A N T 🅸- R A 🅲 I S M.

The vast majority of the world recognizes that we are all enduring a global pandemic right now and have been for months. However, unfortunately, the vast majority of the world fails to recognize that we’ve been enduring a horrific pandemic long before COVID-19 came to fruition.

We live in a world that severely favors those of us with white skin and represses those of us with black and brown skin. 

A lot of us choose not to believe this, see this, and flat out deny it. 

Worse, a lot of us don’t choose to deny it, we can’t help but to deny it because we simply do not believe it. 

Our denial comes from a place of “not knowing,” lack of education, and is reflective of our experiences and what we’ve been taught, we genuinely do not know any better. How would we?

 Nonetheless, this denial doesn’t take away from its truth, it simply points to the severe privilege afforded to people with white skin who are able to live their daily lives unaffected by the severe racism embedded into our society. 

There’s a saying that goes like this, “When you’ve been used to privilege for so long, equality feels like loss.” 

And this statement can help speak to A LOT of what is currently going on.

The reason why so many of us sincerely pronounce “All Lives Matter” as a response to the “Black Lives Matter” Movement, lies in the very words of the above statement.

Due to the privilege afforded to us by our white skin, our gut reaction is to reply in this way. 

We are accustomed to being the center of attention. 

We’ve always been at the center of attention. People who look like us, play our favorite actors and actresses in all of our favorite movies and TV shows. People who look like us, paint the pages of our history books and we are told of all of their heroic achievements. 

Everything we have ever encountered puts us front and center and is centered around us. 

And thus, if and when we are not at the center of the conversation, we cannot help but to feel and believe that  somehow, in some way, we are getting less than. 

We assert; “All Lives Matter” because we don’t even realize that people of color genuinely and wholeheartedly do not believe that their lives matter and thus that is why they had to make a movement asserting that they do.

Yes, all lives matter but we ARE FOCUSED on the black ones right now because it is very APPARENT that our judicial system does NOT know that.

We fail to comprehend that no one has ever said white lives don’t matter…. How could they?? 

Clearly, white lives matter, we live in a society that offers privileges, benefits, and advantages to individuals with white skin..and we are so accustomed to these benefits that we don’t even realize they are benefits. 

A bandaid is not skin color. It’s the white person’s skin color.

We have become accustomed and conditioned to believe that having white skin somehow makes us better, smarter, more equipped humans. We have grown up in a society that is embedded with racism, entrenched at its very core. The systems that make up our society and how we function are built on entrenched biases against people of color and the poor. 

Our own President's slogan speaks to this. 

"Make America Great Again" is completely contradictory because America has never been great, not for all of its citizens. As Americans however, we have a voice that we can use to continually make ourselves better, to be great. We just need to re-define what that means.

 If you’re reading this and you do not agree, I strongly urge you to continue to read and then read this again. We don’t blame you or condemn you for disagreeing with us because you’re a product of our society, our country. You’ve been taught that Christopher Columbus discovered America. “Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue and founded America, a city upon a hill” is what they teach us in school.

We’ve been taught that white Christian missionaries were simply trying to help Native American tribes become better people. We were never told that in discovering America, we simultaneously committed an act of genocide, as an entire population of Native Americans were forced to forfeit all of their beliefs and disregard all of their values and belongings and convert to christianity/ westernize or become enslaved and die.

We don’t blame your opinions because they are a reflection of what you’ve been taught and told to believe. 

“Until the lion tells his side of the story, the tale of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.” 

We don’t blame you. 

You’ve probably grown up watching Disney movies and shows that intrinsically glorify white skin while criminalizing black skin. It is not an accident that the voices of the evil hyenas in the lion king were played by young boys and girls of color. Thus, without even knowing it you grew up associating those voices and the sounds of black laughter and chatter with evil and bad. 

