White anti-racist ally who wants more from other whites

As a white, anti-racist ally, I'm troubled & angered by the response to Trayvon Martin's murder.

Trayvon Martin was the victim.  Criminalizing him in public discourse and during the trial of his murderer is akin to blaming a rape victim.  

When Black people are victim to crime, their aggressors are not prosecuted as vigorously as when white or light-skinned people are victim.

Yes, Zimmerman is of Latino-descent.  Many white people seem to think that his identity blurs the racial aspects of this encounter.  He is a light-skinned man who saw a Black youth as criminal.  It doesn't matter that he wasn't "pure-bred" caucasian.  Viewing young Black men as only criminal isn't exclusive to the white gaze.  Its prevalence is unacceptable.

I was raised in a homogenous, largely white, largely upper-middle class community.  I remember being 18, interning with Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, and being mentored by a Black woman in her 40s.  When my internship concluded, she hugged me.  I remember her and I remember that moment.  It was the first time I had developed a close enough relationship with a Black person that we hugged.  I was deeply troubled by my own lack of exposure to other people, communities, and experiences.

Since that time I've had the privilege to develop close friendships and relationships with people of a multitude of backgrounds.  I've been told by Black friends that my ignorance was deeply painful to them.  I was simply unaware of their reality.  Race wasn't part of my day to day experience, because whiteness is considered baseline "normal" in the region where I was raised and largely lived.  I'm grateful to these friends for patiently explaining their reality to me and answering my questions when this was not their responsibility.  It is my responsibility.  It is each of our responsibilities to investigate, listen, and be attentive to various experiences.  Why?  Because it betters us.  

I still have significant work to do to be attentive towards institutional racism, interpersonal racism, and the latent prejudices I carry.  My family is only a few generations away from being slave holders.  I remember acute racism from my grandparents in Georgia.  I think about reconciling these experiences.  I'm certainly not responsible for any actions other than my own, but I am positioned to understand the context in which I live. The access and privilege I receive, unearned, has to be redistributed towards larger swaths of the population around me.  In this way I can once more find scale.  White skin makes me worth no more than anyone else.  

I strenuously urge other white folks to listen to people of color.  Listen to their experiences.  Read.  Learn.  Don't cling so tightly to what you feel you have, deserve, earned.  Did you really?  What does that mean about you?  

I got into a seven sister's college because I was raised in an environment that prepared me for that education and I had parents who could pay the tuition.  I didn't deserve that education more than anyone else.  And that doesn't mean that I'm a terrible person.  It means that I used that education to the best of my ability, and I know the world would be a better place is we were operating from a level playing field.  If I didn't get into that college, I would still have been able to live and breathe.  

Don't let the world be a place of "us and them."  Don't allow swaths of the world's population to strike you as fearsome.  Don't let the world be a place of such tumult.  Breathe deeply, find your own humanity (underneath your resume and degrees and zip-code) and LISTEN.  Listen the way you wanted to be heard about deeply traumatic experiences.  Listen the way you needed to be heard about struggles that made you feel alone and isolated.  Listen, and be compassionate.  If the person talking to you is angry, let them be.  Understand anger as a valid response to injustice.  Let people feel.  Let yourself feel.  Let the process of making space for one another deepen both of your humanity.

Cheryl Strayed, as columnist Dear Sugar, wrote a bright, insightful reply to a query about jealousy and privilege.  Her response speaks specifically to class privilege, but is applicable to white privilege too:
"Privilege has a way of fucking with our heads the same way a lack of it does... You’ve been given a tremendous amount of things that you did not earn or deserve, but rather that you received for the sole reason that you happen to be born into a family who had the money...  I believe our early experiences and beliefs about our place in the world inform who we think we are and what we deserve and by what means it should be given to us."

Trayvon may have been any number of things, but bottom line, he was human.  Zimmerman is too, and given that he lives, he needs to be held accountable.  All lives matter and we need to demonstrate that to one another.  Making space for another doesn't cede your own.

Unfuck your head.  Be human.