racism

How to Be Less White

~ Randy Blazak ~ Leave a comment

April 6, 2023

White supremacy is a real thing. Let me be more specific, white supremacy in 2023 is a very real thing. And it’s not just Klansmen and whoever pays the “Blacks for Trump” guy to stand behind the GOP’s favorite felon at every rally. It’s in all of us who have grown up in a society that brainwashes us to believe “white” is the standard to judge all other races by. If you think Jesus Christ was a white dude, you are a victim of internalized white supremacy. And White Jesus has done more damage than any Klan rally ever could.

I shouldn’t have to convince you of the damage all this white supremacy has done on people of color. From the Mexican-American woman who is considered “fiery” Latina to the black man bleeding in the middle of the street because police assumed he had a gun, and a trillion other examples of micro-aggressions, discrimination, bias crimes, and hate groups dreaming of genocide, I shouldn’t have to convince you. But if you are a white person who thinks racism magically vanished in the 1960s and all this is liberal fantasy, just read any account by a person of color. (I have been reminded that it is not black people’s job to educate white people about reality.) And don’t you dare say, “I was raised to be colorblind,” because you weren’t.

This isn’t about how white supremacy hurts BIPOC folks. It’s about how white supremacy hurts white folks.

As a feminist scholar, much of my work centers around how patriarchy hurts men. Yes, we benefit greatly from it, but it also squeezes us into a small box called “masculinity,” where you better not “cry like a girl,” and solving a problem “like men” means beating the shit out of each other. There’s a reason women live, on average, seven years longer than men. Whether it’s young men popping wheelies in crotch rockets on the interstate or older men not going to the doctor to have that lump looked at, men’s internalized sexism presents them infinite stupid ways to die. We are afraid to be vulnerable and it is killing us in droves.

Similarly, white supremacy puts us white people in a bland box. The monster of American assimilation screams at non-WASPs to do their damndest to look, think, act, pray, and eat as WASPy as possible. But his “melting pot” con also burns people of European origin. It tells them to give up their ethnic identity and morph into this imaginary, but powerful, thing called “white people.” How many times have you heard a white person describe themselves as an ethnic “mutt”? Whites gain entry into an elite county club but the price is their beautiful culture.

The category of white people is a relatively recent invention. There were no white people before the late 17th century. There were European people but there were no white people because there are no people who are the color white. (Ghosts not withstanding.) White people were invented to distinguish themselves from “black” Africans (who are also not the color black) to rationalize the dehumanization of Africans for the purpose of chattel slavery. The invention assured that even the most impoverished white person would perpetually hold power over the masses of earthlings now defined as “non-white.”

So how can we help “white” people escape the yoke of slave master?

There are three parts to this strategy. The first two must be undertaken before the third can even be considered as an option. The first is the need to acknowledge the expansive privilege that goes along with being considered white. Not only are you white folks more likely to get the job and less likely to be profiled by the police, you’re more likely to not have to think about the issue of race. Ever. This extends to the shade bias of colorism. Barack Obama has had it a lot easier than Jesse Jackson. My bi-racial daughter presents as “white,” and will escape much of the hell her Mexican cousins would endure in the same settings.

Second is the importance of taking an active anti-racist life position. Don’t tell me, “I’m not a racist.” That’s crap. Internalized white supremacy makes us all racist to a degree. I am a life-long anti-racist educator. I would never say I’m not racist. The question is, what are you doing to fight the evil of racism? And if you are “white,” what are you doing to dismantle your privilege? If you are a liberal white person and you think listening to Beyoncé and putting a Black Lives Matter sign in your yard is enough, you are part of the problem. Roll up your damn sleeves and get to work, even if is just unpacking your own internalized white supremacy.

OK, here’s the payoff that will make your white lives matter. Stop thinking of yourself as a white person and reclaim your ethnicity!

Even if you are “mutt,” you have an ethnic identity somewhere in your family line. And ethnicity, unlike race, is culture and food and music and history and celebration. My last name, Blazak, is an Americanized Slavic name. My great grandfather came to America in 1891 from Prague (at the time part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) and the assimilation started. My mother’s family were English immigrants in the 1770s. According to genetic test 23 and Me, I’m a quarter Czech and a whole bunch of other stuff (including 1% middle eastern!). So I chose Slavic as my primary cultural identity.

Rediscovering my Slavic roots has been liberating, from diving into the rich history of Czechoslovakian literature to helping my daughter make Polish pierogis each Christmas, there is so much to uncover. The de-assimilation includes learning about my family’s buried Catholic history and the heroism of my Slavic cousins in tearing down the Iron Curtain. I first travelled to Prague in 1991 and immediately felt a part of the land of the Velvet Revolution. My connection to that people was a major factor in my decision to head to Ukraine last spring to help people who physically looked like many family members. I learned, while I was there, that there is a small Polish town on the Ukraine border called Błażek, the likely starting place of my great grandfather’s clan. I don’t have to suffer from ethnic envy. I have an ethnicity and it’s wonderful. (Now if I could just perfect the polka.)

White people get a small version of this every St. Patrick’s Day, when they struggle to identify some lone Irish chromosome in their DNA. “My great grandmother’s wet nurse was from Killarney! Give me a beer!” On March 17th each year, white people briefly discover they are “ethnic.” What if we did that everyday?

There’s a good chance that if you are in the white people club, you have more than one ethic history in your family tree. That’s even better. Spend some time shopping from the menu and pick the one that most speaks to you. (Helpful hint: Pick the one with the best food and the fewest slave traders.) “White pride” is racist A.F., but “French pride” is cool as shit! Start finding restaurants, festivals and events that cater to your new ethnicity. You will see me every August at Portland’s Polish Festival drinking pilsners with my fellow Slavs, gorging on plates of latkes.

So stop being white. You have so much to gain by being your chosen ethnicity. And if you are adopted, even better! Just choose a random ethnicity out of a hat! (I might suggest Czech as a good option.) Stop with the self-defeating “mutt” business that forgoes your rich ethnic history for the power mad invention of whiteness.

Racists often ask me, “Why do you hate white people?” Obviously, I don’t. I hate whiteness and what that social construction has levied on the world. Europeans and European-Americans have done many amazing things. The invention of the bidet, for example. White people, as a category, have propped up centuries of violent oppression. That’s not a club I want to be a part of.

So help me destroy it.

