Black and White rights

And the gray area. I cannot pretend to address what's happening right now with the protests, the inequality of race, the anger and hatred and frustration.  I cannot pretend to understand how people of color feel at this moment in time.  I can only listen and watch and hope more lives are not taken in this struggle that should have had some resolution years, decades ago. I have no answers to any of this, only wide-eye wonder at why it has taken so long for a catalyst. 

Someone asked me this week if I thought it was right to take down statues in the South, statues that have been there for a hundred years as testament to .... to what?  To white power?  To suppression?  If there is a monument, a statue, a building in our country that perpetuates the servitude of anyone, then it should be destroyed, taken down, burned, ruined.  Therefore, yes, statues of slave owners, statues of blatant racists, monuments to slave auction blocks, statues of Confederate heroes, all those should be removed.  They all glorify oppression. Even if that "monument" is a police station in a city that has a long, long record of police brutality against people of color, then that station should rightly be burned.

The above statement could be taken to mean war on cops, on police stations. It could be taken to mean anarchy, to mean an acceptance of violence against order and law. That statement could be taken in many ways and I do not care how you take it other than this: if George Floyd was your brother, your cousin, your nephew, your friend, and you watched him being slowly suffocated by those white cops, wouldn't you want to burn that cop house down to ashes?  Would the police station be any kind of a barrier to your grief, to your actions, to your need for justice?  

Do I condone random looting, like breaking into a small restaurant to see if there's booze in there, like breaking into a Victoria Secret store to steal underwear?  No, I don't condone that. But I hold no animosity for those who are burning cop cars, police stations, banks, white-owned businesses. We white people have let this go on, we have stood silent and passive for far too long and it might be time to pay for our white privilege. Do I want someone to torch my house? No. I don't want fires in my 'hood, I don't want to be afraid.... but that's just another part of my white privilege speaking. I am safe. Many people are  not.

No answers are forthcoming from me.  But treating people of color like garbage has been going on for hundreds of years. It must stop.

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