Feeling It.

What’s going on with white America?

You’re feeling it, right? My Black friends are talking about it. My white friends are talking about it. We’re talking about it together. We’re watching pictures from around the country — who are these white protesters and why now?

I offer five guesses:

• It’s been 50 years since white people like me were born — the time necessary to grow the next progressive generation with access to power. Take me for an example: I grew up in a racially diverse apartment building, read Toni Morrison in high school and protested my college’s investments in apartheid South Africa in 1987. Rodney King was beaten while I was in grad school and we Sat In and Lay In wherever we could. Along the way we marched for: gay rights, women’s rights, climate change. And we realized an inconvenient (and uncomfortable) truth: racism is the root and its living vines continue to choke Black Americans. Was George Floyd the tipping point for today’s white America?
• It’s been 400 years since white Americans captured other human beings and used them as labor to drive an emerging and ultimately successful economy. Wait? We did what? It’s been how long? This is now landing with a THUD. Why now? Maybe because of: Michelle Alexander, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Bryan Stevenson — and more. Over the past decade we’ve had a new history lesson with new history teachers. We see clearly our original sin as Americans.
• We feel it. I cannot take credit for this important comment by a Black friend and Racial Justice Activist: he said of the killing of George Floyd, “it was so intimate.” Between the almost-nine minutes, the nearness of the video, and the look in his eyes … we felt Officer Chauvin. Is this us? We are nauseated and ashamed. Our hearts are able to hear what our eyes no longer deny.
• We already have Coronavirus: We were already sick and quarantined with a frightening viral pandemic and also sick as a country with the pre-existing condition of intergenerational race-based poverty. And we see already that the negative effects of this pandemic will greatly disproportionately affect Black and Brown Americans. Risk getting really sick at a rally? I’ll take my chances, thanks.
• Lastly, a personal thought: At almost 54 I’ve been spending time writing about my younger life. I’ve wanted to do this for almost two decades but managed to postpone it — artfully. My experiences were minor in the scheme of the world — but the process of excavating them is painful nonetheless. Self-examination is not for the faint of heart. It is a baptism in the waters of accountability, amends-making, grief, and acceptance. Perhaps white America no longer feels so faint of heart?

White America has made me more hopeful this week. I want to believe that we have a critical mass of allies focused on racial justice as our most sacred priority at present. We are accountable for a fulsome process of national reconciliation and a New Compact for Justice with Black America.

This week we saw the extraordinary leadership of people like Mayor Lori Lightfoot of Chicago and Mayor Muriel Bowser of Washington, DC — Black women politicians, and Bishop Mariann Budde — a white woman of faith, and Mayor Melvin Carter III of Saint Paul — a young Black man. it makes us think: our America deserves new leadership like this — representative, morally contemplative, exhorting the better angels of our civic accountability.

I will never forget watching Mayor Muriel Bowser create BLACK LIVES MATTER Plaza across from the White House on Friday June 5, 2020. Neither will my 23-year-old biracial twin daughters who came running with their grins and their Twitter feeds to show me the news.

Thank you, white allies…. my two American daughters are counting on you too.