Foreshadowing Fascism: The Spike in Anti-Semitism is Bigger than Trump and Kanye

~ Randy Blazak ~ 1 Comment

December 7, 2022

Every December 7th, we remember the 1941 attack on Japan by imperialist Japan. December 7th, 1941 is also the date that Hitler made his “Nacht und Nebel” (Night and Fog) decree, the order that instructed the Gestapo to round up all the enemies of Nazism in the lands controlled by Berlin, and send them to concentration camps. Sadly, many of those who supported Hitler’s anti-Semitic vision were political activists in the United States. That included aviation hero Charles Lindbergh, spokesperson of the America First Committee, founded in 1940. Four days after Pearl Harbor, Hitler declared war on the United States, declaring that Franklin Roosevelt was a spawn of the “eternal Jew.”

It’s important to remember that the Holocaust didn’t begin with gas chambers. It began with anti-Semitic hate speech. The fact that former president and current presidential candidate Donald Trump gleefully dines with anti-Semites like Kanye West and Nick Fuentes, tells Proud Boys to stand by, refers to the neo-Nazis of Charlottesville as “fine people,” and has routinely retweeted disinformation from white supremacist accounts should exclude him from any political credibility whatsoever. Instead, it places him in the center of right-wing politics that has always had its right foot in the mud of anti-Semitism. Blaming the Jews isn’t back. It never went away. It’s now just got a media platform so expansive it would make Father Coughlin drool on his frock.

First, let’s dispense with a crucial piece of bullcrap. Saying, “I can’t be anti-Semitic, I support Israel!” is like saying, “I can’t be racist, I support the Lakers!” Support for Israel is not the same as support for Jewish people (including Jews who are critical of the state of Israel). Evangelicals see Jews as “unsaved people,” who are just getting the Holy Land ready for the return of Jesus. MAGA support for Israel is inherently anti-Semitic. So it shouldn’t be surprising that the MAGA subculture has plenty of neo-Nazis, like Nick Fuentes, it its ranks.

This isn’t about Trump and “Ye.” There has been a dramatic increase in anti-Semitic hate crimes and incidents over the last few years. The ADL reported that 2021 was the highest year on record for anti-Semitic incidents and 2022 looks like it could end up worse. Oregon has already logged 257 bias crimes and incidents with Jewish victims this year. Just last month, New York City saw a 125% increase in hate attacks targeting Jews over the previous November. Trump and Kanye just make it more acceptable for those people to come out of the shadows.

While the Jewish people have a long history of oppression, the Adolph Hitler/Kanye West version of anti-Semitism has a fairly recent starting point. The 1789 French Revolution not only brought the promise of democracy to Europe, and the end of the divine right of kings, it emancipated French Jews, making them full French citizens. So when the defenders of church and monarchy needed a convenient scapegoat to blame the revolutionary chaos on, the “anti-Christian” Jews were an easy target. Aside from the fact that European Jews had a fairly good reason to not be fans of the Catholic Church, Jewish participation in the French Revolution was fairly minimal. And yet a new myth was born; the pro-democracy/anti-church rule movements around the globe were the work of secret cabal of Jewish rabbis. The puppet masters; controllers of banks, media outlet, competing political parties, and all things liberal.

This new belief that Jews “control the world” spread like wildfire as the old empires began to crumble. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the bizarre conspiracy theory was codified in a supposedly real (but fully fabricated) document, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It was used to blame the Russian Revolution on Jews and used by Henry Ford to blame unionization efforts on the “international Jew” (the title of a series of booklets Ford wrote in the 1920s). The conspiracy theory became equally popular among jihadists and Neo-Nazis into the twenty-first century. We are almost a quarter of the way through the century and Trump acolyte Kanye West’s proclamation that “I like Hitler” on disgraced conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ show barely sparks a response from the Learned Elders of the Republican Party. That should make the world say, collectively, we’ve seen this movie before.

Volumes have been written on how the authoritarian tendencies of Donald Trump map on to other nations’ slide into fascist rule. American democracy is not guaranteed and Trump’s recent claim that the U.S. Constitution should be “terminated” is straight-up Germany 1933. All we need is an economic collapse to send the “stable middle” into a panicked blame-game and a charismatic figure to convince them that all their problems are because of George Soros/drag queens/woke bankers/deep state agents and we’ve got pogroms in the streets of America; the Proud Boys and their ilk, who have been on “standby,” leading the charge to “make America great again.”

This might seem like a lot of hysteria but let me conclude with two thoughts. Every single Jewish person has a deep personal connection to the violence of anti-Semitism. Every news story about a synagogue covered in swastika graffiti, or about Jewish people attacked just walking down the street, or another “crazy” claim about Jews by an popstar who has 16 million followers on Instagram is a reminder of the long history in the belief that the complete annihilation of the Jewish people is a good thing that is both dreamed about and acted upon. The trauma of living in that world must be immense and yet the Jewish people continue to contribute to a world that imagines destroying them.

Finally, as I’ve written, earlier this year, I spent a snowy April day at the Auschwitz and Birkenau death camps in Poland. After walking though the gates that still read, “Arbeit Macht Frei” (Work sets you free), I suffered my first panic attack, realizing that it was all very real. A population, motivated by fear, was willing to commit mass genocide. Children, like my daughter, were ripped from their parents arms and thrown into the fire pits of Birkenau. Why? Because they were “dirty Jews.” I stood on that spot and wept. Because, unlike what certain guests at Mar-a-Lago believe, the Holocaust happened. And, like certain guests at Mar-a-Lago hope, it could happen again.

We must stand together against this insanity or it will be our children who will be thrown into the fire pits.

Panic in Auschwitz: Putting the Present Moment in Context

~ Randy Blazak ~ 5 Comments

“The present moment began with fire. And still, it burns.” – Ben Okri, Nigerian poet

April 2, 2022

Once again, I find myself in a white van, crossing the, now snow-covered, fields of southern Poland. My very first record, Elvis Presley’s “Burning Love” is playing on the radio. The lyrics hit at an odd angle, “I just might turn to smoke.” Because we are headed to Auschwitz. Seeing the upside down world of April Fools Day, I try to make a joke with my fellow passengers, but my wartime dark humor is not received well. I was scolded earlier in the week for posting that the guy who was snoring in the bomb shelter we were sharing in Lviv, Ukraine made me pray for a bomb. I get it. But humor is also a way to cope with the endless trauma of this world. The DJ, sharing my skewed take on the day, next spins Ella Fitzgerald singing, “Let it Snow,” a Christmas classic in April.

