It’s time for white people to listen

When I was approached about writing a special column about the current state of racism, I felt conflicted.

If you want society to change in the wake of the sadistic murder of George Floyd and you are white, it is time to listen, contribute or do both. The global movement that followed Floyd’s murder addresses a specific issue — police brutality against black and brown people — in a larger pattern of racism. This column takes space away from a black or brown voice.

Writing this column is a tremendous opportunity, given to me by a prominent black editor — James Walker. To prepare, I called black friends, colleagues and leaders — Then realized I was subtly adding to the problem.

As white people, we constantly ask black people to be spokespeople for their race. We often do so by asking them about a deeply troubling racial incident.

Has a black stranger ever approached you, engaged you in a conversation and voiced his opinion about the 2017 murder of Heather Heyer during the Charlottesville protests? It would be weird and uncomfortable, right?

It is discriminatory. As is pointing out that James Walker is black and not pointing out that Heather Heyer was white. It signals that black is somehow out of the ordinary while white is the norm.

Racism does not just involve ugliness and overtness.

As white people, we send a lot of messages to black and brown people without realizing it. Those messages, at best, make the recipient of the message feel uneasy. We overcompensate by injecting too much friendliness in the conversation and paying too much attention to the lone black person in the room.

We qualify ourselves as “friendlies” and “allies” by mentioning our relationships with black people.

Earlier, I casually mentioned that a prominent black editor assigned me to write this story, espousing a similar sentiment.

You may say, “All this is just semantics.”

But so is the “all lives” culture war. It is petty. It is also deeply hurtful. Not everything is about white people.

Black Lives Matter is a powerful sentiment, birthed from the police-involved slaying of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. We now know of hundreds of slayings of black people across the country because of social media hashtags spawned by this movement, such as #sayhername and #sayhisname.

Last year, corrections officers allegedly killed a friend of mine, his death ruled a homicide. His family asked that we not hold public protests. He was white. If “all lives” truly matter to you and All Lives Matter is a movement and not a reactionary sentiment, why didn’t the All Lives Matter movement say his name?

White people, myself included, must fight the injustices facing our friends, colleagues, co-workers and fellow Americans who are non-white so this country can achieve its potential.

Time to listen.