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I grew up in a household hearing racial slurs, where my mom would correct my father and say,
"we don't, that's, that's not a nice thing to say, you know, about those people." I guess
you can see it most when you watch the Fourth of July parades, Confederate flags will appear
in the Boy Scout troops. When I was younger I really didn't know what that meant, but
I sort of got that I was supposed to stay away from people of color, particularly black
people. That they were going to take something from me, they were going to hurt me in some
way. In college, I once went to a--an event and I approached a young African American
male who had spoken very beautifully at this gathering and I said, "I want to help, how
can I help?" You know? How can I help promote change in equality for African Americans and
for all people of color? And he just turned to me and he said, "Educate your own people."
Are you ready to go? Yes! Everybody get into groups, One. Two. I didn't want to be the
bad guy, I didn't want to be the person that causes pain that causes hurt. I didn't want
to be the guy says stupid stuff, that makes people mad at me. So I try to distance myself
from that, tried to deny that I was white. I realized that my struggle was around being
white and not wanting to be white and trying to run away from it. That, I couldn't run
away from it and so the question was if I have to have this privilege, what am I gonna
do with it? What would happen to privilege if racial justice actually existed? Is that
possible? And I don't know. I think we can all be bigots. I think being a bigot is an
equal opportunity phenomenon. But, in order to create a system or systemic institutionalized
privilege you have to have prejudice plus the power to institutionalize that prejudice,
to put it into laws to put it into actions, policies, procedures. If white people don't
stand up and don't learn to be allies to people of color, we definitely are going to have
a very very difficult time ever attaining anything even remotely resembling a just community
and we may not get there anyway, I mean it's very possible that racism will never be, you
know, fully eradicated from this or any other society but we're certain that it won't be
if we don't do the work. I wanna end racism because it destroyed my family and I don't
want it to destroy other people's families. Intimacy is this radical concept that when
we can get there, either as allies across our lines, that have been so implicated from
such a young age. There is power to change the world with that, there's incredible power.