Speak. Up.
What I was going to write about this week was body language. And I will.
But not this week.
This week, we’re getting uncomfortable. Because over the past few days, we have seen multiple examples of racial injustice, and if you believe in a world that is equal for everyone, and if you are somebody who has not experienced racism, you need to step up.
If you experience racism in your daily life, you are likely exhausted. The amount of mental energy you need to expend just to figure out if something is going to give you trouble, is huge. I have a women’s only public speaking course so that we can speak freely about ways that we’ve experienced sexism that often men don’t understand (because they don’t experience problems specific to women), and sometimes try to negate. “I’ve never seen anything like that in the office, you’re probably imagining it.” “Stop taking everything so seriously, and lighten up.” “It’s so difficult to be a man these days, there are too many rules! I liked it better when I could just be myself.”
If you are somebody who has not experienced racism, you don’t know what it feels like. End. I am somebody who has never experienced racism, I do not know what it feels like.
But I know it exists.
And unless you’ve been under a rock the past week or so, so do you.
If you think that the pandemic has been too stressful, and you’re tuning out as to what’s been happening, that is privilege.
If you think “it’s not as bad as they’re saying it is”, that is the privilege of never having experienced it.
Let me give you two examples from this past week:
A friend posted on Facebook about how white privilege allows him to unplug from all of the media around George Floyd. One of his Facebook friends, let’s call him Steve, wrote that it’s nowhere near as bad as the media portrays, and that he himself had never seen any instances of racism in his personal or professional life. A quick look at Steve’s public profile showed a picture of a young boy with darker skin smoking a cigarette, and one of Steve’s friends wrote “Solving the Social Security deficit, one puff at a time…”. There was one “like” on that comment, and it was Steve himself. I took a screenshot of this and posted it below his comment that racism doesn’t exist. Steve blocked me.
A woman was recounting how her black boyfriend needed a bag, and so she offered him her pink reusable shopping bad, and he didn’t want to use it, and she gave him a really hard time about gendered colours. He let her know that wasn’t it. As a 6 foot tall black man, if he walked around with a pink bag, he would worry about people thinking he stole it from a woman, and that could cause him trouble, if not violence, and if not, as we just saw last week, death. I don’t know any white man who would worry about being killed for carrying a pink bag.
Now is the time, if you have privileges, use them to speak up. If you’ve never experienced racism in your life, speak up against it. If your friends make racist jokes, call them out. If your relatives make racist jokes, call them out. If you are worried about making everybody uncomfortable, they are the ones who have made everything uncomfortable. You are simply calling. shit. out.
You know why George Floyd died? Because all of us have not done enough.
If you want help polishing up your performance of an anti-racist speech, or video, email me, I’ll help you for free.
Watch it live.
