable Dr. Crowe enters the scene. Because while Dr. Crowe doesn’t believe the ghosts are real, at least Cole has an adult on his side who is trying to help.
In the final scene, however, we find out that Dr. Crowe is himself a dead man, and is actually one of the ghosts who’ve been visiting Cole. Suddenly, we mentally play back each scene in the movie and realize that Dr. Crowe doesn’t seem to speak to anyone else … just Cole.
All this time, he thought he was outside of Cole’s problem, but in reality, he was representative of Cole’s problem.
A RACIST CONSTRUCT
Friends, that is exactly how I have felt over the past few months. I’ve been realizing that I am a part of a system built on the presumed supremacy of white people.
Instead of waking up and realizing I’m dead, like Dr. Crowe, I woke up and realized that despite being liberal, always voting Democrat, voting twice for a black president, and thinking I wasn’t a part of the problem of racism in this country, I now realize I most certainly am.
Watching George Floyd get murdered in cold blood and hearing of Breonna Taylor getting gunned down in her apartment were devastatingto learn about. But like always, I compartmentalized the news as “other.” These acts of violence had nothing to do with me, and everything to do with a system of corruption that exists apart from me.
Because of the Black Lives Matter Movement and the Amplify Melanated Voices, a movement on social media that encouraged white and non-black Instagram users to mute themselves for a week so that we could listen to people of color, I started to learn. I started to wake up.
Learning & Unlearning
One of my favorite mantras in life is this one;
Sometimes I’m a teacher and sometimes I’m a student.
And good God, have I been a student lately. Here are the top three things I’ve learned in the past few months:
- I live in a white-centered world. The dominant filter through which I perceive reality is a white filter. What does that mean? It means that I have been raised on information pertaining to Western European achievements, white history, and white artists.
I’ve been taught to value the white version of the English language and to de-value African-American vernacular English. Beyond the two or three most famous black people in history, let’s say Martin Luther King, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglas, and Malcom X, I struggle to name any others.
My beauty standards are white-centric and my role models are white. My podcast guests have been overwhelmingly white, so has my Instagram feed, my bookshelf, my friend group, my politicians, my doctors, dentists, OB-GYN, teachers growing up… the list goes on forever.
Now, while it’s not my fault that I was raised in a white-centric society., the point of this exercise isn’t to find fault.
It’s to find Truth, and living in a white-centric world is to live in a state of partial truth.
In other words, a white-centric world view is not an accurate representation of reality. By staying in this warped, incomplete version of reality, I became complicit in the damage done to people of color.
As such, I’m opening the aperture of my perception to take in the world as it is— full of diversity. I come into that broader world with the humility of a student, and with tremendous respect and openness.
I’m following new teachers and influencers on social media, and I’m filling my bookshelf with authors of color (I can’t recommend Layla F. Saad‘s work on white supremacy highly enough). I’m absorbing content online, like The great Unlearn from Rachel Cargle, and I’m trying to learn more about Black American history, not just the white-washed version of it.
If you want to go on this journey of learning and unlearning, get ready to feel like Bruce Willis realizing he’s a dead man.
- SHAME Is a Natural Byproduct of Waking Up
The thing about talking to white people about race is that we get very fragile very quickly. Some of us get angry and defensive, while others play the role of the victim. We take everything very personally, and perhaps we should. Perhaps the progress of this begins when we internalize the criticism and see our personal role in it.
We feel ashamed that we have benefited and profited from these systems, yet we worry that we’ll lose our standing or benefits, and that we’ll drift to the bottom of the opportunity line. We don’t like it, and then we feel shame. And that shame is painful and feels like an indictment of my personhood and my worthiness.
I don’t feel worthy of this awesome vision board I’ve constructed, because I’m benefiting from a racist societal construct. That vision board works for me because society looks at me and opens doors.
It is so much easier for someone like me to make their dreams come true than it is for a black woman to. Look at Breonna Taylor – she was sleeping in her house and the police shot and killed her.
It’s enough to make me feel a deep sense of self-loathing and unworthiness, almost downright despicable. It makes me feel like a fraud.
I could walk into a bank with a gun and officers would tackle me to the ground, take the gun from my hand, and make sure I didn’t hit my head on the roof of the police vehicle as they took me to jail. But, if I were black, I’d be dead before my third step into the building. It makes me sick. It is so wrong. It makes me feel enraged.
Until all of us are afforded the same respect that white people are afforded, we can’t call ourselves a civilized society.
We can’t lie to ourselves that America is the land of opportunity, because, right now, it isn’t. It’s the land of shoot first, ask questions later, if you happen to have non-white skin.
It is outrageous that people like me are only just now waking up to it.
- This is Not Just a “Moment”
Black Lives Matter isn’t just a hurricane in the news cycle, soon to be replaced by another story. It is the beginning of something and the end of something. We are either part of the solution or part of the problem.
And we will get our asses proverbially kicked around when we get things wrong, say something hurtful or do an intentional harm? Of course we will.
But we can’t continue to be fragile. We need to get thicker skin if we want to be part of the solution.
Are you with me?
Shine on, you crazy diamond.
