White Privilege: Starting a Difficult Conversation at a Moment of Reckoning

“Start now. Start where you are. Start with fear. Start with pain. Start with doubt. Start with hands shaking. Start with voice trembling but start. Start and don’t stop. Start where you are, with what you have. Just… start.”― Ijeoma Umebinyuo Photo credit: The White Supremacy Iceberg, Safehouse Progressive Alliance for Nonviolence

In my waspy middle-class family, we avoid difficult conversations.

We don’t talk about the elephant under the rug. We serve cocktails on its back, engaging in “polite” conversation about “safe topics” as the pachyderm looms ever larger through lack of acknowledgment. Through lack of witnessing.

It’s like if we don’t talk about it, it’s not really there.

With all that is going on in our country — all that I am witnessing — I can no longer sit in silence about an elephant hiding in plain sight under our red, white, and blue carpet. An elephant that at this point is the size of a mammoth. The mammoth that is white privilege.

Because silence is complicity.

Because silence is violence.

Because silence is death.

Because silence in the face of racial injustice in and of itself is a white privilege.

I have huge reservations even broaching this topic in private conversation much less attempting to write thoughtfully and intelligently about it for public consumption. I’ve only just begun to really look at it, to learn about it, to reflect on it.

It’s telling that the first real conversation I had about race and white…