A LOVE LETTER TO WHITE PEOPLE

Feeling Rebloggy

Joseph Osmundson wrote,

White people, I love you. I really do. Not because I am a white person myself. This is not a story of self-love, although those can be important. This proclamation is not an attempt to subvert power structures that disavow love of white bodies. No, love of white bodies and selves, that is the norm, so hidden in plain sight that it is rarely given a racial identity at all.

We are so afraid of talking about race. We almost always believe racism is a thing that other people do. Talking about race and our own racism is ugly, and it implicates us in terrible things. But love without honesty is infatuation. If we want to love ourselves and each other we have to admit to the worst amongst us and claim the worst within us. I want to do this work.

White America, America full stop, I am trying to love you in a different way, an honest way, a way that provokes a dialog, a way that requires progressive change. I love you, and we need to do better. James Baldwin said, “Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.” White people, it’s time we grow up.

Who am I and what am I doing here?  

I read The Autobiography of Malcolm X embarrassingly late in life, at 28....X, it turns out, was also reading me.

“I sure don’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings,” he wrote,“but in fact I’ll even go so far as to say that I never really trust the kind of white people who are always so anxious to hang around Negroes, or to hang around Negro communities.”

I looked around me. In the heart of hipster Williamsburg, the pool was filled with people of color. I turned back to Malcolm. 

“I tell sincere white people, ‘Work in conjunction with us – each of us working among our own kind.’ Let sincere white individuals find all other white people they can who feel as they do – and let them form their own all-white groups, to work trying to convert other white people who are thinking and acting so racist.  Let sincere white people go and teach non-violence to white people!” (emphasis added)

While I believe that white people do have a role to play in the fight for racial justice, simply unpacking our invisible backpacks of privilege is necessary but not sufficient...

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http://www.thefeministwire.com/2013/09/love-letter-to-white-people/