To my fellow white Americans I have one word:
Lean
Into the past.
The mark your ancestors left on the backs
Of the black and otherwise non-white people of this country.
Lean
Into the mud
Of your own family line.
I remember giving praise to my great grandfather of the early 1900s…
Sharing a story of how a black man saved his life
And in return he gave him ownership of a drug store.
Proof of the good faith that had formed.
But I didn’t find out until I was 28,
that this same grandfather had been in the KKK.
Lean!
Into the fact that It’s not okay to rise up the good, without looking at the bad.
The history of my bloodline washed clean
Only showing what we want to see…
When the reality
Is that we were part of the problem too.
Lean!
Into the facts
That the white generations before us are responsible for committing acts
that wiped out
Entire families
Bloodlines
And the history
Of the non-white communities.
Lean!
Savages we called them.
Heathens.
In need of a cleansing.
Slavery. Reservations. Internment camps.
To keep them in place.
But we never built a jail to lock in our racist hate.
If we had
We would still hear native tongues speaking in these lands.
We wouldn’t have left out black names from the history books.
We would not have black men dying in the streets,
A cop’s knees blocking out the air they breathe
for the sake of a fake $20 bill.
When white men might only be in jail for 3 months for rape.
Lean!!
Into the stats
That show
That poverty rates ranked from high to low:
Native American, Black American, Hispanic American
Lean!!
Black Americans are incarcerated at 5 times the rate of the white.
We haven’t ended oppression, we just keep moving it around to hide.
Slavery, lynching, segretation, and now the criminal justice system.
Black and white people use drugs at similar rates,
but the imprisonment rate of African Americans for drug charges is almost 6 times that of whites.
Lean!!!
Into the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act
Which gave mandatory minimums for drug offences.
Eat the facts:
Crack cocaine and powder cocaine are basically the same,
But
Crack = black people
Powder = white people.
Yet 5 grams of crack gets you 5 years in prison while
It took 500 grams of powder cocaine to get the same sentence.
This didn’t change until 2010.
Lean!!!
A criminal record can reduce the likelihood of a job offer by nearly 50%.
So when we put that non-white person in jail for having a half gram of weed
How is he
Supposed to get back on his feet
In a country that is already out to exploit him.
It’s easy to judge someone joining a gang,
Until you realize we stripped them of an easy way out.
Lean!!!
Because we have to lean into the uncomfortable realities that face us.
We have to care!
We have to take a stand
And lay bare
The changes that need to take place.
This country is not great,
Until it is great for everyone.
Make America great, is all that should be said.
There is no “again”
Until it first begins
And we are not there yet.
Resources:
- https://www.povertyusa.org/facts
- https://www.naacp.org/criminal-justice-fact-sheet/
- https://www.aclu.org/other/cracks-system-20-years-unjust-federal-crack-cocaine-law
- https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/sep/02/brock-turner-released-jail-sexual-assault-stanford