Maybe the awkwardness was to prepare my brain for what was to come. How does one plan a day-trip to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi death camps? How do you transition from this moment to that one? I’ve been a student of the Holocaust for as long as I can remember and lectured about the camps for 30 years. In my recent Research Methods class at the University of Oregon, I presented gut wrenching evidence of how Auschwitz doctor Josef Mengele perverted the values of science in a sadistic attempt to demonstrate Aryan superiority. My life’s work revolves around studying neo-Nazis who both pretend to believe the Holocaust never happened and fantasize about perpetuating similar acts of genocide. The previous day, I had wandered around Krakow’s old Jewish district that had been emptied of Jews by the Nazis, except for the lucky few who were rescued by Oskar Schindler. It was important for me to do this.

The van carried a varied lot, an English couple from Birmingham, a Norwegian couple, a young German woman who must have been filled with dread and her English friend who puked, on and off, during the hour drive from Krakow because she had had too many shots of vodka the night before. Our driver, who went by Mike, was wise enough to ease us into the arrival into hell. He took us to his “secret location,” which was an abandoned box car on a track between the Auschwitz and Birkenau camps that had been used to carry the doomed to their final destination. There, in the snow, I began to slip through time.

Auschwitz is where it is because Oświęcim, Poland was a railroad hub, and industrial town that could manage the importation of countless slave laborers and then the millions who were to be exterminated. It still feels like such a town, ringed with McDonalds and KFCs when you arrive. For better or worst, the area around the camps has been preserved in amber. When we arrived at the Auschwitz tour center, with the crematorium chimneys visible behind it, snow fell gently down, smelling cleaner than the ash that fell 80 years earlier. In the gift shop, I bought a copy of Ellie Wiesel’s Night and watched the other tourists. Some stared somberly, some teenagers laughed, as teenagers do, and a group of Israeli students, draped in their flag, did both. I held my breath.

My group got their headsets so we could better hear our tour guide, a Polish woman in her late sixties who had lost two uncles in the camp. We stepped back into the snow and walked under the “Arbeit macht frei” (“Work makes you free”) gate as she began to describe the buildings. For the first time, I had a 360 degree view of this thing. I could see the grey clouds above and the mud below my boots. This was not a fantasy, a conspiracy, or a scene from a film. This was real.

The tour had just started and I began to hyperventilate. Then I began to sob. I got light-headed and thought I was going to pass out. I had to lean against one of the barracks that had housed 500 prisoners at a time. Nothing like this had happened to me before. I think I was having a panic attack.

It was the realization that this was a real place and that horror had actually happened. Holocaust deniers be damned, the systematic annihilation of millions of men, women, children, and babies was carried out with methodical precision here from 1940 to 1945. I could feel the terror and it was too much to bear. All those books and lectures and movies and documentaries and sitting listening to Holocaust survivors, choking on the pain in my throat. It all happened in this spot and my body convulsed at the realization. The weight of what humanity was capable of in its darkest moment.

I sat down for a bit, half listening to our presenter, half trying to get my bearings. I flashed to a scene in Schindler’s List. The black and white film had one moment of color. A little Jewish girl in a red coat, her body later appears in a pile of corpses. It was 1993 and she reminded me of my then 5-year-old friend in Prague, Suzanka, who was living too close to the genocide in Yugoslavia. I burst out sobbing in the Phipps Plaza movie theater. The memory, as I sat on barrack steps in Auschwitz, caused be to burst out sobbing again.

Gradually, I wiped my eyes and rejoined the tour as we entered the slightly warmer barracks and viewed their displays. Our guide returned to the refrain, “You must remember,” and how the total count of those exterminated may never be known, because the Nazis burned the paperwork along with the bodies. Each display was more devastating than the last; children’s shoes, human hair removed from the gassed to make into fabric, luggage waiting to be claimed. The one that put me back in my panic was the massive collection of crutches, canes, and prosthetic limbs of the “invalids,” deemed too defective to work and put to immediate death. That specter of ablism did not fade with the Third Reich.

I soldiered on for the rest of the tour, through gas chambers, past the gallows, in front of the “wall of death,” where prisoners were shot, and down to the ovens, and finally to the spot where Auschwitz Commandant Rudolf Höss was finally hung on this day (April 2) in 1947. But this was only the first half of the trip. Auschwitz had a sequel, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, ordered built by Heinrich Himmler in 1941 to accelerate the extermination of the Jews. Mike ferried us over to the second, much larger camp, much of which was destroyed by the Nazis at the end of the war in a futile attempt to hide their crimes. Our guide walked us along the train tracks where prisoners were divided between those who would be forced into labor than those who were marched straight to the gas chambers. Babies and small children were thrown into open burning pits. I stood there, as a father, unable to move. Where was goodness? Where was God? Where was the empathy that should have been present among Hitler’s willing executioners?

On the ride home, we were all silent, including puking girl. I thought about what I had seen in Ukraine; the faces of frightened children forced out of their homes by an unprovoked war-monger. I thought about the concerns of my Polish friends, that nuclear weapons would turn them to ash like those who left Auschwitz and Birkenau through the chimneys. I thought about the new rise of authoritarianism in the form of Putin and Trump, that gleefully weaponizes hate and the threat of violence. I thought about the anti-trans laws and voter suppression acts that are slowly eroding democratic freedoms in my “beacon of liberty” home country.

The first chapter of Ellie Wiesel’s Night is a cautionary tale. The Jews who lived in his Hungarian village thought they were far enough from the war not to worry about the rumors of Nazi anti-Semitism. When they were pushed into a ghetto, many thought it was to protect them from the violence of the Allied invasion, and when they got to the platform at Birkenau, and Wiesel saw his mother and sister forced into the line for the gas chambers, many thought that no such horror would be allowed in the mid-twentieth century. The Holocaust was not a sudden tsunami of death. It was a slowly rising tide that drowned those who never realized they were so far from the shore.

That tide is rising again. I will not sit on my hands and hope things get better. I will use every tool at my disposal. This trip has taught me that I must.

Represent! Why We Need a Black Woman on the Supreme Court

~ Randy Blazak ~ 1 Comment

January 30, 2022

There’s a classic experiment in the 1940s that unmasked the true depth of racism in America. Two psychologists, Kenneth and Mamie Clark, gave black children in New York City four baby dolls, two with dark skin and two with light skin. Then the researchers asked the kids to pick the “good” dolls and the “bad” dolls. The black children generally saw the white dolls as good and black dolls as bad. The experiment was later used to convince the Supreme Court to hear the Brown vs. Board of Education case in 1951.

The black doll experiment has been repeated numerous times, well into the 21st century, and still results in gut-wrenching displays of the internalized white supremacy in black children. (Just watch a few on YouTube.) The demonstration has an added value as our attention returns to the Supreme Court and the issue of race, and the coming vacancy of Justice Stephen Breyer. President Biden has said he would nominate a black women to the bench. That means something to the little black girls in Harlem that picked the white doll.

