I asked some white friends why they support anti-racism, and this is what they said
Forty-five days after George Floyd was killed and America erupted into protests for racial justice, I waited in line for security check at LaGuardia Airport.
I noticed that the passengers in front me had kept their shoes on while going through security. Was this the new normal of flying domestic during COVID-19? As I put my bags on the belt, I confirmed with the TSA agent if I should keep mine on. Yes, he said. As I proceeded, the other TSA agent pulled me out of the line and asked me to remove my shoes. I asked him why, since all the others before me (all white passengers) had kept their shoes on. He made a joke.
As I waited for my bags and shoes, barefoot, I saw that the only other person to go through the same line without his shoes on was a Black guy.
Racial profiling at the airports is very common, but I usually don’t comment on it. I posted about this incident on social media, because my silence may have made these incidents conveniently invisible to white friends and partners.
I don’t lack agency to stand up for my own rights, but questioning racism should not be left up to people of color.
Following the death of George Floyd, in a two-week period, support for Black Lives Matter increased by nearly as much as it had grown in the past two years. A Monmouth University poll found that 3 out of 4 Americans now believe racial and ethnic discrimination to be “a big problem.”
What makes someone decide that they will actively seek racial justice and equality? What were their earliest memories of being aware of racism and what shaped their views?
I talked to some of my white friends and this is what they said.
Bridget Hieronymus, 49, owner/founder of Girl Code Marketing, Miami
“This is our problem to solve. It’s not Black people’s problem.”
Bridget Hieronymus grew up in Savannah, Georgia. Her earliest memory of becoming conscious about color was when she was 12 or 13 years old. “There was a house up the street from us where a Black family lived. One of the girls was my age, we played together. One day, we were playing in my room and she asked me if I would stop being her friend because she was Black.”
Bridget was surprised; was she not supposed to be friends with a Black person?
Although she was raised in the south, Bridget doesn’t remember talking about racism with her family or friends. These days, she is looking inward and forward. She shared another story.
“I was … somewhere between 18–22 years old, I guess, living in Savannah. I’d gone out one night downtown with friends. It got late… I wanted to go home but didn’t have a car. Around 3 a.m. and a little buzzed, I decided to walk home. I passed through “projects,” and “bad” neighborhoods. I was scared to death, I had a big stick in my hand to protect me.”
“What was I so scared of? My Mom and Dad raised me right. I wasn’t taught racism, but I was afraid walking that night … afraid of the neighborhoods because they were “Black.”
At 49, Bridget feels that the terrible, illogical fear of Black people, specifically Black men, still lurks somewhere deep inside. She wouldn’t instinctively feel afraid to walk alone at night in a predominantly white neighborhood.
Where does this fear come from, she asks?
“I am ashamed of that fear, and my white privilege, and I am vowing to learn to let that go,” she says.
It is important for Bridget to be an anti-racist, because she says racism is a white person’s problem to solve.
“It’s not Black people’s problem. They are not the ones who need to fix anything, it’s us. If those of us who understand that sit around and be silent and don’t help shape the view of others, nothing will ever change.
Nothing changes just by being quiet!”
Adél Grobler, 40-s, marketing and communications expert, New York
“It was the harshest reality that I had to face, to realize that what I had thought to be the truth was furthest from the truth…”
Adél Grobler grew up in full-on apartheid South Africa and visiting the apartheid museum at 32 was an eye-opener. She still cries when she talks about it.
“Oh. My. God. To see the kind of George Floyd videos that we never saw… to actually see the truth, the video footage taken by journalists that we were oblivious to or that was spun in a way that our government wanted us to see… It was the harshest reality that I had to face, to realize that what I had thought to be the truth was furthest from the truth that could ever have been told.”
Adél remembers what the state-censored media shared as the “truth”: Nelson Mandela was a communist, and enemy of the state, and was in prison for killing a lot of people.
She also remembers the constant dichotomy in her upbringing. Her parents were progressive and raised her to think that everyone was equal.
But everyone was not equal.
“We had a Black “maid” (that was the language of the time) — Anna — who lived in the small room connected to, but outside our house. Anna was like a member of the family, we loved her, but she had her own cutlery, her own plate and her own coffee mug. My parents never taught us that Anna was any less human than us, but Anna had to use her own toilet. And if Anna wanted to go out after 6 p.m., she would have to carry her passbook and a letter from my parents because there was a curfew for Black people.” Anna worked with the Groblers on a full time basis until around 1990.
