Everybody talks about genocides around the world but when the killing is spread out over a hundred years, no one notices. Where there are no mass graves, no one notices.
...so says Gertrude to Jim toward the end of Percival Everett's newest book, _The Trees_. A book I started when my plan took off from Raleigh and finished on my descent into LAX. But in Dallas, as we waited for our second flight, the news alert came through about Rittenhouse verdict.
I hadn't followed this trial at all. So I'm commenting less from a place of case facts, the law and specific trial details. I'm commenting as a (white) observer of race in America today. With that in mind, feel free to skip. If you're staying, thanks.
Black people (men, women, kids and trans folk) are lethally targeted in increasingly visible and more socially accepted ways by white people with guns that are more available and deadly than they have ever been. Rittenhouse is just the example of this brief moment. His actions, however, reflect a centuries long pattern by white men to control, manage and subvert Black people in the United States.
And we are not a “post-racial society,”.
This has been happening since slavery was abolished. Whether the white supremacy was explicit (Jim Crow, separate but equal, etc. ) or less so (how the structure of the GI Bill denied Black soldiers, redlining in communities, Tuskegee, etc.), nothing has changed except the strategy that white men have used. (I'm saying "men" because men have always been in greater positions of power, across every industry in the US, than white women are but white women are also to blame.)
NOTHING HAS CHANGED.
What do we do? My answers—only what I am doing, will do - are but clear drops in a vast, teeming trough of hate and indifference but they are all I can do. So here they are.
I talk about white supremacy. I talk about it with my kid, here in this public space and with others in larger and smaller conversations. I talk about the prison industrial complex but also "smaller" things like what race looks like in AIG school programs. I read books like _The Trees_ as a way to better understand where I (a white person) have come from. And I do that step to remind myself, as a white person who is part of and benefits from white supremacy. I buy books (like _The Trees_ but others too) from Black bookstores, as my own act of support and restitution. And I also support the Black people in my life in any way I can. No matter what that means, providing I have capacity and I am willing to allow those people to tell me what support means to them.
What are you doing? Feeling? Thinking? Share a comment below. And thanks for being here.