June 14, 2020

I began my anti-racist journey about 2 years ago when my husband and I joined The Madison Institutes for the Healing of Racism. You can never unsee after you seen. This course we continue to be a part of has changed us as human beings so much. I never thought I was racist but I now realize as a white person, I was born into racism and have benefited from my white privilege my whole life. This is not from a place of blame or shame, it’s just facts from our country’s horrific history towards black people and the realization that it is still happening in different ways today. Every Thursday night I would get nauseous before going to our racism class and often want to vomit during the class. Once you start reading books and watching films, I think you might just vomit as well. It’s very very intense and very very hard to swallow as a white person but we must read and we must watch. It’s been 450 years and its f**king about time to use our white privilege for good and to make change happen. My sister Lynn lives 5 blocks from where George Floyd was murdered and she has shared so much with me. She asked her black friend the day after if she wanted to join her for the protest and she said “no, I’m going home and we need white people to stand up for us.” And after being in this healing of racism course for 2 years now, I know exactly what she means through and through. Once you start reading the books and watching the films and having very uncomfortable conversations with family and friends and colleagues and neighbors, you too will see where I’m coming from. You might be thinking to yourself like I was 2 years ago before I started the course, “I am not racist and how am I as a white person suppose to help?” Once you start learning that as a white person we were unconsciously and unintentionally born into this racism system that oppresses people of color and they we’ve lived our whole lives unconsciously and unintentionally benefiting from it, then you can begin to soften and let go of some of the blame and shame and start doing your inside work to heal the racism within yourself that you didn’t even know was there. You will face things inside yourself that you’ve never faced before but as you stay compassionate and loving towards yourself during this process, you will slowly start to heal and want to become anti-racist as well to try to leave the world in a much better place than we came into it. I’ll end todays writing here with a quote I recently read that said, “so when you’re later in life and your grown kids or grandkids learn about racism and ask you what did you do to help, what do you want to able to tell them?”