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Black Lives Matter | Personal Reflections

I recently was chatting with a friend about the stages of learning about antiracism and unlearning what is so ingrained in my (white) world view. They go something like: denial, anger, acceptance, grief, education, hope…

I don’t want to make this about me, but it feels like the most authentic way to share. I am simply sharing my heart in case someone out there needs to read this.

I used to be the person who said “all lives matter” and questioned how slavery still impacted the Black community today. I didn’t get it. I used to be the person who cringed at the term “white privilege” and responded in all forms of denial. I used to be the person who, not so long ago, questioned if “institutional racism” was really a thing in the US. I didn’t know. And in all honesty, I didn’t try to know. I was apathetic. I am sad, ashamed and sorry about ever having that perspective. Honestly the word that has been on my heart the last week or so: repent. I’ve repented to God about my unwillingness to invest in understanding the injustices against Black people in this country and my unwillingness to participate in being part of the solution. It’s left me feeling brokenhearted. But I’m so thankful for fresh eyes to see and fresh ears to listen.

In the fall of 2018 the white influencers in the ethical fashion community got a long-overdue wake-up call when a collective of women started a movement to highlight the lack of diversity in the community (you can follow the hashtag #1010representationmatters). I did not receive this very well, and I responded with denial (defensiveness) and anger. Many, many people took the time to share their painful, real life stories of experiencing racism, and others shared resources in the forms of books, teachers, readings and more. After my defensiveness and anger subsided a crack in my world view formed. Eventually that crack allowed acceptance and grief to start seeping in. But it was only a crack and I only pursued learning from others in the smallest of increments.

The murder of George Floyd at the hands of a merciless police officer brought our country’s racism front and center for many people, myself included. I’ve heard people say over and over the last few years to “Do the work” and now I finally understand what they mean. The work involves (but is not limited to!) listening, believing, learning, studying, reading, looking inward, identifying privilege (and using it to help), identifying bias and rooting it out.

Over the last week, I spent several nights glued to the TV watching live video of protests as they happened in my city, just a few miles from my house. The first night was particularly filled with unrest and destruction as fires were set, windows smashed and stores looted. It was shocking.

But so was the on-camera death of George Floyd. (Take a minute, read a little more about this life. Let him become a human to you and not a cause or a symbol.) Feel the outrage. And he is just one of many.

As I process it all, I realize the riots, the looting, the property destruction are not so shocking. As Trevor Noah put it, the bodies of black people have been looted FOR YEARS. No wonder there is anger.

Once you start reading and learning, you can’t unsee it. If we are one body of people – when one part suffers WE ALL SUFFER.

But this all begs the question for me: what next? How do I (to use the words of Latasha Morrison) make this a lifestyle and not a hashtag?

A moving and powerful memorial in downtown Portland.

I don’t have it all sorted it out, but this is how I’m doing the work right now.

What I’m Doing Personally.

Listening to Black teachers. Learning from them. Reading books on how to identify my own privilege and work toward being antiracist. Right now is the time to amass a list of resources because there are so many being shared on social media, I’ve been bookmarking them as I see them, and going back and reading them more slowly. At the end of this post I’ll share a few.

What I’m Doing as a Parent.

Talking to my kids about what is currently happening. We are trying to give them as much perspective as possible. My hope is that my kids will grow up being able to identify racism, including implicit bias and instituional racism, even better than me. My hope is that they would be prepared to stand up to injustice when they see it.

I want to educate them about structural racism and the history of racism in our country through age appropriate books and movies. (I still remember watching ROOTS in the 5th grade and how vividly it stuck with me.)

See also: 6 Things You Can Do As a Family to Be Antiracist

What I’m Doing With the Blog/My Business.

I will continue to share where and who I’m learning from. This will probably come in the form of links on my Weekly Rundown.

I am asking my brand partners how they are supporting and working with Black influencers. I will leverage my existing relationships with companies to facilitate these conversations.

I will continue to apply what I’m learning personally to my business and look for opportunities to amplify voices of Black women.