Racism takes many forms. We easily associate it with cross-burning Klansmen and “Whites Only” signs from the Jim Crow days. But it can be a slight as a clutched purse when a black man steps on an elevator, or as insidious as predatory lending from banks who prey on black and brown people. We see it in the causal commentary about “Mexican immigrants” and the bloody tally as hate crimes rise.

But it is also present in absence. For every black boy who has never seen a male teacher who looked like him, or for every Asian girl who as never seen an Asian woman in the media portrayed as anything other than “exotic,” representation is a game changer. We white people never notice this because, quite literally, there are people who look like this in every filed we can imagine. A white fish doesn’t know it’s in water until you take it out of the damn water.

That gets coded as “white is normal,” and every other race is the exception. You don’t have to say, “white person.”  You can just say “person,” because their whiteness is assumed (as is their maleness). In the nearly 233 years of the U.S. Supreme Court, it’s pretty much been a nonstop sea of white people. That changed in 1967, when President Johnson swore in Thurgood Marshall, who was on the bench until 1991, when he was succeeded by Clarence Thomas and his Pepsi can. Thomas, hasn’t exactly been a civil rights lion, not even offering an opinion until the 2003 Virginia v. Black cross-burning case.

But race is not gender and blackness is not femaleness. Representation is an intersectional matter. Just like there are no actual afro-Caribbeans in Lin-Manuel’s film, In the Heights, (a musical about an afro-Caribbean neighborhood in New York), there have been no black women on the high court. While you might find plenty of black female judges in local courtrooms, 80% of federal judges are white and black women magistrates make up a tiny sliver of the remaining 20%. The addition of a black woman would not only be meaningful to those little black girls (and the thousands of black female attorneys), but it would make a difference to the non-black people, too.

The subtle prejudice of absence is in the lack of affirmation. People thought blacks could never be faster than whites, until Jesse Owens was. People thought a black man could never win the presidency, until Barak Obama did. People thought that a black person could never become a billionaire, until BET founder Robert L. Johnson made it. The Supreme Court is the brain trust of our democracy. The absence of black women sends a subtle message about they capabilities.

The white supremacists over at Fox News are already having a field day, playing the “reverse racism” card to their elderly white audience. The rhetoric goes like this; If Biden picks a black woman for the court, he’s screwing a capable white man out of a job. I wonder how many capable black women have been screwed out that job so a white person and/or a man could be hired. But the white snowflakes are apoplectic over the thought that a black women might have an informed opinion on constitutional matters more rooted in reality than something they heard spewed by Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan, Ted Cruz or any of the other white men who, in the words of James Brown, are talking loud and saying nothing.

As we head into Black History Month we can underestimate the power of firsts. The first black airline pilot (Marlon Green, 1964). The first black pole vaulter to medal at the Olympics (LoJo Johnson, 2000). The first black woman in space (Mae Jamison, 1992). Second and thirds are equally important. Like the court was made up of all white men from 1789 to 1967, there may be a future court where all nine justices are black women. Until then, whoever President Biden picks, will be a reminder to those little black girls to pick the doll that looks like them.

I Became a Teacher Because of Sydney Poitier

~ Randy Blazak ~ 1 Comment

January 15, 2022

My first album was a four-record set called, #1 Hits of the ‘60s. I ordered it C.O.D. in 1973 after I saw Mickey Dolenz, of the Monkees, hawking it on our local UHF channel (WTCG). My mom had to pay for it when it arrived, but I immediately chose Lulu’s “To Sir, With Love”  as my favorite track of the 52 songs. So when the 1967 movie of the same name was scheduled to play on the 4 O’clock movie, I knew this latchkey kid would be parked in front of the TV.

What that 9-year-old living in a Georgia Klan town got was his first introduction to Mr. Sydney Poitier. I loved the story of American who tamed the rowdy British kids by breaking the traditional rules of the classroom. He was dignity and respectful control in the face of youthful chaos. Perhaps I craved that.  The fact that that he was black man corralling white kids added to the juxtaposition. But he didn’t treat them as children, and they transitioned into young adulthood under the guidance of “Sir.” There was nothing in my Georgia schools like this. This white boy immediately thought, I want to be like Sydney Poitier.

The film itself, directed and written by James Clavell, is overly sentimental and plagued with real gender problems, but it tackled British racial politics the same season that the Beatles were singing, “All Your Need is Love.” To my young mind, it was all about Pointier’s poise and composure as he deconstructed the politics of the public school, literally throwing out the book (into the classroom trashcan) to take the students to museums and other London adventures. I’d had a taste of Montessori under my belt from the second half of second grade (the first half was wasted in Bible school), and I craved that educational freedom.

So I became a teacher. The first classes I taught were as a young graduate student at Emory University. In one sociology class, taught on the second floor of the Candler Library, I had my own Mark Thackery moment. (Thackery was Poitier’s character in the film.) Instead of working class hoodlums, my students were the privileged children of wealth. It was clear that students weren’t invested in the curriculum I had created for my Youth Subculture class, so I went into a monologue about the corrosive nature of privilege and the opportunity of youth to define itself in its own historical moment. Then I threw the three required texts out of the library window and told them we would never meet in that classroom again. I channeled Sydney as we took the class out into the world. (I later went and retrieved those books from the bushes below the window.)

That dignified grace was a hallmark of so many of Poitier’s roles, including favorites like The Defiant Ones (1958), A Raisin in the Sun (1961), and Guess Who is Coming to Dinner (1967). His seminal role as Virgil Tibbs in In the Heat of the Night (1967) was a pretty accurate picture of policing in my rural Georgia town and planted the seed police reform in my young brain. I became obsessed with his films, never missing them on the 4 O’Clock movie or when I’d sneak downstairs into the recroom to watch Paris Blues (1961) on the late movie. When I learned about his civil rights work, I had permission to question the racism of my peer culture. Other kids had their role models, this was mine. Sydney and I had the same birthday (February 20) and I knew that the best thing I could be was to be like Sydney Poitier.

There will never be anyone like him, but I carry his Mark Thackery with me into the classroom every time, with love.

How to not be an anti-racist asshole: Mindfulness and Racial Progress

~ Randy Blazak ~ 3 Comments

December 21, 2021

There are a lot of well-meaning people who’s well-meaning actions just make things worse. I’ve  certainly been one of those people. Portland is filled with self-proclaimed anti-racists who believe that by smashing windows and setting trashcans on fire, they are somehow making black lives matter. Have they bothered even asking any of these black lives if this is a good strategy? The people of color that I’ve talked to see is it as purely white performance. Now working on policies that help people of color buy homes and operate local businesses, that helps. A lot.

