White folks, what are we doing to fight anti-Blackness, really?

I’m restraining my anger right now, I’m trying so hard not to make demands for our society to be a pheonix, trying so hard not to say “burn it to the ground and we’ll rebuild from the ashes” but what I know is that there were protests and “anti racist book clubs” and demanding change from elected officials and those goddamned performative blackout boxes and yet still so much actual work that’s been done, yet here we are.

So many lives snuffed out. So many murdered for being Black. So much pain because we white Americans can’t get our shit together, can’t get past the racist looting narrative, can’t stop trying to find ways to center ourselves and our feelings, can’t let go of this false dichotomy of racist and anti-racist as NOUN or ADJECTIVE long enough to examine ourselves and recognize that racist and anti-racist are VERBS, that it is a constant project you work on by looking at the parts of yourself or the people you love, the things you are scared of, and acknowledge them and change them. Holding ourselves and our white families and friends and coworkers and lovers and acquaintances and ducking everyone accountable isn’t a thought exercise, it is literally life or death. And holding the inaction and the turning away accountable as well.

This past summer I tried this thing where on Mondays I’d ask white friends to share an anti-racist action they were taking, and I’d share, and so few people actually responded and shared themselves, so I ended up stopping. I, quite honestly, decided it was a failed tactic and not getting anywhere. That is on me and says not great things about my own lacking sense of urgency or distraction or, honestly, faith in the people around me, even in this virtual social world that’s taken over our lives… but I don’t want to turn this into a confessional.

Because I want to talk about you, white friends of mine.

I want to talk about us, white liberal/progressive people, collectively.

I want to really get to the root of what it is that’s stopping us from acting. I want to deal with the “allyship fatigue” shit I saw floating around Twitter and on Instagram and even here, as if someone was asking white people to run a marathon without breathing or taking breaks when no one was — that was our guilt talking, but what it did was give white people an excuse to stop, as if it was too hard, as if something being hard is an excuse to stop, as if it isn’t a ducking privilege and say “fighting for justice and equity and Black people’s safety is exhausting, I’m gonna take a break now.” I want to get to the root of what’s stopping us, while women especially, from risking making other white people uncomfortable or maybe even angry by asking the questions that need to be asked or sharing truths we think might make us unpopular or annoying or unliked or unloved. I want an answer to why a letter — that took weeks of discussion and debate and writing and revising — to a leader in the literary and academic community demanding she make change, got such a bullshit non-response my teeth still grind whenever I think about it. I want to dig into why the white Jewish literary community turned on a Jewish Black author in our midst for — respectfully, lovingly, welcomingly — shining a light on the racist ugliness in our community, when we should have fucking thanked her for it. I want to really challenge this idea that being called out or called in or, god forbid, canceled for a racism we did, a hurt we caused, is mean or bullying or unkind when truly the kindest thing you can do for someone is to help them see the parts of themselves they need to fix. I want to work on this tendency to divorce actor from action, agent from agency, in not just the media but also in our own interactions, so that we stop using a million words to tiptoe around the truth, so we stop saying “a weapon discharged” or “a young boy died” to “an officer of the law — someone we’ve been trained to believe is supposed to serve and protect — killed a young boy before he got to live.”

I want us to take accountability for our actions and language, at least for me, is such a huge part of that. I want us to act, and to realize that sometimes action is internal, and also realize that internal action is not passive, that listening and learning is active but rings hollow when used as a way to avoid honesty.

This probably sounds like a lot of yelling and lecturing and criticizing and that’s because it is. I’m usually careful with my “gentle reminders” because I don’t want to come off as preachy because I don’t think it works, but gentleness or using myself and personalizing this in the hopes it would encourage other people to do the same isn’t working. I am yelling and I am lecturing and I’m criticizing because what I feel is love and, honestly, faith that we can be honest with ourselves and we can get better and we can do better, and I know that people are doing the work but it isn’t enough and the reason why we know this is because George Floyd’s girlfriend was Daunte Wright’s former teacher, and they are both gone. We know this because Adam Toledo’s family is grieving right now, in unspeakable, unimaginable pain, when they didn’t have to be. This is preventable. This is changeable. This is not fixed. Society can change but we need to change it, and individual, internal change can happen concurrently with systemic, public change.

I don’t have answers. I mostly have questions. Maybe just one:

White people, what anti-racist actions have you taken today?