Hurray for safety pins. A way for the majority to put a foot forward and enter the conversation on discrimination. To signal a willingness to initiate dialogue instead of being a blank, white title page, contents unknown.
How does a white person start a conversation on discrimination while carefully treading on all the eggshells? There really should be a 'How to Talk about Racism for Dummies.'
Recently during the 2016 election, tensions over minority rights seem to have reached amazing new heights and don’t appear to be going away any time soon.
The U.S. has already renewed conversations on police brutality and race after a number of shootings of black Americans and in part thanks to the efforts of the movement Black Lives Matter drawing attention to racial inequality.
The words ‘Black Lives Matter’ make a strong statement as the title of a movement. It gets right to the point: black lives matter. However, the strong exclusivity and emphasis that makes ‘Black Lives Matter’ poignant, leaves a linguistic loophole forging the movement’s title into a double-edged sword in the ongoing battle against racism.
I’m talking about the ‘all lives matter’ comeback.
‘All lives matter’ can be seen as a cheap, shallow concession or a negation of the power of the issue and the very real statistics behind it. But it may also point to the desire of some whites to lay down the seemingly hereditary blame that comes with carrying the gift of being born with a light skin tone.
Guilt is not an emotion most people enjoy, and when coming face to face with the crisis of racial injustice in the U.S., there are white supporters of equality that struggle under its weight.
Granted, some people are just racist.
However, while attitudinal racism is a significant problem, white people cannot stop being white. And, I cringe as I write this, white people have troubles, too.
An interesting aspect of the current predicament is how to address attitudinal racism while laying the blame for it in the correct place - ignorance, unintended obliviousness, lack of experience.
And by ‘lack of experience’ I mean that even as a white American who has lived in areas where pale skin is a minority trait, I will never understand what it means to go through life as a black American.
So, for those who truly feel ‘all lives matter,’ let’s wear some safety pins and engage in vergangenheitsbewältigung, people.
The Germans created this lovely word post WWII and, roughly translated, it means ‘the process of coming to terms with the past.’
Perhaps a bit more elegant than the phrase ‘collective guilt’ sometimes used in English when referring to certain aspects of German cultural inheritance after the end of the Nazi regime.
Vergangenheitsbewältigung is part of a German cultural acknowledgement of the past as an important lesson, but also the process of moving forward from those events while not forgetting them.
Black Lives Matter is seeking reparations from the government and other institutions for years of unfulfilled promise and subpar treatment.
But for the individual white American, what debt is owed our fellow black citizens? How do we compensate them for an advantage of birth that cannot be given away as easily as money?
The potential answers to that question can be inspirational to crushingly overwhelming for a single person to contemplate on their own.
There are ‘majority’ Americans that already actively support minorities - with or without a safety pin. And there are allies taking part in the conversation on diversity and equality despite perhaps not fully understanding the stakes. Of what it means to not be white or Christian or straight.
Hopefully, safety pin movement supporters will be able to keep the focus of the conversation where it rightfully belongs: on how to end discrimination.
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