My challenge to anti-racist activists, of which I am one, is to take a break from chasing down neo-Nazis and Proud Boys, and take a look in the mirror. Until we start on the long process to undo our own internalized white supremacy, we will be blind to the racial trauma we cause while we’re chanting “Black lives matter!” There is a simple sociological formula that goes like this:

Racist socialization

Internalized white supremacy

Implicit bias

Micro-aggression

= Trauma

In 2021, still, we all learn various versions of “white is normal and better” lessons. That seeps into our subconscious where it lives as implicit bias and then emerges as micro-aggresions (a clutched purse, an off-handed comment, a joke that shouldn’t have been told). And that small thing lands as another wounding message to people of color that they are still not full members in this society. And the endless barrage of those “micro-assaults” become cumulative trauma. And that’s why BIPOC folks were in the streets in 2020, because enough was enough.

As I’ve written in this blog, 2021 has provided a great opportunity to move inwards from the barricades as Delta, and now Omicron, send us back into our shelters. Mindfulness and meditation give us strategies to interrupt our hard-learned tendencies to act in racist ways, even while we lecture others against their racism. I had a great week training with the Center for Equity and Inclusion here and Portland and consumed Mindful of Race by Ruth King. Both had huge impacts on how I move through the world as a white person.

King, a Buddhist woman of color, offers useful strategies to manage those situations that can cause racial distress. It could be finding yourself in an uncomfortable conversation with a Trump-loving uncle who wants to make America white again, or, on the other side, those white fragility moments when a person of color is taking apart your liberalness as just a vacant act of wokeness. One of her mindfulness strategies, that goes by the acronym “RAIN,” has been helpful for me in not only navigating my racial interactions, but also being more present in my relationship with my wife. It works like this:

The “R” stands for recognize. A big part mindfulness is paying attention to our emotional states as things to be observed. When you have an uncomfortable feeling, where is it? Is it a sick feeling in the pit of your stomach or an angry tension in the middle of your forehead. Recognize it. “There’s that feeling. Hello again. I see you there.”

A is for allow. Buddhists teach us that everything is temporary, especially our emotions. Instead of letting them control us, let them float past, like a cloud. Accepting impermanence (“anitya” in Sanskrit) allows us to not, as U2 once perfectly sang, get stuck in a moment that we can’t get out of. So in those racially tense moments, we can see it and then remind ourselves that they will be in the rearview mirror shortly, so hold off on any emotionally driven impulses (including micro-aggressions).

I is for Investigate. Mindfulness teaches us to be curious about our thoughts. Where did this discomfort come from? Could it be projection, or due to a lack of true reflection? Could it be rooted in mis-learned lessons from our childhood? Maybe it’s those implicit biases we all hold.

And finally, the “N” is for nurture. What do you need right now to pass through this moment without adding to the racial harm? And what do others need to address their harm? It could be developing a strategy to address a problematic policy or person, or it could be a hug and a short walk around the block to calm down.

At the root of King’s teaching is kindness. Kindness to ourselves and to those traumatized by racism, and, yes, kindness to those who perpetrate racism in the world. They, like us and as us, are products of this racist society and capable of becoming forces for racial healing themselves. The Buddhist principles of racial mindfulness might be a tough sell to a black clad 20-year-old who thinks vandalizing a police station somehow helps black people, but that 20-year-old has the capacity for personal transformation and the ability to participate in stopping the harm so there can be true racial healing.

The Black Strawman: In Defense of Critical Race Theory

~ Randy Blazak ~ 2 Comments

June 18, 2021

Note: Sometimes, “idiot” is the only word that applies.

There’s been a lot of right-wing nuts, Trumpists, and QAnon moms freaking out lately about something called Critical Race Theory. Ask these troglodytes what CRT actually is and you’ll get some hastily prepared bullet points from conservative tools, like Candace Owens; “It’s Marxist re-education!” “It’s anti-white racism!” “It’s teaching our children to hate America!” “It’s Barak Obama’s secret plot for a Muslim takeover of America, financed by Chinese communists!” States like Oklahoma and Florida (not known as bastions of anti-racism and/or intelligence) have tried to outlaw CRT from classrooms, causing concerns about the civil liberties of teachers. As we mark Juneteenth, let us stand against the anti-education hordes. (CRT-foe Owens bashed Juneteenth yesterday, tweeting “I’ll be celebrating July 4th and July 4th only. I’m American.”)

As an educator who actually teaches Critical Race Theory, it’s a bit sad seeing the hysteria that seems way too much like last season’s hysteria about Mr. Potato Head and Dr. Seuss. I see a lot of inflamed idiots who know absolutely nothing about CRT convinced that some evil cabal is going to destroy “their” country. It’s tiring. If there’s one thing worse than feeling the country has fallen into idiocracy, it’s that it’s fallen into a racist idiocracy.

First of all, Critical Race Theory has been around since the 1970s. All that it is is a set of assumptions, backed up by a massive amounts of data, that the damage done by racism is not by garden variety white supremacists, like Klansmen, Nazi skinheads, and Tucker Carlson. It’s done by institutions that carry the white supremacists ideology that this country was founded on. (Google “Three-fifths Compromise,” cracker!) These institutions include, but are not limited to government, the police, courts, housing, healthcare, education, and the media. That’s it. You’d think that fragile white people would love that. “You’re not racist, the system is!”

But Lordy are these white people (and their well-paid enablers, like Owens) fragile. They believe that telling the truth about race relations in America is unpatriotic. These people don’t want Americans to learn that the ideology of slavery was central to this nation’s founding. These people don’t want Americans to learn about the 120,000 Japanese immigrants, most American citizens, placed in concentration camps by the Roosevelt Administration after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. These people don’t want Americans to know about the forced assimilation of indigenous persons. These people don’t want Americans to know why the average white American lives seven years longer than the average African American. Ignorance is bliss.

The reality is that those that support Critical Race Theory are more true to the promise of America than these woke-ophobics” spazzing out at school board meetings. Law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, who coined the term, recently said, 

“Critical race theory is not anti- patriotic. In fact it is more patriotic than those who are opposed to it because we believe in the 13th and the 14th and the 15th amendment. We believe in the promises of equality, and we know we can’t get there if we can’t confront and talk honestly about inequality.”

