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Jason Bellew's avatar

This reminds me about the same time, a white neighbors, very Fox News conscious and conservative, had a mixed race grandchild born. Both are very happy and loving to their grandchild but I asked them, are they prepared for the pain their grandchild is going to live through once he is older and in the school system?

Their response was, that won't happen because he'll go to a Christian school. A white Christian school with all the same Fox News conscious and conservatives. I could have gone further asked them more questions.

As a teenager had African American friends in my car and I had been pulled over and asked if I was okay. What? Of course I'm okay with my friends. Wasn't until I got back in the car and drove away that I truly understood what had happened. (There is more but I'm not going into here). This happened in California where everyone, since I left California, tells me is so liberal.

Systemic racism doesn't care if the State/City you are in are liberal or conservative. It doesn't matter if kids that are mixed race, have white Christian grandparents. It doesn't care except to preserve itself, and continue to paint all others that are non-White, especially African Americans, violent.

I hate this article because it reminds me that nothing has changed since my teenage years in the 80s. I will say that friends who didn't understand racism were so surprised that Trump was voted president because he seemed so racist. They didn't think the United States was this racist.

I hate this article because we are in the 21st century where I had hoped that science and reason who begin to take center stage. I was/am hopeful we will get there but it's been four-hundred years and I fear it's going to take another four-hundred years.

Thanks for writing this article. It so important that us, white United States citizens, continue to understand how systemic racism diminishes us.

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Ian Douglas Rushlau's avatar

White people are still in the 'reckoning' phase of addressing state sanctioned brutalization and murder by badge-wielding thugs.

Rodney King's videotaped beating was supposed to be a 'national reckoning'.

George Floyd's broad daylight murder by Derek Chauvin was supposed to be a 'national reckoning'.

Breonna Taylor killed in a hail of gunfire in her own bedroom was supposed to be a 'national reckoning'.

Now we are all witness to, not only the savagery of uniformed agents of the state torturing Tyre Nichols to death, but the callous indifference of other uniformed agents of the state, as they stood and watched uniformed agents of the state torturing Tyre Nichols to death.

Please repeat this to yourself in the the coming weeks and months: uniformed agents of the state stood and watched as other uniformed agents of the state tortured Tyre Nichols to death.

And this will be another purported 'national reckoning', we're sure to be told.

We've been reckoning this over and over for centuries.

Little mention of an etymologically related word- rectifying.

Only when the majority of White people are prepared to rectify state sanctioned brutalization and murder by badge-wielding thugs will it change.

Too many White people enthusiastically embrace living in an apartheid state for that to happen, at the moment.

Look at them, especially among family, friends, neighbors and coworkers.

Because that's where all this begins and ends.

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