A sociologist actually reported a personal experience she had with this. Her young son heard little Hispanic boys and girls playing at the park one day and asked his mother why the hyenas were there while telling her he was scared. You see, racism, in every form, is built into the fabric of America. 

Embedded into our society is a system built upon racism and exploitation. Intrinsic in western history or rather what is depicted via history textbooks, novels, stories, etc., in virtually all mainstream Western literature, journalism, works, and so forth, is white-washed, biased and skewed. 

The foundation of much of “white America’s” belief system is based on a fabrication, constructed with the intent of keeping anyone with white skin above those without it. 

We are taught to be racist.

We don’t understand why we jump and feel scared when we go to gas stations late at night and see a dark man, but why wouldn’t we when every crime show or movie we’ve ever watched had the black guy play the bad guy; the murderer?

Why wouldn’t we lock our doors and keep our eyes on the road when driving through inner-city neighborhoods when every news station discusses the rampant drug use and gang violence that take place in inner-city neighborhoods & when our prisons are filled with people that look like the ones that live on those streets?

Why wouldn’t we associate positions of servitude with people of color and minorities when those are the roles that we see them playing in all of our favorite TV shows and movies? 

We were socialized, conditioned, and taught to be racist and we can’t help it because it is what we learned but we must unlearn.

Due to our society’s ability to disguise racism as something other than that repulsive phenomenon we “rid” our world of so long ago, it has continued to exist and thrive putting African Americans and minorities at a significant disadvantage.

Racism has been able to exist and even prosper because it has remained hidden and disguised as something that it is not. 

Evidently, what has been happening, what is happening today, what is happening right now on our streets to people of color depicts what race scholars have been saying since the dawn of the “post-civil rights” era;

Racism is not gone and it never was. 

In America today, blacks are forced to live in a white society where, because of their skin color, they are not only denied the same privileges as whites but their human rights and ability to survive is paralleled to what it was when overt racism reigned at the height of Jim Crow and slavery. 

The actions committed by those in positions of power and authority demonstrate that the very idea that racism was abolished during the Civil Rights Movement is one that is extremely fraudulent. 

Yesterday, claiming that racism was a thing of the past may have been acceptable.

But today, it is not. 

The death of George Floyd and way too many others prove this. The fact that they are no longer alive speaks to this truth. 

The very act, definition, and view of racism has evolved and changed significantly over the course of time. While America was progressing so was racism. From slavery through the Jim Crow Age through the Civil Rights Era to today, the very essence of racism is one that has been changed, altered, redefined and re-exemplified. In fact, as made clear by civil rights lawyer, advocate, legal scholar and author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander,  the actual way that we use our criminal justice system today, especially in regards to incarceration is really just an extension of slavery, a form of social/ racialized control, and as such the confinement/ bondage of African Americans has not disappeared, it has only been reincarnated. As Alexander put it, “hundreds of years ago, our nation put those considered less than human in shackles; less than one hundred years ago, we relegated them to the other side of town; today we put them in cages.” That is precisely what Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer wanted to happen to George Floyd, he wanted to “cage” him. Floyd was ACCUSED of buying cigarettes with a counterfeit $20 bill, but prior to even looking into this case to find him guilty or not guilty, the police officer killed him. Floyds life was taken from him after an accusation was made about him. He was not even given the chance to defend himself. His breath was literally and figuratively taken from him as he muttered “I can’t breathe,” while being choked to death by the officer’s knee. 

Unfortunately, “I can’t breathe” is a phrase that can define the experience of many people of color and minorities living in America. 

They live in a society where due to institutionalized and systemic racism, they feel like they cannot breathe. 

The officer’s actions parallel actions carried out by whites decades ago. 

George Floyd was innocent and was complying with the police. His only crime was that he was born with black skin. 

And that “crime” cost him his life, just as it has cost thousands of others born with the most incriminating trait of all in America today, black skin. 

