This week… … . I have read thousands of pages of lamentations and righteous indignation and gut-wrenching anger and dismay and hopelessness over the past few days. Yes, I’ve been reading from the comfort of my porch, with my children safely sleeping in their beds and no fear that stray bullets will hit them as they sleep or that they will be brutalized…
I’ve been paying a lot of attention to the ways in which white people have been responding. Though my social media is awash in good-white-liberalism and therefore inundated with outrage, I am shocked at how we are taking the short view on this problem.
Talking to your kids about race? Great. Posting BlackLivesMatter memes? Yes. Speaking up and speaking out? Thank you.
But soon we will see August and our children will go back to school with children who look like and sound like and come from families just like ours. Our schools are more segregated than EVER BEFORE and we wonder why we can’t get anywhere with race relations in the US…?
Until we invest our most precious, until we entrust our most beloved, until we put our skin in the game, it will not be enough.
YOUR middle class white kid, statistics say, will be fine wherever they go to school. They will grow up to be middle class adults. Done. But if we all went to school together, our adulthood would be marked by empathy and not pity, by visceral understanding and not distant consideration, by knowing…
What can WE do to stop the violence? Integrate. In school. For real. Because policing and racism and schools are NOT separate conversations.
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