It is Time for a Reckoning — A Response From White Anti-Racists
Black people should not have to ask us. We could simply look into the vacant and lonely eyes of our sons and daughters, drunk on red wine at 11 pm, dazed from hours gazing into the computer screen of video games. We could look into the glazed eyes of our neighbors; into our own eyes after the umpteenth hour of Netflix or my personal drug of happy-ever-after romance novels. We would see that sure, police aren’t killing our white bodies. But the violence of white supremacy, the violence of what is done in our name, kills our souls. Ours is the violence of trying to be good enough to deserve what is ripped, dragged, beaten, starved, and killed out of Black bodies on our behalf.
Sure, we are outraged. Innocence is part of our privilege. We are appalled. We can’t imagine. How true that is. Blinded by generations of superiority and fragility, we can’t bear to look. I can’t imagine that Black man’s blood on the asphalt, their struggle for breath beneath a police boot, has anything to do with me.
But if my home, my job, my kids’ education, my breath and blood and bone are worth more, it can only be true because a Black home, job, child, body, breath and blood are worth less. And still, those of us who are white continue to be shocked at another Black body dead at the hands of police. Why do we expect this institution, rooted in the bloody soil of slavery, to be any different? When will we wake our souls from this numbing violence and demand its end?
Join us in the fight — Undoing White Supremacy Austin — Our group works within multiracial communities to end personal, structural, and cultural racism and build a racially just Austin. We are a group of people of European descent, whose varying ethnic histories have been forged into one common “white” identity to perpetuate racism. We seek to undo racism in many ways, including educating ourselves on racial oppression, mobilizing other people of European descent to dismantle white supremacy, and supporting social justice organizing led by people of color communities, including indigenous people.
