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Don’t Whitewash This Movement
White people, the first rule of this moment is to educate yourself
I watched the video of the Minneapolis police officers’ execution of George Floyd, and that’s what it was, an extrajudicial execution, and recognized immediately the agonizing knot in my stomach that it provoked.
It was the fear that Floyd could just as easily have been one of my own children — singled out for brutal oppression because of the texture of their hair, a hint of a non-European facial feature or the hue of their skin. Yes, by the one-drop-of-blood rule established by this nation for its slave trade, my bi-racial children, all four of them, are African American.
They are grown now, all college graduates, gainfully employed and two with terminal degrees — a medical doctor and a university professor. My wife and I are now married 30 years and worked hard to open doors for them, despite fighting against a force in this country that so many white people want to deny or minimize: Racism.
It has been an ugly reality forced on our lives as a family for decades now — and I say only decades because that’s when I first got a front-row seat to it from outside a wholly white perspective. For my wife and her ancestors, it’s been a burden carried daily, unending, for centuries in this America.