Adél remembers when Archbishop Desmond Tutu launched South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC): “It was broadcast every day, there was a TRC channel on television. As a teenager, I didn’t understand at first why you would want to talk about the past, bring up all the hurt and the injustice. I thought, just let it go…” But as she listened more, she started seeing it as an important, cathartic step in the process. Not everyone was looking to have someone punished, they needed to be heard and believed.
“The point was that we should listen, and we should give credit to people for telling their stories. We should listen, understand and then act, so that it doesn’t happen again.”
"To be in America and to see such blatant racism play out in our society is a painful reminder of my own country’s history, and to know that we have such a long way to go as a people to reach equality is a call to action for everyone who feels this way.”
Adél defines herself as an anti-racist. “This is not about random people being racist, it’s systemic, it’s ongoing.”
Kelley Ready, 63, anthropologist, educator, feminist, activist, Boston
“If white people are not anti-racist, racism is not going to die. We have to see how it impacts us as white people too… that we miss out on great friendships and we grow up not knowing others.”
I have known Kelley Ready since 2007, when she was my professor in the Heller School of Social Policy, Brandeis University. She and her wife Jacquie are like family. When I asked Kelley about her childhood, her first memory of being aware of Blackness was during the 1964 World’s Fair in New York. She was eight years old.
“I was on an escalator and a Black man was in front of me. I touched my arm gingerly against his arm to see what would happen,” Kelley remembers.
Kelley grew up in an affluent white neighborhood in New Jersey. She didn’t meet many Black students until she went to high school, and even then, she didn’t have close friends who were Black.
In school she learned about the history of slavery and lynching, “but it all seemed very far away.”
Kelley’s family belonged to a Roman Catholic beach club on the Jersey shore. “I remember the Sheehans — a family that lived in the same town. This was in the 60-s. They got a “Fresh Air Kid” who was Black and brought him to our beach club. They were asked not to bring him back. The Sheehans cancelled their membership at the beach club.”
Kelley says she came into anti-racism work through her intersectional feminist work: “As I got involved in politics, I realized who were the most discriminated and who weren’t.”
The biggest influence for Kelley’s anti-racist work has been her wife, Jacquie Bishop. Jacquie is “first generation Northern born”, born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. Her mother lied about their address to make sure that Jacquie went to a better school.
“I learned how hard it was for us to mingle in our circles sometimes,” Kelley said to me. “Seeing the acts of racism happen, understanding the concept of micro-aggression, what it’s like being followed around in a store or have someone question your abilities for no reason, other than the color of your skin.”
She wishes that she had done more to call out the everyday acts of racism and stereotyping that she witnessed earlier in their life together.
Kelley believes white people need to be actively anti-racist because, “racism is such a profound structure in our society, it makes it very hard for Black people to succeed.”
“If white people are not anti-racist, racism is not going to die. We have to see how it impacts us as white people too… that we miss out on great friendships and we grow up not knowing others.”
As they sat on the porch reminiscing, Kelley said that because of Jacquie she had made friends she might not have met otherwise, and she gained access to Black spaces, like “a bid whist game.” They laughed together.
“You have also learned more about code switching than you consciously realize,” said Jacquie.
Merrill Wilcox, 40, strategic partnership expert, Atlanta
“In school we were taught about slavery as if it was a million years ago, but it’s not!”
Merrill Wilcox was born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia. “The private schools cropped up as integration in schools started,” she says. “In the south, white people with means pulled their kids from the public schools and put them in private schools.”
The same happened in many other parts of this country, of course. Black families with means also pulled their kids from public schools where poor Black children went.
Growing up, Merrill had Black friends, but it wasn’t until 10th or 11th grade when they had an entire day of school devoted to conversations about racism. It was the first time that she was confronted with the idea that people of color are not racist, because racism is systemic and bigger than individual animosities. “Until then, my understanding about racism was about individuals treating other individuals poorly because of their skin color,” she remembers.
Recently, Merrill discovered that her grandfather came from a family that owned slaves. “Pops was the patriarch of the family and built the foundation for generations to come, the foundation that allowed me to go to a private school and have a nice house and everything. And Pops was able to build that foundation from inheriting land and wealth earned by a slave-owning family.” It was too close for comfort.
