It seems a whole lot of waking up is happening among people of whiteness. I am going to reserve my critical commenting on this phenomenon for another post and focus on the question that I keep seeing everywhere:

What can I do?

1. Listen to people of color share their experiences.

2. Educate yourself. That means reading books and connecting with anti-racist resources.

3. Pay reparations to individual POC that have expended their emotional labor dealing with your privilege. Pay reparations to POC institutions. Pay activists and content creators for your education.

4. Disrupt the racism that you see from your fellow people of whiteness. Tell people that they’re being racist. Refuse to entertain insensitive talk anywhere, including this app.

5. Get uncomfortable. Put yourself in situations with people who are not afraid to speak their truth to you.

6. Do the work. Dedicate time and energy to learning to deal with your whiteness. Since you were born, you have been exposed to a lot of negative ideas about people of color. It is going to take a lot of time to dismantle the things that you thought were normal and okay.

7. Be ready to be offended and to have your feelings hurt. People are tired of being oppressed and a lot of folks are gonna let you have it right now. Will you learn or will you retreat into comfort.

8. Listen to people of color who you might not necessarily agree with rather than defaulting to the same voices that don’t challenge whiteness.

9. Don’t demand emotional labor from your black, brown, and indigenous friends. Especially right now. Take whatever they have to offer and don’t make demands upon them.

10. Manage your white tears. Your eyes are being opened to the injustice in the world and that’s a good thing. But your black, brown, and indigenous friends should not have to wipe your tears when they’re too busy wiping their own.

And since people from FB keep emailing me and asking:

For as little as $2/month you can support my anti-racism work via Patreon ( http://www.patreon.com/allyhenny )

Here’s how you can give one-time donations:

http://Paypal.me/allyhenny 
Ca$sh: $allyhenny
Venmo: @allyhenny