Dear White People: This is Your Job.

This post inspired by Spectra’s article in Huffington Post, “Dear White Allies: Stop Unfriending Other White People Over Ferguson.”

Dear White People:

This is my son.

He is eleven years old and in the fifth grade. He is the youngest of my three children. He is brilliant, funny, and caring. He loves Legos and Star Wars and will play video games all day long. Sometimes he goes outside to play with the neighborhood kids – riding bikes, playing basketball, and sometimes pretending to shoot each other with toy guns.

I bet Tamir Rice was a lot like that.

I wonder if he would have come over to play Xbox with my son. Would they have argued over which Avenger character to be, like his other friends do? I can envision Tamir and my son playing together in the yard, leaving their bikes in the driveway, chasing each other down the street while shooting Nerf bullets at each other. I can picture them practicing shooting at the hay target we had set up against the garage all last summer at my mom’s house.

My teenage daughter used that hay target against the garage to practice shooting (real) arrows.

None of the neighbors ever called the cops, because everyone already knows that white girls are not dangerous, right?

Once, my son and a 13 year old neighbor boy got into a fight. Regrettably, my son threw a rock at the other kid’s head. (My son has an impulse control problem for which he receives counseling.) The police were called, all parties were questioned, and the officers left, brushing it off as “boys will be boys.” This is how white boys are treated by the cops.

Tamir Rice was playing in the park with his pellet gun, when the police showed up and shot him. This is how black boys are treated by the cops.

It scares me that one of my son’s friends could be shot by police. I can’t imagine the fear experienced by the mothers of these same children. I don’t know what it would be like to have to teach my son how not to get killed by a policeman when he leaves the house. How do you raise a child to protect themselves from the protectors? I teach my son to ask a police officer for help if he gets lost in public. Other women have to teach their sons how to respond to a police stop and search.

I think it is too easy for us in the white community to ignore the problems of police brutality and racism. We have an option to look away which other people don’t have. It is easier to blame the victim, or talk about the incidence of crime in the African-American population, as I have heard many people do, than to stand up for change. We have been hearing about black people dying on the news for years…what’s one more? It is too easy to see it as not our problem, or to dehumanize the victims. We are ignoring the fact that people are dying. White Americans have to stop thinking of the deceased victims as dangerous criminals who got what they deserved – they are other women’s kids. Young men that used to be the classmates of our sons and daughters are dying. Little boys with dark skin who smiled bright smiles when you brought cupcakes to school on your kid’s birthday are dying. Little boys who stood next to yours at fifth grade graduation, in sharp suits or rumpled uniforms, are dying. The little boys for whom you clapped at each recital, band concert, or talent show, are dying.

Not only do we have a responsibility to do something, but we are in a unique position of having the power to do something. In the Nursing Leadership class for my BSN program, we studied change theory. In the Complex Adaptive Systems change theory, Olsen and Eoyang identify the most powerful components of change in a complex system to be the interactions and relationships of people at the bottom of the ladder, rather than at the top. We have to stop relying on the government to fix the problem, because they can’t. Nurses are trained to influence behavior change in health promotion and education activities, but those same theories can be used to influence change in belief systems. Lewin’s Theory states that in order for change to occur, driving forces for change must be greater than restraining forces (barriers) for change.

It is your job to have the uncomfortable conversations with your in-laws and co-workers. The people who are being oppressed are not there at Christmas dinner to argue on their own behalf when your crazy uncle starts talking about how “black people shoot each other all the time, but one white cop does it and everyone riots.” It is up to each individual person to change the attitudes of the people with whom they interact each day. White people who think that you share the same racist attitudes will reveal themselves to you in the comments that they make. We all know these people. It is your job not to let it slide anymore because you don’t want to be controversial. It is your job to call them out and let them know that is not okay. It is your job to be the driving force.