Who + Where I am Learning to Be Antiracist From Right Now:

Austin Channing Brown, been a fan of hers for some time, but especially thankful for her pointing me toward some important readings, particularly Ta-Nehisi Coates piece The Case for Reparations.

Oh Happy Dani, for learning about implicit bias. I am working my way through her IGTV series: Upward, Inward, Outward.

The Conscious Kid for identifying resources in parenting.

Be The Bridge for resources in racial reconciliation.

I’m currently reading White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo. Next on my list: I’m Still Here, Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness by Austin Channing Brown, How to Be An Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi, and Be the Bridge by Latasha Morrison.

We just watched 13th on Netflix (it’s on YouTube too). It’s all about the 13th amendment, which freed slaves but included a loophole, which is still exploited today. It gives a breakdown of how institutional racism has taken on new forms over the decades. If you want to have a better understanding of mass incarcerations, watch this. Next on my list: Just Mercy, When They See Us.

In this video Kimberly Jones uses a monopoly metaphor to help explain the history of racism in the USA. She referenced things I’d never heard about, which has lead me to search out some of the history I was never taught in school. (Did you know about the massacre of Tulsa’s Black Wall Street?)

Lastly, if you haven’t read White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack, I highly recommend it. I believe it was the very first thing that finally clicked, and helped me to see things were not as I had thought they were. It’s so, so important to be open-minded and open-hearted right now friends, it’s part of having a growth-mindset and it’s critical to our continued growth as human beings.

Thanks for reading this. I hope it’s clear that I’m coming at this with a humble heart and trying to learn what I don’t know. Inevitably I will mess up, and get it wrong, but this enneagram 1 is doing her best to push through that.

Much love to you guys!

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21 thoughts on “Black Lives Matter | Personal Reflections”

  1. I’ve been waiting to see how you respond to this on your blog. I know there has been pushback against white women sharing their stories because it often centres us within the narrative. However, I think what you shared is really, really brave and necessary. The more we, as white women, own up to the harm we have caused without making excuses, the more we create space for that conversation amongst ourselves.
    Thank you for what you shared today, and I look forward to see how your learning impacts your work going forward.

    1. Hi Alyssa, thanks so much for weighing in. I agree, it’s crucial for us to hold these conversations because it’s too important not to.

  2. Hi Andrea, it’s me again, thank you for this. As a non-black POC with light skin privilege, I have a lot of learning to do too. I appreciate the way you’ve been open about where you came from, where you’re at now, and the resources you’re using to study up and take action.

    1. Thanks so much Lexie, I think humility is so important, and I appreciate it in others too when they share their journeys. Thank you for being a long time presence and commenter on this blog. <3

  4. Thank you for this. I think it is really important for white people to continue sharing about our learning journeys, so that we can help reach other white people and not place the burden of explanation and conversations on black people – just one more burden on them. We don’t have to center our experiences in order to educate others. These are great resources. Waking up White by Debby Irving is also a very approachable memoir about her learning journey.

    1. Such a great point Maggie, about not spreading the burden. I will look into that book, thanks a bunch for the rec!

    1. I’m glad to see this post. I commented here in 2018 when you and other white women were responding negatively to the criticism of Jesse Kamm and other brands that exclude women of color and women of size. I was so incredibly disappointed in your response at the time, which was defensive and dismissive. I stopped reading and disengaged from the ethical fashion space because of it. I’m not sure what caused me to check in here today but it’s great to see that you’ve gotten past that and are working to be part of the solution. It gives me hope for other white women. We’re all learning here, and it’s okay to recognize that things will we’ve said and done in the past were hurtful. I’m looking forward to checking back here and hopefully seeing more diverse content.

      2. Hi Amanda, I’m so sorry for turning you off on the ethical fashion community, and for my extremely slow learning curve, and the ways those things may have hurt you. Thanks for your kindness today, we are all learning so much. <3

        1. Oh that’s okay, and to be clear it was not just you that turned me off the community (I realize my first post read that way, that was unintentional). It was just looking at all these Instagram accounts and realizing how overwhelmingly white they were, and seeing at how all these white women were dismissing the women of color who spoke up about feeling excluded, saying that they wouldn’t include these women unless they discussed their exclusion in a more *polite* way. It made me realize that while I do think we need to rethink the sources of things we purchase, the movement on Instagram wasnt for people like me. I hope that changes! I hope that this growing awareness of racism isn’t something that fades as the moment passes.

