So, What's a Person to Do?

This blog post contains personal musings on race, racism, equity, and inclusion prompted by my own thinking and continual education and especially How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X Kendi. This is written with the primary purpose of working through my own thoughts and learnings, but if it's helpful to you in some way, all the better!

These past few months have brought recognition of my own privilege, bias, and racism in new and dramatic ways (for examples see these posts: How I'm Learning from Black Lives Matter, On Representativeness). I've been reading both fiction and non-fiction about the Black experience (lots of great resources in this Qualtrics blog) and I find myself returning back to where I started, with questions of what to do and how to help.

I do believe the change has to start with me. Thoughtfully choosing new voices to hear, voices that come from experiences well outside of my own, and voices that are often suppressed or dismissed continues to be illuminating and challenges my assumptions. Learning about definitions of racism and finding vocabulary and voice to some of the swirling questions within me matures my own thinking.

But I also believe that suasion (my own or even that of large portions of society) is insufficient to create lasting change. I have become newly committed to choosing a side in the battle of racism, and I'm firmly on the anti-racist side. There's no neutral in this battle - we are each either creating or dismantling racism.

In How to Be an Antiracist, Ibram X Kendi says that, "Changing minds is not activism" - instead, activism is power and policy change. It also means that the most lasting investment we can make in this very moment is in funding and advocating for policy and power change instead of programs that touch and enrich the individual lives of oppressed or suppressed people. True, this isn't an either-or scenario - we can invest in enriching individual lives, changing individual minds, and changing power and policy. But think that when investing with limited resources, this is the time to create policies that actively create equity.

And (stepping in a minefield here, but it's worth it because important to work these things through), to me that's the difference between something like Black Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter. Do police lives matter? Yes! Police do a hard and dangerous job with lots of baggage and little recognition. The difference is that, in general, the safety and security of individual officers is not suppressed by power and policies. Police safety is endangered by the actions of individuals, not government-created and funded laws and systems. Black lives are endangered, shortened, violated and suppressed by government-created and funded laws and systems.

There's so much I'm still working through on this - for example, how do economic systems and capitalism fit into this mesh of racism? I don't have answers there. 

But I do know the system is rigged and it's predominantly rigged in my favor. And I get to be a part of changing those power structures and policies that created and perpetuate a racist America.