For Those who have asked…
I am not going to the Women’s March in Washington, DC on Saturday. No I don’t have conflicting plans. No, I probably could scrape up enough gas money. No, I do have many people I could go with. No, I actually love the cold and it is not too far away. It is none of these excuses. Very wonderful people keep asking me why I am not going. Here is my answer. I’m staying home because I feel guilty.
I have been feeling awful since the election. I have felt fury, depression, utter hopelessness, and distrust, anger, in-credulousness, and a general lack of believing in the worth of fellow Americans. I feel isolated from other people, even my friends and coworkers. I feel nothing but dismay about our collective future and feel a new futility in my teaching endevours. Some days I have felt that I can’t carry on with my work, or feel joy in everyday things. There is a big dark force looming and I am helpless in the face of its arrival.
In my liberal, middle-class, well-educated, white mind and heart, I have never ever felt this overwhelming hopelessness way before. This is where I differ from 13.2% of the population of the United States of America.
Many Black Americans feel this doom every day of their lives. This is how they have felt for generations…for centuries. African Americans have felt objectification, racism, hatred, and Jim Crow laws, housing and job discrimination, unjust incarceration and eviction, and stereotyping in movies, books, music, and art. I have participated in this system of oppression because I am white.
I have heard from many of the white people that I know that they will feel energized by attending the Women’s March in DC. I have heard from my closest friends that it will make them feel better to meet and walk with people who feel the same way they do. I hope that they will feel comfort in their action and will leave feeling a part of something positive. But.
I will not go. I will not march with like-minded people who for once feel this helplessness and have enough money, resources, and empowerment to march together. I feel intense shamefulness that white people have sat by for years and years separately in the face of this systemic racism and have not collectively stood up to protest. We have sat separately and not demanded action for our fellow human beings while they have been arrested without cause, died young from gun violence, tried to survive on lower wages and broken families, and have lost hope in education. We have not demanded equity in schools and equity in the court system. We have not stood up together and taken action to attempt to erase the impact of the history of our country on our fellow citizens.
Teachers: we have not stood up and demanded equitable educational opportunities for our black students. We have not stood up to help the failing schools around us when they don’t directly affect us. We have not examined the systems that we keep in place to disenfranchise many of our black students. We don’t help recruit black teachers or help to show black students how much they are needed as future teachers in our schools. We do not stand up to share ideas that might work to bring equity. We sit. In our own classrooms disconnected from our black students and not willing to join forces to be the leaders they need us to be until they can gain their own power.
I cannot march with fellow white people on Saturday. I want my friends and people that I love to feel empowered and welcomed into the arms of other like-minded people. Then I want them to come home from Washington and keep standing and start moving towards changing some very deep-seeded beliefs that keep us all from standing up when we ourselves are not directly threatened.
WE feel threatened, we march. THEY feel threatened, and we sit…shift uncomfortably in our chairs, but continue to sit. I’m not going to the march, but I’ll stand with you when you get back.
cQ��oA
