I met Monica Erling through the Northside Schools Collective. Shes pretty phenomenal and knows what it means to be an ally and ACTIVELY work against white privilege--especially in the context of schools! Check out her words: theyre pretty moving and theyre a call to daily action. And, please share widely and wildly if you are so moved... Why Ferguson is White People’s Problem and What We Can Do About It By Monica Erling Over the last few weeks I have read every blog and commentary I have come across about the murder of Michael Brown. I have read lots of essays written by really nice white people urging us to recognize our privilege, suggesting ways we can stand in solidarity with black people and offering other concrete ideas for things we can do because we want to do something. All of these essays, while valuable first steps, are missing some fundamental and hard-to-face points that I would like to address. Recognizing your own race privilege doesn’t mean much if you aren’t working to actively reject that privilege. That means deliberately giving up things that you could otherwise have because of your privilege. Recognizing your privilege and then feeling grateful for it is morally worse than failing to recognize it in the first place. It is impossible to reject privilege in every possible situation and it means something different in every context, but if you really care about racial equality, it should be something you think about and work toward every single day. Failing to talk to your kids about Michael Brown to protect their innocence is an exercise of privilege. Hardly any black parent in America gets to decide when and in what manner their child learns about the life and death consequences of racism. My six-year-old knows all about Trayvon and Michael Brown. He was sad to find out that police officers can be bad guys, and that sometimes the people they shoot are good guys. I have complicated his over-simplified world of heroes and villains, good guys and bad guys. If I want to keep his world simple, to protect his innocence, then I need to move to a society that doesn’t gun down unarmed black kids. If you really care about racial equality you will have the hard conversations about racism with your kids. What is happening in Ferguson is directly related to what is happening in your life. The accumulation of privilege in your town, your neighborhood, your workplace, your kids’ school and your home is, literally, the cause of the disadvantage, poverty, unemployment, under-education, crime, violence, hopelessness, anger and civil unrest in that town or that neighborhood over there. You, white people, need to stop running away from black and brown people. You say you want safer neighborhoods and better schools, but it is your privilege that allows you to attain those things, and in doing so, you are creating the problems on the other side of town that you are running from. If you really care about racial equality, then you need to live in intentional community with black and brown people instead of running from them. Speaking of schools, you say you want the best for your child. They deserve it. But to say that your child deserves the best, is, by definition, to say that they deserve more than other kids. Your kids know you are trying to get them the best education possible. When they look around the classroom and see mostly white faces, it is reinforcing an ideology of white supremacy whether you intend to or not. You are also assigning greater value to your white child’s life than to the lives of black and brown children who can’t access the “best.” This contributes to a culture that gives police tacit permission to gun down unarmed black kids. If you really care about racial equality, you will stop leveraging your privilege to attain the best education for your child individually and start working to improve the education that society provides to all children. That is what you can do about the injustice in Ferguson. Monica Erling is a sociology instructor and struggles every day to figure out how to live justly in a profoundly unjust world.
Posted on: Wed, 10 Sep 2014 00:05:40 +0000