Not My South: Being a White, Liberal Female in a Red State

So I guess actually, Georgia is more purple. But we still went for Donald Trump.

 

I’m trying to tell myself maybe it won’t be so bad.

 

But then I remember…. I’m white. (Although I claim my Hispanic heritage, it’s not something that’s overly obvious. I can only speak English and only occasionally do I get the “but what are you” questions about my ethnicity.) I’m educated. I have a home. I have resources when mine run out.

 

And things happen like a mistrial in South Carolina- I don’t care if the man did threaten an officer or whatever the excuse was…. he was running away. Walter Scott was murdered. How we are even debating this is beyond me.

I wonder what it must feel to be black in America.

 

I have immense guilt because I didn’t even bother to wonder until a few years ago. I can date when it happened, it was when I went back to college. When I read Letter from a Birmingham Jail for the first time and thought – oh my God. I’m the white moderate. I am the one who is dangerous because I don’t say anything.

 

But how can my recent activism really do anything?

 

These questions are at the heart of a book I’m working on. It’s fiction so I can make it up as I go, but I want to know- how does a white, privileged, female show sincere care for a cause that is only recently discovered? Something which was caused by those of her own ancestry?

 

I think many white people are so used to feeling defensive. That they say, well my ancestors didn’t own slaves (although check the Slave Census Records before you say that to be sure), or even the Civil War was over 100 years ago- I didn’t cause this.

 

But we’re in a new Civil Rights Movement even now- let there be no mistake about that.

 

 

We own what is happening now. I don’t know how to be a true ally in all this without feeling like there might be some misplaced sense of being another white martyr. Because when I have these conversations with people who disagree with me. They don’t just dismiss me. They listen. Or seem to. They nod their heads and have civil discourse. But I have to wonder if they would do the same if my skin were of a different hue.

 

Black Lives Matter folks, for the most part, just want to be heard. (I think- someone please correct me if I’m wrong.) And I could be wrong but I don’t think these people blame many white people for their places in life. But I do think WE owe it to them to listen, to not invalidate their feelings, to open our hearts and move past our own fear of being blamed for the past so that we can listen to what is happening in our present.

 

I love living in the South. I love being a Southerner. Our history is more complicated and interwoven than most want to acknowledge. But we’ve got to get better about talking about it.

 

Love to all y’all,

 

Molly