The reality is that the legacy of slavery is with us in 2021. It is present in the wealth gap between whites and blacks. It is present in the data from traffic stops to the death penalty. And it is with us in every African-American whose last name is Smith, Jackson, or Washington. It’s not just the mouth breather in a Trump hat, waving a Confederate battle flag, it’s also there in unequal hiring practices, redlining, and the lack of doctors in poor urban areas. That’s why we celebrate Juneteenth. 1865 was not the end of racism in America, it was the beginning of healing. But it’s hard to heal when there is another Jim Crow-fashioned attack coming at us. Just ask black voters in Georgia in 2021.

So what’s behind the kooky white-wing backlash against CRT by moronic reactionaries who don’t even know what it is? It’s more of the same thinly disguised racism. Just like the idiots 60 years ago who were burning rock and roll records because it was “jungle music,” there is a fear among white supremacists in acknowledging the impact and manifestation of racism in America. In 1966, the Ku Klux Klan and radio stations organized “Beatle bonfires” across the South. (And don’t make me make you watch Footloose.) White fear of black bodies has been used to justify everything from slavery to racially objectifying porn. Greater than the fear of black bodies is the fear black truth. That reality holds up a mirror to white faces and fragile whites know they aren’t gonna like what they will see. So smash the mirror.

Therefore it’s not surprising that the anti-CRT mob chants, “CRT is racism!” That’s called projection. It comes from the same place the myths of the black rapist came from – from white men who were raping slave women.

But teachers are smart. They know the old – “Columbus discovered America – Pioneers tamed the west – Lincoln freed the slaves” myths require context. Their classroom is less white these days, so instead of teaching a curriculum that serves to empower white students and marginalize everyone else, teachers will address systemic racism, whether it’s been banned by they racist lawmakers or not.

I know I will. 

Happy Juneteenth, Candace. Let me tell you how free people like you were in 1776. And the white kids will be alright.

Witnessing the Witnesses of the Murder of George Floyd: Trauma at the Trial of Derek Chauvin

~ Randy Blazak ~ 1 Comment

March 30, 2021

I’m watching the second day of the murder trial of Derek Chauvin and I want to throw up. Chauvin is the 44-year-old former Minneapolis police officer who is on trial for the murder George Floyd on May 25th of last year. I want to throw up because of the excruciating videos of Chauvin torturing Floyd to death. I want to throw up because of the young people who witnessed the police officer kill a man in broad daylight. I want to throw up watching Chauvin’s attorney trying to discredit the witnesses as “angry blacks.” And I want to throw up because there are already countless white people on social media trying to blame the murder of George Floyd on George Floyd.

Police kill roughly a thousand people a year, and, on average, about 44 police officers are convicted of anything in those killings, usually on a charge less than murder. That’s why this trial carries so much weight. Floyd wasn’t fighting or fleeing. He was on the ground, handcuffed with Chauvin’s knee on his neck for nine minutes, while he called out for his children and his dead mother and repeatedly told police “I can’t breathe!” There is no ambiguity. No “maybe he had a gun.” No implicit bias. There was only explicit cruelty. It was the revelation of that cruelty, caught on video because of the number of witnesses, that reignited the Black Lives Matter movement last summer.

Those videos traumatized every person of color who understands from first and secondhand experience the reality of race in America. Their experience with law enforcement is deeply different than the experience that white people like me have with law enforcement. I see the police as my protector. They have learned to see the police as their potential executioner. The murder of George Floyd unlocked the very real generational trauma that is rooted in the dehumanization of black people initiated in centuries of chattel slavery. I witnessed this in the weeks following Floyd’s killing, seeing black men on TV in rarely shared tears, wondering aloud when they would be seen as human beings in America.

Day Two of the trial has featured a number of prosecution witnesses who, for various reasons, were in front of Cup Foods on Chicago Avenue and E. 38th Street that spring day. Most were underage at the time. One was a teenager named Darnella Frazier, who was there with her 9-year-old cousin. This young women was sharp enough to pull out her phone and record what was happening. In tearful testimony, she reported that she saw in the dying face of this black man, all the black men in her life. “When I look at George Floyd, I look at my dad. I look at my brothers, I look at my cousins, my uncles. Because they are all Black … I look at that and I look at how that could have been one of them.” She begged the police to help him instead of killing him. Her young cousin testified that Chauvin didn’t remove his knee from the already dead Floyd until the paramedics pulled him off.

Frazier then testified to the guilt she experienced for not doing more. “It’s been nights I stay up apologizing and apologizing to George Floyd for not doing more and not physically interacting and not saving his life. But it’s not what I should have done,” she said, looking at Chauvin, who was writing on a yellow legal pad. “It’s what he should have done.”

Similar testimony from other young people at the scene told a similar story. They begged police to help Floyd has he faded from consciousness. That’s what the police are supposed to do. Help. They detailed, often pausing to weep or collect themselves, how the life was slowly choked out of George Floyd. They were just feet from him as his life and urine were squeezed out on to Chicago Avenue. To the four police officers, including Chauvin, it was just another day on the job, but for the witnesses, the moment is frozen in amber.

Each witness, including the off-duty firefighter who crossed the chaos, provide accounts that were devastatingly powerful. Maybe none more than bystander Donald Williams, a mixed martial arts fighter who repeatedly begged the police to take the pressure off of Floyd’s neck and render aid. Williams, there on the sidewalk in his Northside Boxing Club sweatshirt, exercised great restraint while telling Chauvin that he was enjoying the torture. He called 911 because he believed he had witnessed a murder. “I called the police on the police,” he testified.

Chauvin’s defense attorney tried to characterize him as an angry black man, perhaps threatening the officers on the scene. He calmly answered the cross examination. “You can’t paint me as angry. I was in a position where I had to be controlled, controlled professionalism.” If Chauvin’s defense was that a “riot” or an angry crowd of bystanders caused the police to forget that they’re not supposed to murder people, it fell apart at that moment. 

I don’t know what will happen after today. If history is any guide, Chauvin will be found not guilty on a technicality or found guilty of a lesser charge, like not filing some required paperwork. But I do know three things.

First, is that the the United States Constitution guarantees due process rights of anyone accused of a crime. It is a founding principle of our American democracy and distinguishes us from the world’s tyrannies. The right is guaranteed to anyone within the boundaries of our nation, including undocumented immigrants and people with previous criminal histories. Due process is afforded to those accused of white collar crimes and street crimes, and it doesn’t matter if you are a “menace to society,” as one of my “I’m not racist” white Facebook friends described George Floyd in attempt to blame him for his own murder.