To use Michelle Alexander's words; “the “white-only” signs may be gone, but new signs have gone up—notices placed in job applications, rental agreements, loan application, forms for welfare benefits, school applications, and petitions for licenses, informing the general public that “felons” are not wanted here,” continue to persist. Unquestionably, these dynamics in which continuously target African Americans, work to maintain the existing racial hierarchy even as they adapt with the times or accommodate new racial and ethnic groups.  

We as people contain implicit biases that color our every interaction, unconscious judgments based on clothes, speech, skin color, etc. These prejudices have been part of America since the beginning and are built into its foundation. 

So what is our point? Our point is this: some of us have been so privileged that we’re able to sit back and deny the fact that we’re currently dealing with two terrible pandemics in our country, not one. 

We cannot sit back and pretend that racism is not one of them any longer. We need to educate. We need to inform. We need to empower. We need to open our minds, our eyes, and our hearts before opening our mouths. We need to stop pretending that we live in a post racial society. “Make America white again” was the slogan of the Ku Klux Klan commonly called the KKK, an American white supremacist hate group, whose primary target was African Americans. The slogan “Make America great again” is not a coincidence. When was America ever great for African Americans? Building a wall will not rid America of the “rapist and terrorists and drug dealers who are stealing our jobs” in this country. And equating those terms to immigrants and minorities is not only wrong but it simply is overtly racist. This was on purpose. A rhetoric was used to appeal to people who lost their jobs or who were simply used to privilege and thus experiencing a snapshot of equality under Obama felt like loss to them. Believe me, we understand that a lot of people reading this will pride themselves on the fact that they aren’t racist and never have been. However, as Angela Davis once said; “in a racist society, it is not enough to be non-racist, we must be anti-racist.” Our point is, it does not matter if you have never ever partaken in a racist act. If you’re living in this country today and you continue to remain silent, you are contributing to injustice. As Martin Luther King JR once said, “there comes a time when silence is betrayal.” If you’re not actively against racism today, you’re a part of the problem. 

As white females, we do not know and would never pretend to know or understand even half of what people of color and minorities face today. But we wrote this and our posting it because we stand with our brothers and sisters of color. We stand with ALL American citizens, all human beings. As John Romaniello said, “[we are] here and [we] want to get better, to be better. [We] know the people doing the real work, the deep social, cultural work, are too exhausted to have it placed on their shoulders to do the emotional labor of telling us when we are wrong. So it is on us to research on our own, read the books and articles and resources written by those who’ve personally experienced this, black men and women, and to keep ourselves and each other accountable.” These resources are powerful, eye-opening, and necessary to read. They do a powerful job showing how regardless of how hard people of color and minorities work to achieve their dreams, aspirations, and success, and as a result of factors and decisions completely out of their control, they are put at a SEVERE disadvantage in the race called life. 

In honor of George Floyd and the millions of others that have lost their lives because of the color of their skin, we are speaking up and out. 

Nobody should have to live their life in fear and nobody deserves a death like George Floyd and WAY too many others. Speaking up for injustice is long overdue for the rest of us. Not just today or tomorrow when it’s apparent and looks bad not to speak up… but for days, weeks, years, decades, and centuries to come. Because the fact of the matter is, the injustice that we are seeing today, the injustice that led us to write this post is not new. It has been present everywhere and the lived reality for people of color and minorities.  We must do our part. We must continue to show up, 365 days a year. We can’t let our brothers and sisters of color down, again. They need us. We must use our voices, do our research, educate ourselves, open our hearts, our minds, and our EYES to the facts and to the sad reality that racism will continue to exist, as it is embedded in the very confines of the society in which we live. Individuals are socialized into its use and thus it cannot be fixed overnight. Racism is not something that will just go away. Therefore, we can and must FIGHT AGAINST IT. As Nelson Mandela put it "No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite." We have been and are currently experiencing two life-threatening, terrible, pandemics in our country, and we can no longer sit back and ignore the fact that racism is one of them.

Yours Trulee <3