Black Lives Matter

…and what you can do about it.

By Ingi Mehus. Haarlem, 08/06/2020.

It’s heart-warming to see the global calls for unity.

But.

It’s not enough to protest police officers or American culture. It’s easy to be outraged by others and focus on elsewhere.

What do we know about our own personal privileges and institutional racism❓

Black author Ijeoma Oluo asks “White people: I don’t want you to understand me better; I want you to understand yourselves. Your survival has never depended on your knowledge of white culture. In fact, it required your ignorance.” Don’t tell me that you’re open-minded, progressive, colour-blind, or educated. I told myself this for years and it made me even more ignorant. The closer you are to blackness, the more profound will be the oppression. As an Asian woman I’ve had my share of racism, but I’ve personally never experienced the #DeadlyOppression of Black people. 

I want to talk about the differences between prejudice, discrimination, racism - and ultimately about privilege. This is from white author and researcher, Robin Diangelo:

#Prejudice is pre-judgement about another person based on their social groups. It consists of thoughts and feelings, including stereotypes, attitudes, and generalisations that are based on little or no experience and then are projected into everyone from that group.

🌍 All humans have prejudice.

#Discrimination is action based on prejudice, like ignoring, exclusion, threats, ridicule, slander, and violence. Most of us can acknowledge that we do feel some unease around certain groups of people, if only heightened sense of self-consciousness. But this feeling doesn’t come naturally. It comes from living separate from a group of people while simultaneously absorbing incomplete or erroneous information about them. When the prejudice causes me to act differently – I’m less relaxed around you or I avoid interacting with you – I’m now discriminating.

🌍Everyone has prejudice and everyone discriminates.

#Racism: When a racial group’s collective prejudice is backed by the power of legal authority and institutional control, it is transformed into racism. It’s a structure, not an event. It goes well beyond individuals. Let’s take women’s suffrage as an example: While historically women could discriminate against men in individual circumstances, women as a group couldn’t deny men their civil rights. Men on the other hand, controlled the institutions and therefore they could deny women their civil rights. The only way women could gain suffrage was for men to grant it to them.

❗️❗️ In US and Europe, people of colour may also prejudice and discriminate against white people, but they lack the social and institutional power that transforms their prejudice and discrimination into racism.

This is white #privilege. 

Suleqo Yusuf goes on to explain: “If talking about racism, white privilege, and supremacy makes you uncomfortable and is the reason you are staying silent, then that is a perfect example of your privilege. Your privilege to ignore the injustice, murder and oppression of black people due to your feelings. The rest of us have to live with the consequences of white supremacy daily and we cannot shut it off like some of you can! Black lives matter more than your feelings! Now is the time to stand up for what is right! No matter how inconvenient and uncomfortable that might be for some of you. This isn’t about you it’s about all of us! Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere!”

Let me be clear, just because you have some privilege doesn’t mean that you don’t face personal struggles and barriers (of course you do!). It also doesn’t mean you’re a bad person. It means that you live in a system that gives you an unfair starting point to others. This can only be changed if it’s first acknowledged and then acted upon.

Support the Black Lives Matter movements and learn more about your own privileges. Here are some of my favourite resources:

🖤 White Fragility by Robin Diangelo. I got recommended from Revolution Books in Harlem, New York last year and I cannot recommend this enough. You can also read more about Diangelo’s work here.

🖤 Blacklivesmatters.com

🖤 Discover why AllLivesMatter hashtag is racist.

🖤 Black Heritage Tours Amsterdam by Jennifer Tosch

“Being pro-black doesn’t mean that we are anti-white” - Jennifer Tosch🖤