You are about to enter a hypothetical scenario in which you are a white student at a boarding school. It is move-in day, and your white roommate has hung an “I am not a racist” banner on your shared wall. You ask them why they chose to hang this poster, and they talk of how they are often labeled “racist,” and they want to clarify that this is not true. Before you respond, think this through.
Systemic racism in the United States is how all of our systems, such as healthcare, government, and education, were built to empower white people and oppress every other racial group. As a white woman, I and all other white people benefit from how these systems are structured. To benefit from this racism by definition makes every single one of us “racists”. Why, as white people, do we waste our time deciding whether or not the other is “racist” when we could put that energy towards fighting the hundreds of years of crippling oppression that we are privileged enough to have never experienced?
What I am suggesting, white people is simple. We all need to have a conversation at home, in our schools, or in our offices about what it means to benefit from systemic racism and how we can utilize our privilege to fight this oppression. Kevin Breel has been telling us this since 2013, when the Comedian said in a TED Talk, “We just push it aside and put it in a corner and pretend it’s not there and hopes it’ll fix itself. Well, it won’t. It hasn’t, and it’s not going to, because that’s wishful thinking, and wishful thinking isn’t a game plan, it’s procrastination, and we can’t procrastinate on something this important. The first step in solving any problem is recognizing there is one. Well, we haven’t done that, so we can’t expect to find an answer when we’re still afraid of the question.” It is well past time for us to ask the question and listens for the answer.