Today, Merrill works in education policy. “You can look at the data, going back decades, based on race, income groups etc., and you can see that the system has been built in a way that certain people cannot thrive. It’s very hard to change systems, because you need people’s buy-in. Asking people to change systems is a lot harder than asking them to be nice to each other,” she explains.
Merrill believes in actively pursuing racial justice, “because, how can you not? They taught us ‘liberty and justice for all’, and I believed them!”
Being quietly not-racist is not enough for her because she feels that, “racism is at work, as you quietly go about your daily life in a system that’s eating other people alive.”
Merrill contributes to the movement for racial justice in many ways. During our conversation, she pointed out something that often slips under the radar. She talked about witnessing racism among progressive, middle to upper-middle class white women. She thinks it’s because they follow specific cultural education and norms that they expect all others to follow. “For example, being impolite is seen as a character flaw, and we police each other. If someone calls someone out, then the rules we were taught are broken.” Merrill wishes that they would go back and inspect their own reactions and listen more.
Most of all, Merrill Wilcox wants to change the system that’s eating up other lives while it spares hers.
Ben, 32, co-founder of an international education company, Portland, Oregon
“Maybe it’s a good thing for us to finally understand what it’s like to not feel safe. There are people in this country who have always felt unsafe.”
I met Ben at a dog park in New York. He was just starting a company that creates international education program for American students to travel and learn abroad. Ben and I both believe in the power and magic of travel. Traveling around the world took away any sense of “otherness” for me.
Ben and his wife, Abby, moved to Portland, Oregon less than a year ago, from New York City. They were worried about moving to a very white neighborhood after living in one of the most diverse cities. Little did they know that the courthouse half a mile from their new home will become the stage for Black Lives Matter protests and federal agents will descend upon their streets. They were among the thousands of ordinary people who joined a peaceful demonstration recently and got tear-gassed.
Ben said to me that he is very aware that racism is not a new problem, but now it’s in the news cycle and gaining momentum. “I hope it doesn’t stop or slow down at all,” he says, about the movement for racial justice.
Ben grew up in predominantly white communities in Massachusetts. “I was aware of racism issues from what I was taught in school, but it all sounded abstract. In middle school, I had a friend who was Cambodian, who would talk about his Blackness. I didn’t get it then — it was part of his identity, but what was the big deal? But in high school I started to see that he had to live his life differently.”
One incident left an impression on Ben. “My sister’s friend’s dad was a Black professor, and he was walking home from the library with his backpack full of books. He got stopped and frisked, very publicly, by the police, in a small town where everyone knew each other. They dumped out his books and yelled at him.” Ben was shocked — why on earth did that happen!
In high school, when Ben and his friends started driving, the police would often pull them over, he said. Ben got pulled over more than once, but he had a sense of security that it wouldn’t be a big issue. “But my Black and brown friends had a real sense of fear about it. I remember going to school one day and my friend told me how he got pulled over by the same police and got thrown over the hood of his car. That’s when it started to hit home.”
Ben feels guilty that he is not more involved in the protests in Portland, but he cannot afford to get arrested. It is bizarre for him, and many others in the country, that he fears being arrested for going to a peaceful demonstration as a white middle class American.
But maybe this is a good thing, he said to me, “for us to finally understand what it’s like to not feel safe. There are people in this country who have always felt unsafe.” If more people understand what it feels to be unsafe in their own country, in their own streets, maybe there will be more support for systemic change.
Ben wants to be anti-racist, but he admitted feeling a little nervous when I asked him if he would have this conversation with me. “I didn’t want to put my foot in my mouth. And that’s all the more reason for us to have this conversation. If white people are nervous to say the wrong thing and if they are not going to speak and not get involved, racism will continue,” he feels.
“What is the right way to talk about this, what’s the proper way to be anti-racist?” he asks.
He is not alone in asking this, and trying to learn more every day.
As for me, I am a brown-skinned immigrant woman, a feminist, and anti-racist.
I am also a product of colonization. I code-switch to a posh British-Indian accent as soon as security agents at the airport pull me out of a line.
I started having conversations with white friends and colleagues about racism because I believe that right now, white people need to think about racism — the system that eats up Black and brown lives and potential, while it spares them. We need to speak up together, sustain this momentum and settle for nothing less than anti-racist policies and ideas.
The cost of apathy is too high.
Note: The views expressed are those of the author.