The police are not judge, jury, and executioner. That’s common in dictatorships. Derek Chauvin did not have the right to execute George Floyd for “his actions and lifelong poor decisions,” as another white Facebook poster tried to rationalize. We have a justice system and it’s supposed to be blind. Do police have the right execute you for jaywalking (Michael Brown), selling loose cigarettes (Eric Garner), or allegedly passing a fake bill (George Floyd)? Black America has an answer to that question.

The second thing I know is that the 2020 murder of George Floyd woke a lot of people up to the very deep reality of black trauma in America. The weight of the dehumanization of slavery foist upon African-origined people didn’t magically disappear in 1865 at the close of the Civil War. It morphed into Jim Crow and then institutional racism that explains the wealth gaps and death gaps and the incarceration gaps that disadvantage African-Americans in the twenty-first century. George Floyd was every black person and, in his name, Americans flooded the streets. Americans also read books about racism and found ways to respond to the empty bleat that “all lives matter.”

But the trauma experienced by the young witnesses who testified today is even deeper. Like witnesses to a lynching, these people, including the children who were standing on the corner of Chicago and 38th, watched a group of white police officers (and an Asian-American cop who failed to intervene) kill a black man. Their trauma will last a lifetime. Their deeply held beliefs about police, white people, and the value of black life will be shaped for a lifetime. Even MMA fighter Donald Williams was in tears as he testified, as was off-duty white firefighter, Genevieve Hansen, who witnessed the crime.

The third thing I know is that Darnella Frazier should not feel guilty for not doing more. Her recording of George Floyd’s murder went viral and sparked a massive civil rights movement that transformed America in the summer of 2020. A recent study from Northwestern University found that cities that had sustained Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 experienced a 20% decrease in killings by police. Because of what she did on May 25th, Darnella Frazier saved countless lives.

And I will add one more thing I know. If Derek Chauvin is not found guilty of the murder of George Floyd, Americans will be right to return to the streets to express their frustration over this country’s inability to end the reality that there are two justice systems in America, one for white people and one for everyone else. You can work to heal trauma or heap more pain upon the open wound. If you think more wounding will silence black pain, you don’t understand the mighty resilience of a people who have had it with centuries of this trauma. America is on trial.

Talking to Your Kid About Black History Month: First Grade Edition

~ Randy Blazak ~ Leave a comment

February 18, 2021

I have a thing about Black History Month. I really get into it but I wish it was on a longer, warmer month. June seems logical. My students are reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X right now. I try to make sure black authors are in front of their eyes each winter. There’s just a binge on learning cool stuff. Did you know that the ice cream scoop was invented by an African-American named Alfred L. Cralle? No scooped ice cream for racists!

My love of the black history binge might have had something to do with a white supremacist moment I had in 1979. In my tenth grade journalism class had an assignment to write an editorial. The title of this editorial, written by a white kid in a historic Klan town was… ready…?, “If They Have Black History Month, Why Don’t We Have White History Month?” That’s how my 15-year-old brain was processing the state of race in ’79. My teacher’s response was, “That’s a very strong opinion, Randy.” It should have been, “Every month is ‘White History Month,’ you racist twerp.” So maybe my affinity for Black History Month is a penance for that sin, or the many others.

This year’s Black History Month is a bit more meaningful, in wake of the massive BLM protests last year. But also because my daughter, Cozette, is ready to dive in herself. I was where she is, first grade, in February, 1970, which was the very first Black History Month. The closest I got to knowing that I should think about race at 6 was staring at a “Black is Beautiful” poster in a shop on an a family trip to Niagara Falls. The women in the poster was topless, with a massive afro and a clenched fist. I was transfixed. Cozy is more familiar with images of Breonna Taylor that are painted on murals in our city.

Unlike me, Cozy is growing up in a house with plenty of black heroes. MLK is on the fridge and Motown Magic is her go-to cartoon. (I did have Fat Albert but I don’t know if that undid any racial stereotypes in the 1970s. I’m looking at you, Mushmouth.) But even better, Cozy’s teacher has her first grade class on a healthy diet of Black History Month stories. She’s started her winter school days with lessons about MLK, Malcolm X, Ruby Bridges, Harriet Tubman, and Louis Armstrong, among others. 

Her school is sponsoring a Black History Month art show, in which students complete portraits of African Americans that have inspired them. Cozy’s already done portraits of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, so she chose Louis Armstrong, someone who gets a lot of play in this house. (Fun fact: Cozy’s grandma met Mr. Armstrong after winning a saxophone contest when she was 16. In awe, her main memory was that he swore like a sailor.) At 6, Cozy pretty much captured the greatness of Satchmo. She’s a true jazzbo. As much as she loves Louis’ “wrinkly” voice, she prefers Miles.

Having a teacher who explains why Black History Month matters has been a wonderful thing. How do you explain to a six-year-old the horrors of slavery? “People owned other people just because of the color of their skin.” When I asked her what slavery meant, she grew silent and talked about her black friends and how it made her sad. Kids her age are quite aware of race, especially if they are not white. Cozy’s Mexican genes are talking to her European genes, while across the street from her African-American friends and in a house where her parents are always talking about racism. It must be a lot for her brain.

To help her out, I bought her a copy of The ABC’s of Black History by Rio Cortez, brilliantly illustrated by Lauren Semmer. D is for diaspora. She fell in love with the vibrancy of it, especially the entry on George Washington Carver (she loves peanut butter) and the “M is March” section, featuring BLM posters, like the ones she made last summer. In addition, PBS has made a point of centering black history in its children’s programming. She’s been glued to a cartoon called Xavier Riddle and the Secret Museum, learning about Rosa Parks, Frederick Douglas, Zora Neal Hurston, and Ella Fitzgerald. (The 1956 Ella and Louis album is now on repeat play, which is a very good thing, and Cozy has taken up scatting.)

At 6, I think Black History Month is about celebrating how African-Americans have made life so much better in America. She has an understanding of the pain caused by racism, but it’s not time yet to wade into the torture, trauma, suffering, exclusion, and dehumanization the begs us to make black lives matter every month. I can see her processing it through her peers. Generation Z kids not only have more diverse friend-groups than their elders, they themselves are more diverse. Where “mulatto” was a pejorative a hundred years ago, bi-racial+ is just the norm now. But these kids still live in world that pushes a white supremacist worldview. Despite Motown Magic, the majority of the cartoon, book, and TV characters she sees are white. And male. So while it’s certainly too soon to sit her in front of the TV for a screening of 12 Years a Slave or 13th, she can definitely start picking up on the whole unfairness of racism story and that people who look like her father benefit from it and that people who look like her friend Jaden are challenged because of it.

