I want to talk to white people for a second.

You have been lied to. You have been told that America is a place founded on freedom, where everyone has an equal shot. When racism in our past was acknowledged, it was always in the past, something we got over. 1/

Your teachers did not talk about the brutality of the slave trade. They did not talk about the millions of people that died in those wooden ships, beaten and starved. 2/

They did not talk about those that jumped overboard, preferring to die than to be taken from their families and communities. ‘Could I have got over the nettings,’ wrote one former slave, ‘I would have jumped over the side but I could not’. 3/

They did not tell you that the ones that survived were raped and beaten, and chained to dead bodies.

They did not tell you that the rape continued. That children born of rape to enslaved women were also slaves, that brothers owned one another, all agreeing to turn a blind eye 4/

Like one slaveholder’s wife said, “Any lady is ready to tell you who is the father of all mulatto children in everybody’s household but her own.” They do not mention this in Gone with the Wind. 5/

Your teachers never stopped to point out that we have had slavery in this country longer than we have had freedom, or that it did not end with the civil war. They do not tell you that former slaves made progress so quickly, it threatened their white neighbors. 6/

They do not tell you that shortly after slavery ended, a new campaign of terror began. They do not tell you how sharecropping was another kind of slavery. They do not tell you that a black man could be murdered for making eye contact with a white man.7/

They do not tell you that even in spite of this, some black communities flourished. But even this was not allowed to be. They do not tell you that the white residents burned the black community in Tulsa to the ground, because the residents stopped yet another lynching. 8/

They do not tell you that white men pulled a talented black doctor (my great grandfather’s doctor), on his porch and shot him like a dog. 9/

They do not tell you that the lynchings continued until 1968. That these were family affairs, and whole groups of people came and sat on blankets and picknicked while a man was beaten, tortured, dismembered, hung, burned. They posed for photographs and took souvenirs. 10/

They tell you then that Martin Luther King and Malcolm X came. That Martin was good and Malcolm was bad, and that they did not work together. 11/

They do not tell you that Martin Luther King’s main tactic was to provoke white violence, and that he was hated in his lifetime. They do not tell you that Malcolm X took on the much more entrenched white racism of the north, where Martin Luther King was never successful. 12/

Whites in the North would not acknowledge that racism wasn’t just a Southern problem, or even primarily a Southern problem. They do not tell you that Malcolm and Martin worked together, respected each other, and had more in common than they did with any moderate whites. 13/

They do not tell you when you come to Boston that black children going to white neighborhoods was so threatening that their parents threatened to blow up their children’s school. They do not tell you that segregation has increased every year since 1988. 14/

They do not tell you that for every dollar a white family has, a black family has a dime. 15/

They tell you that the civil rights movement was successful. They do not tell you that mass incarceration began when integration was abandoned. 16/

They do not tell you that one in three black men go to prison in their lifetime, and that we don’t know how many go to jail (if you don’t know the difference you have led a charmed life). 17/

They do not tell you that there is almost no recourse for a family when their son or daughter is murdered. That police are almost never held accountable. 18/

They do not tell you of the deep racism in medicine that drives black students away, black doctors out of academia, and black patients from our offices. That both cops and doctors protect their own, even when they treat the poor and immigrants and black Americans with disdain 19/

They tell you when black americans die of covid19 at twice the rate of whites, that it must be their poor choices. 20/

You see these videos now, of a man murdered while dozens screamed at him to stop, and three officers stood next to him and did nothing. 21/

But it seems like an isolated incident, even though there have been so many other videos and murders and deaths. You cannot understand because you don’t know the country you live in. But it is time you found out. 22/22

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