Member-only story
I’m a racist
“Don’t walk with him to school.”
Richard Taylor and I were in the fourth grade together. I liked walking with him. Two of us together were less likely to draw the attention, and the meanness, of the bigger boys.
I’d learned to be afraid of Dad’s wrath. So I didn’t ask why.
But I knew why: Richard was Black.
When I first heard the phrase “Black Lives Matter,” I immediately thought, “but all lives matter.” In that moment I completely missed the point. The point that Black lives clearly didn’t matter enough, and that white lives — my life — did.
And the larger point: that in spite of all my struggles, from foster homes to flunking the fourth grade, my privilege had been there all along, helping me succeed at every step along the way, right up to the position I’m in to write this. Something Richard would never be able to say, or know the feeling of.
I’m deeply uncomfortable writing this.
Privilege: Some have it, some don’t. That’s the way civilization works. Always has.
Civilization as we know it today stems from when the oldest governing states were born with the invention of organized agriculture. Agriculture required lots of labor. Sometimes the labor was voluntary, sometimes conscripted; and when that didn’t work, slavery did. Lots of evidence…
