In the twenty-eight years since the Los Angeles riots, videos and reports of police brutality have become more and more commonplace, reinforcing what Black Americans have been saying for decades—and which most White people didn’t want to believe—that the lives of Black men, women, and children are regularly, systemically, in danger from the very officers sworn to protect the residents of America’s cities. Without demonizing all police officers, it’s clear that this trend far exceeds the idea of a “few bad apples.” Instead of confronting the inherent racism implicit in so many of these cases, however, we kept putting our heads in the sand, unwilling or unable to confront our complicity in maintaining a society which has condoned and excused these horrors since our nation’s founding.

I’ve spent the last few days thinking about how to approach this post, how to couch it and best get through to people who may read it, although sadly, I believe that those who most need to read it, won’t. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if some people clicked the back button as soon as they finished reading the first paragraph. Over the last couple of days, I backed off commenting on most social media posts, because this is a bigger conversation than can be, or should be, left to an angry back and forth on Facebook or Twitter.

What I’ve seen in many of the posts and comments I’ve read about the killing of George Floyd, the ensuing peaceful protests, and the unfortunate violence and looting, is not overt racism (although some of my friends have been subjected to that as well), but rather the difficulty many White people have, even those that I know are good, caring people, to articulate their sympathy and anger at the injustice and cruel violence seen in the video of George Floyd’s murder, while simultaneously demanding coherence, order…civility from the protestors. That dissonance, however, isn’t anything new. Today, most Americans hold up Martin Luther King, Jr.’s tenets of civil disobedience and non-violence as exemplars of how people, particularly Black people, should protest, but in the ’60’s, most White Americans disapproved of him.

As such, the conversations I reference, appear to come from something Dr. King described in his Letter From a Birmingham Jail, who noted that the biggest stumbling block to racial justice, is not groups like the KKK, but the White moderate, “more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action.’”

I think in this country, we White Americans struggle to understand that racism is an us problem, not a them problem. Black people shouldn’t have to convince us that they deserve equality, justice, or you know, not to be murdered by police. It should fall to us, to White people, to be against racism, not just to be not racist, but to be actively anti-racist. It is our responsibility, to call out racists, or racist behavior, in our institutions, communities, amongst our friends, and yes, amongst our families.

Now, that may strike a nerve, and you may have just reflexively, indignantly thought: not all of us well-meaning, White Americans are like that!”

I hope you’re still with me though, because I plan to dig a little deeper, and it may feel a little like a root canal.

Let me start with some truths about myself: I’m a Jewish woman, and a granddaughter of Holocaust survivors. I consider myself White-passing, because in this country, in my city of Los Angeles, in this time, I’m thought of as “White” by most people.¹ Whatever else I am, in the regular, day-to-day life of American society, that is how I’m seen and, therefore, I benefit from white privilege.

You just twitched a little, didn’t you? Did you have that knee-jerk, reflexive indignation again at hearing the phrase “white privilege”?

I get it, I do! So please, indulge me more.

The first time I heard the phrase “white privilege,” I was uncomfortable. Wasn’t I the child of immigrants who worked hard to get where they were? I got my first job at 14, and refused to be lumped in with the indolent, spoiled children of the uber wealthy. I wasn’t privileged! However, I don’t resist acknowledging my white privilege anymore, because I have learned and accepted a few things that maybe my fellow, well-meaning White friends haven’t yet.

First, the term privilege in this context does not mean that you haven’t had a hard life, or that you were born into wealth, nor does it mean that you didn’t work hard for that college scholarship, your professional success, or your nice home. It simply means that whatever other barriers and hardships you overcame in your life, your skin color was not one of them.

Second, I also realize that acknowledging that privilege, and the protection it gives me in our society, doesn’t mean I’m giving anything up. Equal opportunities? Civil rights? Human dignity? Common decency? They aren’t pies with finite numbers of slices in them. You will not run out of pie because you acknowledge your privilege. You will not be made lesser for acknowledging it.

Third, I understand that this privilege is sustained by systemic racism imbedded in the fabric of our society.

You twitched again, right? Thought, “but I’m not a racist,” didn’t you? Please, don’t, because that is not what I said.

No one is calling you a racist when they discuss systemic racism and how it may benefit us White folk. Discussions of systemic racism are about a system that, whether you are a racist or not, whether you want it to or not, still works to your benefit over the benefit of Black Americans. It’s about the overlapping systems of society that continue to perpetuate racist policies, and which sustain white privilege. Things like disparities in education, access to, and application of, the legal system,² voter suppression,³ job opportunities, home purchases, and in the disproportionate death of unarmed Black Americans at the hands of police.

I wrote that rather long introduction, because as White people we need context for the current events we see unfolding, and because we have to understand that our lived reality is not the lived reality of our Black friends, family, and fellow citizens. We have to stop pretending that as long as we all follow the rules, America is fair to everyone, because it most definitely is not. When you dig a little deeper, when you acknowledge those truths about our history and our privilege, you know that “equality for all” is at best an idealistic goal, and at worst a lie.