  6. I too echo the other commenters who appreciate you posting this. I am unfollowing many influencers, etc. who have not commented at all on the current crisis. As a white women of priviledge living in one of the more liberal cities in the nation (Seattle) I had mistakenly thought i was not racist for the usual reason others like myself feel they are not, but clearly I was wrong. I need to work towards being actively anti-racist. There is a wealth of information out there one can access by changing the algorythms on the various platforms you use (when you start following BIPOC influencers your feed will become more diverse)). Let’s get to work. This time in history is a call for us all to make a commitment to taking action in whatever lane you choose towards making a change to systemic racism. We truly have so much to learn and unlearn.

  7. Dear Andrea –

    I’d like to bring your attention to the words “riot” and “looting” – not as a call out, but genuinely, to help us all consider how language is related to the way we view and understand things. I have been researching the use of these words, because I have heard them floating around this issue. As a non-black, light skinned, POC, I hear a lot of “code words” because some view me as white. As a white passing person, I can tell when people are alluding to certain racial stereotypes. I can see, too, that often this is subconscious, and is ingrained into us by news coverage and wider messages we receive in our racist society. I hope you, and the community reading this, are open to reading a few thoughts I’ve gathered here!

    Looting:

    According to journalist Nermeen Shaikh:
    ““loot” is a Hindi word with Sanskritic origins, and it entered the language in colonial India, with South Asian historian Vazira Zamindar pointing out that its initial usage — one of its initial usages was to define as rapists and looters those who were involved in the first rebellion against the East India Company in 1857” https://www.democracynow.org/2020/6/11/robin_dg_kelley_social_movements

    It is also interesting that this word (along with “thugs”) was used by the president in a tweet to encourage hatred and violence. To me, this is a signal that the word has some racist connotations.

    It is also worth noting that it isn’t called looting when rich white people steal from the poor and give to the rich, otherwise known as “corporate bail out” or “tax reform.” https://jacobinmag.com/2020/05/looting-minneapolis-police-george-floyd

    Tamika D. Mallory, black activist and leader, points out that this land was looted from the indigenous people. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6juYnfLYq48. And as you mentioned in your post – Trevor Noah talks about the looting of black bodies on his show. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4amCfVbA_c

    Riot:

    I have less information on this, but it does seem like people a lot of people are thinking about who is deciding how these words are used. Daniel King of Mother Jones recently published an article about this:

    “Riot vs. rebellion/uprising is all in the eye of the beholder. This country was founded on acts of vandalism and property destruction,” Genetta Adams, The Root’s managing editor, tells me. “See the Boston Tea Party. This was a fight for ‘liberty’ and ‘freedom.’ Who decides what these acts are called? Unfortunately, today, all too often it’s all-white or majority-white newsrooms.”
    https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/06/the-reliably-racist-cherry-picking-of-the-word-riot/

    For me, it is interesting to consider what would happen if we flipped the use of these words, as Meagan Day did in a headline for Jacobin Magazine, titled “In Cities and Towns Across the US This Week, The Brutal Police Riot has Continued.”

    Time Magazine also recently published a piece about this topic: https://time.com/5849163/why-describing-george-floyd-protests-as-riots-is-loaded/

    My hope is not to derail you, I know there are many books and articles to read about anti-racism and American history already on your list. I hope that my comment shines a tiny spotlight this one particular area!

  9. Andrea

    A steady, softly illuminated golden light hovering in the center of your being
    Being human, feminine, masculine, spiritual all the virtues of aliveness
    The force of will, humility, love , patience, giving the light that never fades, flickers or fails
    It resides in remembrance of all that is worth keeping.

    Joanna
    Thank you for sharing the journey

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