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As Close as I Can Get
As a white woman, I can never get close to understanding the way people of color feel in this country. 1/29
As Close as I Can Get
As a white woman, I can never get close to understanding the way people of color feel in this country. 1/29
I’ve always only been at the side watching my family of color, my husband and my children deal with racism. I have been there on several occasions to witness racism and injustice, 2/29
but I personally was never on the receiving end, besides being called names for dating outside my race. I can never know the feeling of living in skin that potentially endangers my life and fills my life with fear and rage. 3/29
I do not write this to take away from the experience of death by poc at the hands of policer. I write this to try to find a way to connect white people, who don’t understand. 4/29
I am looking for a way to help them emotionally connect to people and experiences they can never understand. 5/29
I am not writing to make them understand, but because emotional connections are what bring people together when we cannot ever possible understand another person’s experience. 6/29
All I can do is take a horrific experience in my life and try to imagine amplifying the feelings and the experience by 300 years and thousands of lost lives. 7/29
When I was a young woman, I watched my 18 year old cousin’s life leave his body and his heart slowly stop beating due to a gunshot to the neck. Our family felt so much at one time. 8/29
We felt unimaginable grief and rage. We wanted revenge, we wanted to burn things to the ground, break things and we cried too many tears to count. We mourned in many different ways with so many intense emotions. 9/29
The only one of these desires we could act on were the tears. I try to amplify these emotions by 300 years and thousands of murdered cousins, brothers, sisters, mothers, father, friends and people. I just can’t imagine feeling that much. 10/29
After my cousin was murdered, his murderers were at home, they were threatening our family and friends as we drove by the killers home. There was no choice except to drive past their homes, they lived in your neighborhood. 11/29
We congregated together to mourn and rage. We lived with the fear of more gunfire. We carried weapons to protect ourselves. We asked the police for help, they said “sorry, they haven’t actually attacked yet.” The same thing they said the night my cousin was killed. 12/29
I can only amplify this feeling of helplessness and anger by the murderer being the police. I can only amplify this by fearing every time you leave your home, because of the color of your skin. I can only amplify this by 300 years and thousands of incidents. 13/29
At the trial, our prosecutor was state appointed, we are poor people. The murderer’s family had money for defense. Their lawyer taunted the victim’s family, we could do nothing. We watched as justice was not served. 14/29
Only one of the people involved was given a very short prison sentence with time served during the trial. I can only amplify the feeling of injustice by 300 years and thousands of instances of injustice and failure of the system to protect the victims. 15/29
My cousin’s murder caused irreparable damage to individuals in our family and to the fabric of our family as a whole, forever. It changed us all, it rocked our very foundations. 16/29
The incident destroyed our trust in the system (what little we had to start with.) Our ideals of justice were destroyed. 17/29
If I amplify these feelings by 300 years and thousands of incidents and families, it’s as close as I can get, and still not even close to how poc feel every day. 18/29
At the mention of the murderer’s name or seeing a picture, the rage and pain and grief come back. An opened wound. I cannot begin to imagine the reopening of the wound day after day, and having a repeat of the same incident over and over again. 19/29
I can only amplify this by 300 years and incident after incident and still I cannot come close. 20/29
The problem I run into trying to amplify these feelings, is everything I felt was and is the most intense feeling of hate, rage, pain, grief, helplessness, fear and injustice I have ever felt. 21/29
How do I amplify that and make it more intense and repeat it day after day?
I can’t, it isn& #39;t possible. 22/29
I can’t, it isn& #39;t possible. 22/29
Please, remember this when you say, “this is not the way to protest.” Please, stop, because you will never understand how incredibly hard it is to contain that kind of emotion into a sign, into a chant, into a march. 23/29
How impossibly hard it is not to give yourself over to the emotions and lash out physically at your murderers, not to react physically in fear of being murdered. How hard it is not to lash out at those that just stand by and watch it happen again and again. 24/29
How impossibly hard it is to hear and see people criticize your feelings and the way your feelings are coming out? 25/29
Do not pretend to know how you would react. As close as I can get from personal experience, does not come close to 300 years and thousands of incidents and then having the wound reopened daily. 26/29
No one wants violence, but emotions flow over, especially, as the murders are the ones policing themselves. They are the one’s shooting tear gas at the victims. 27/29
So, we stand up for the oppressed, we place our bodies between them and their murderers, we walk beside them. We add our voices, we don’t judge how they feel. We help make changes in the system to bring equality and equity. 28/29
We stand up, we unify, we lend our shoulders for tears, we lend our hands in friendship, we listen and hear. We do not judge the feelings of others, because even amplified by 300 years and thousands of incidents we cannot come close. - Anonymous 29/29
