This Week's Opening Thought: August 1, 2022

This week’s opening thought: once you understand how white supremacy operates and how it manifests in the actions and beliefs of people starting from an early age, you can’t unsee it. You can’t unsee how it plays out in your workplace, community, and city. You can’t ignore how it permeates the politics, policies, and laws we see our local and federal politicians and lawmakers weaponize daily. To know of white supremacy and the generational harm it has caused, even if your understanding is in its infancy, and to still consider it not to be “that dangerous” or not a danger at all? That’s not ignorance.

That’s a choice.

If you are white and you see harm being done to non-white people, to white people, at the hands of white supremacist ideologies, and you understand that these ideologies exist and have existed for generations? There’s no way you can reverse unseeing it and acting like it’s not happening?

That’s a choice, regardless of the generational trauma your white ancestors have passed on to you.

If you are a member of the Global Majority and you witness harm being done to non-white people at the hands of white supremacist ideologies, and you understand that these ideologies exist and have existed for generations? There’s no way you can reverse unseeing it, especially if you’ve been on the receiving end of white supremacy’s blade or watched someone with your skin tone be hurt or hurt someone who looks like you. Acting like it’s not happening to others? Gaslighting yourself?

That’s a choice, even if that choice is prompted by current and generational trauma that has been passed on to you, having a hand in you passing harm on to others.

You get to choose if ignoring the white supremacy running rampant around you and perpetuated by you is, in your opinion, in your best interest. I will not add quotations to that last part because that is your choice. But please believe that your choices have consequences – in the present and future.

People get to choose not to be a part of your life, workplace, and the communities you live in and try to build relationships with them as a response to your choice to be a white supremacist or to openly or passively aid and abet white supremacy.

Choose wisely.