Please understand that I’m not holding myself up as a pillar of social justice, of racial harmony, or anything of the sort. Like some of you may be doing now, at some point I read something similar to this, and said, “but I’m not like that! Don’t lump me in with all of those people!” I believed that as a Jew whose family knew persecution and genocide, I couldn’t possibly be biased or prejudiced. I believed that if I said “I don’t see color,” it meant that I’m not a racist, while failing to understand that such a statement erases the lived experiences of many people. Imagine someone telling me they don’t “see” my Jewishness, that it is irrelevant to them, when the fact is that I am a Jew. It is a core part of who I am; to deny that would be to deny the history of my people, my family, and their suffering.

I came of age in the 80’s, and while I never ascribed to the political conservatism of the Reagan/Thatcher era, there is no doubt that the society and culture of the time contributed to all kinds of internalized biases that, if I’m honest, I only began to untangle well into adulthood, and which I still see as an ongoing process. I know that just in the course of the last year, the last few months even, I’ve made missteps. I’ve stepped into conversations that likely were not mine to be had, and spoke over the voices of the people I should have been listening to.

I am a work in progress.

The posts and reactions of the people that I believe to be well meaning, and who I believe aren’t racists, who want change to happen, but are like me, safe at home, protected in so many ways by their white privilege, illustrate a lack of understanding of the collective effect of all these deaths, of this incessant brutality, on Black Americans. Thus, these well meaning people recoil against the anger, vehemence, and yes, sometimes violence of the resulting protests, and so what I’ve read and heard has been a varying litany of: “I think what those cops did was terrible, but why can’t they protest peacefully?”

And all I can think is, “why would they?”

When eighteen year old Michael Brown was killed, I heard people admonish that he should not be the face of the protests in Ferguson, because he wasn’t a “good guy.” Similarly, when Eric Garner died, begging for breath, the refrain was that while his death was a shame, it’s not like he was a total innocent, selling loose cigarettes is a crime after all. Meanwhile, we regularly see White twenty year olds get slaps on the wrist for rape, and White men who murder people in movie theaters and Black churches, brought in with nary a scratch on them. We watch as armed White men storm capital buildings, in what can only be described as acts of terrorism, screaming in the faces of the police, intimidating legislators, but they are left alone, allowed to remain armed, and without consequence. The dichotomy begs belief.

Black Americans tried peaceful protests. The Black Lives Matter movement was born, and White America responded with, “all lives matter.” NBA players wore shirts with #ICan’tBreathe on them, and were criticized. St. Louis Rams players came on the field with “hands up,” and apologies were demanded from them. Colin Kaepernick silently knelt in peaceful protest, and he was run out of the NFL. In short, every time attempts were made to peacefully protest this relentless police brutality, Black Americans were told “not like that,” because it makes White Americans uncomfortable when we have to face these ugly truths about our society, and it is so much easier to ignore protests that aren’t all up in our faces, or in our neighborhoods, or during our favorite sporting matches.

But protest must be uncomfortable. It has to be loud, in places that draw attention, and I repeat: uncomfortable, uncomfortable, uncomfortable. Protests must threaten the status quo, otherwise they are ignored. People need to understand that what we’ve seen during the last week is a primal scream of pain, anger, frustration, and fear, and while I do not condone the violence and looting, I do understand the raw emotions behind what we are seeing, and I think it takes a lot of chutzpah to demand that such protests be done in a way that makes us White folks feel better or more comfortable, because we shouldn’t feel comfortable with them, not when we’ve ignored the causes of them for so long. 

Finally, maybe it is time to remind people that our nation’s independence, our revolution, was sparked by a protest and the destruction of property, only we like to call it a “tea party” instead. We celebrate it every Fourth of July, and even have a conservative political movement named for it. So sitting back, safe in our homes, or our gated communities, while we order deliveries during a pandemic—from “essential workers” that are mostly people of color—maybe we shouldn’t clutch our pearls in genteel horror, as we watch this nationwide paroxysm of grief and anger. Maybe we need to take a long, hard look at why people have been driven to this point, and what we can do to start putting things to right.

“To be silent and indifferent is the greatest sin of all.” ~ Elie Weisel

^{1. [I don’t fool myself, however, that it means I’m safe, even here in the United States, because anti-Semitism exists across time and geography. It has always considered us as something “other,” and it is something my people have grappled with for centuries, and still grapple with today.]↩}

^{2. [Resulting in mass incarceration of Black Americans at a disproportionate rate, as well as harsher sentencing.]↩}

^{3. [A dissection of how SCOTUS’s evisceration of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder, has encouraged a return of voter suppression in Southern states, disproportionately affecting Black voters, is another entirely different conversation.]↩}