Thanks for this very interesting explanation. I guess it’s plausible that someone can be totally clueless as to what racism is and how it works, especially if it does not affect you personally, but it seems to me that you would have to ignore vast quantities of information, readily available information, to arrive at that place. America has a very long history with racism, as well as a very long history with corruption in law enforcement. But privilege is an odd thing, no one ever wants to admit that they are privileged or recognize the way certain privileges have shaped their experiences.

I had to recognize my own privilege pretty early on in my life experiences, being African-American, and yet very light-skinned, light-skinned enough to experience “white privilege.” It wasn’t called that, not back then; but many African-Americans made it clear to me, in a number of different ways that I would be treated better than most of them because my skin is so light. Initially I didn’t want to believe it. But after constantly having the evidence of this brought to my attention over and over again, I could no longer deny it.

I feel like, with regard to what we’re seeing in the media today, I just can’t fathom how so many white people can continue to deny racism- institutional or otherwise with so much evidence of it, just everywhere. But then I think of other American minority experiences, do I know what the Native American experience is like? Or the Latinx experience? Or the Asian-American experience? Not really. I’ve filtered all that information out of my experience because it doesn’t impact me directly.

I suppose that’s what white people must do, but my thing is, if you don’t know, then don’t be so arrogant and intrusive as to tell these minorities what their experiences actually are. I would never tell a Latino person, “there’s no racism against your group” or “ the border didn’t cross you, you crossed the border” — simply because I do not know. I would try to be informed before I said anything about their life experiences. I would never deny what they are saying their experiences are, especially if they were complaining about their lives not mattering or being valued. Many Latinx in my community have raised many similar concerns. They claim to experience very vicious police brutality from our local police, but I have never. Do I discount their stories then? No. I can read. I am well aware, it’s been well documented that our county has a great deal of anti-immigrant sentiment, directed specifically at Hispanics, so I’m not going to deny the validity of any of their experiences, just because my privilege of being an American citizen insulates me from the kind of experiences they have with our police.

So I guess what really irritates me about white people who work so hard to invalidate the Black Lives Matter Movement, is just the extreme arrogance and ignorance that it takes to only acknowledge your own experience and to use that as a frame of reference for all experiences. And, if that weren’t bad enough, to the have the audacity to tell black people that our experiences aren’t our experiences, even though it’s been made clear on video, in stereo, how many black people experience police. It’s just too much.

“Yeah there’s a video of that police officer blowing that mans head off, but see he needed to blow his head off because…” No! No — just stop with this kind of discourse. It is arrogant, it is ignorant and it does absolutely nothing to ease the current racial discord-it just exacerbates it.

So a bit of advice to all the white men who want to mainsplain and whitewash systematic racism — read at least one book about African-American history- or I’ll make it real easy- watch a YouTube video on it — before you open your mouth and join a discussion about issues you know absolutely nothing about.

I’m not referring to you personally, as you neither mainsplain or white wash, but actually have offered reasonable explanations for a phenomenon that I find utterly baffling — which is white people ignoring all evidence of racism, even when confronted with it. Thanks again!