Black lives matter. Complete sentence, end of story.
This week will look different for my notes to self, because it just will. Maybe it will only be two days or three or maybe it’ll be every day or none at all. (I might surprise everyone and write four). I do know this: right now, every time I feel an assumption rising in my throat, I remind myself that I must reshape it into a question. Who is being violent, and why? Who is blaming violence, and why?
This is a disruption—in the same urgent way that the words “listen to me” disrupt silence. In the same way that those words have been disrupting silence for hundreds of years, but we have chosen to not hear them. White people with white privilege have been disrupted in our destruction, and are clinging to that destruction like a security blanket—but who will we be if we are not what we are?
I can’t stop thinking about the looting. (Before anything else, I must ask: who is looting? Who is vandalizing? How many videos have I seen of people not upholding this cause as dearly as it should be upheld? Who is an ally, and who is not?)
When it’s not revolution cosplay, I hear echoes in both ears about how that’s where the line is drawn; like that is where the cause becomes invalid. Like that is where we hop from one square of an Instagram post to the next, swapping over to whichever side makes us feel most comfortable. Who are we parroting when we say “yeah, but the looting is just too far”? Big businesses have insurance. For the local ones, we can donate and rebuild. We can help support those around us who’ve lost their jobs because of it, because—look!—we’re already doing that.
Saying that people in pain are only in pain until we’d rather go to CVS for a kombucha is not the move. And allowing people of privilege to decide who is good and who is bad is the poison that caused this.
Here is where I remind myself to do better. Wield my privilege for people outside of myself, and then smelt it down—give it up. Question everything on the news, believe lived experiences.
And to not slip quietly back into posting about sourdough bread.
Next Steps: Drink a glass of water, and do better today than you did yesterday. Repeat forever.