It’s a tricky path. What I knew about race at 6 came from horribly racist norms. People who lived in the city (i.e. black people) were savages compared to those of us (white people) outside of the city. The urban jungle was framed in contrast to “civilized” society. Cozy lives in the city with plenty of black friends, so that hateful dichotomy is gone, but the complexity of racism remains. It seems like the “primary school” agenda is simply that black culture is amazing and that our black friends have faced unfair struggles that we are committed to fixing.

I’m supposed to be an expert on this topic, but when it’s your kid, it’s a real challenge. You really want them to value everyone as fully humanized but also recognize the forces that have stood in the way of that simple truth. It’s harder than I thought. But she’s smart. I think she’s getting it, complete with the soundtrack. Thank you to all the great teachers who make February matter.

Open Letter to My Father: Why I Support Black Lives Matter

~ Randy Blazak ~ 4 Comments

July 31, 2020

Dear Dad,

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I was watching the funeral of civil rights icon John Lewis, thinking about how far we’ve moved forward and how far we’ve fallen back. You’ve expressed anger that I support the Black Lives Matter movement and that I have been showing up at the protests in downtown Portland. To someone your age, I would hope the images of anti-racist protestors being teargassed and beaten by police would remind you of similar images 55 years ago when John Lewis and civil rights protestors routinely suffered a similar fate. But you’re a white man and white men like us can pretend the racism that existed then has somehow magically disappeared.

You and mom brought me into a world that was in the last, most violent, days of Jim Crow. Born four months before the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the month I was born Byron De La Beckwith was found not guilty of the murder of civil rights leader Medgar Evers because of hung jury while black men were still being hung from trees. Three months later, Martin Luther King, Jr. was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. I was born while America was trying to shake off the yoke of the white supremacist order, but our little white family was removed from the growing pains in our suburban home while black people marched, carrying signs that read, “I am a man.”

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I often wonder what you, a 22-year-old white man, thought of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1964. Historians will tell you that a large percentage of white people considered him a “communist agitator.” Many fell in love with him after he was assassinated by a white supremacist in 1968. White people love a black icon when he’s dead. I certainly never heard his name in our house growing up or any need to show empathy for the victims of white supremacy. In 1972, we moved to Stone Mountain, Georgia, the birthplace of the modern Ku Klux Klan. I never heard anything about the terrorism and trauma they inflicted on our black neighbors. I just heard about how if black families move into the neighborhood, home values will go down. I heard that a lot.

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I did learn some valuable life lessons from you in those days. As a Boy Scout, from a long line of Eagle Scouts, you gave me a mantra that has oriented me throughout my entire life – Leave the campsite better than you found it. That’s exactly what I’m doing and why I’m willing to put by body on the line to clean up this camp. So let me tell you how badly this camp is messed up.

I was born into a position of privilege which means a whole lot of people were disadvantaged. In February 1964, there were not yet systemic wins for the civil rights movement, the modern feminist movement, the gay rights movement, the disability rights movement, the Native American rights movement, or the migrant labor rights movement. Those wins were coming. But I was born into a world where the authority of white men like us was still unchallenged. I know, to you,  it must seem like that world is long gone, but I can tell you it’s alive and well and Jim Crow has never ceased to exist.

The statistics would make your head spin, so let me just say that in 2020, in every single institution in America, black people still get screwed. From the criminal justice system, to hiring, to health care, to housing, institutional racism is alive and unleashed. And before you fall back on the “but Affirmative Action!” trope, let me tell you that I worked in an Affirmative Action office at my university. Affirmative Action in no way mandates the hiring of unqualified minorities and the primary beneficiaries of Affirmative Action have been white women and veterans. Believe me, Dad, I’ve heard every fake excuse in the world about how black people have it so much better than white people, yet I have yet to hear a single white person say they would gladly switch places with a black person in America.

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So here’s why I support the Black Lives Matter movement. Because black lives don’t matter at the moment. African-Americans have been devalued and dehumanized for 600 years and it didn’t magically end because a law was passed in 1964. There is a mountain of evidence that teachers, cops, medical doctors, judges, and many others still treat people of color worse than people like you and I. You can argue the evidence, but you should try just talking to ANY black person about their DAILY experience with racism. And by talking, I mean shutting up and listening. Robin DiAngelo, author of White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism , asked a black man what it would be like to have a white person just sit and listen, without responding, to the true expression of what it means to be black in America. He answered, “It would be revolutionary.” I’m listening. You should, too. If you truly believed that “all lives matter,” you would, of course, agree with the belief that black lives matter, just like someone who believes that all trees matter agrees with someone who says, “Maple trees matter.”

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You’ve told me that Portland is being burned down by “Antifa.” That statement is hilarious to anyone who actually lives in Portland. Of the thousands of people protesting, a handful have damaged a small area of the city. I have friends who are anti-fascist activists and I have friends who work in the Federal Courthouse downtown, and all have similar values. I would love to introduce you to my friends at the U.S. Attorney’s Office who work in the building that’s been surrounded by protestors every night. They support the Black Lives Matter movement, as do the scores of veterans, moms, doctors, lawyers, and black youth who have demanded justice in the streets of Portland for over two months. I know the internet and Sean Hannity want to tell you who the Black Lives Matter movement “really is,” but I can answer that. It’s all of us that are tired of centuries of the racist humanization of black people and want to find a way to change it. If you actually believe that all lives matter, you can be a part of the Black Lives Matter movement, too. You could be a powerful voice to help clean up this damn campsite.

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But the main reason I support Black Lives Matter is because of the black kids in my neighborhood. They are my brown daughter’s best friends. They have already been disadvantaged by racism, including having parents arrested for things I should have been arrested for but my white skin got me off the hook. They live in a world where white is “normal,” including white heroes, white politicians, and white standards of beauty. Ask these little black girls which doll is the “pretty doll,” the white doll or the black doll and watch them pick the white doll every time. It has to end now. I will do everything in my power to prevent my daughter from growing up in a world where white is automatically viewed as better. There’s a term for that; white supremacy.

John Lewis was arrested over 45 times, trying bend the moral arc of the universe towards justice. That fight continues. I am honored to show up for that cause in a way that I wish more white people of your generation had done. Do you think the millions of African-Americans who are crying for black lives to matter are lying? Are grandstanding? Or want something for nothing? All three of those opinions would make you just another defender of white supremacy. Me, I’m doing what I can, even if is just quietly listening to black voices, to create an America that lives up to its value that all are created equal. And I have to do this work, in part, because you chose not to. I have to clean up our campsite. I hope you’ll get to see how wonderful it will be.

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