Category: 08 – The Shadows – racial justice awakenings

I have been watching all kinds of movies and documentaries on racial issues, heroes, hardships, horror. I feel compelled to educate myself as those who are affected DIRECTLY haven’t had a choice in how any of this goes.

Every day my empathy dives deeper and deeper. I’m committed to practicing unbiased kindness and love. I hope my words and service can move others into a better existence, and to really know and trust that they’re loved … especially by me.  I don’t have any answers. But I want to know what I can do.

2020 gave me a hard look at how white liberals doing anti-racist work ran with certain ideas that my community and neighbors — who are majority black — are never going to be up for. Community / neighborhood policing is not an option in a neighborhood that has gang culture in certain areas, and they… Continue reading kathryn m.

The vitriol I saw coming from the conservative right did more than anything before to solidify my view that racism is real, systemic, evil, and needs to be dealt with now. The summer’s civil unrest was in my own backyard, so to speak. I had zero issues with the protestors, but saw white privilege co-opt… Continue reading patricia b.

For me, 2020 made me think harder about the abolitionist movement and what it means to fight for abolition. I’ve always been anti-police (well at least a few decades) and I needed to better understand how we create a world in which we abolish them, prisons, the military, and these systems that uphold them. It… Continue reading dan a.

Being from another country, I have always been fascinated by the hypocrisy in the U.S. society at large. People debate if saying Black or African-American is the correct way, and nobody notices that they don’t really care because one way or the other the racism is always there. Being politically correct in the language doesn’t… Continue reading alfredo g.

After one of the many publicized BLM incidents (before George Floyd), I read a Facebook post written by an African American college professor in Boston describing how gut-wrenchingly terrified he was when he was for no reason suddenly surrounded by police cars as he was walking into a taco place for lunch. It was brilliantly… Continue reading marilyn a.

This year really brought into very sharp focus the amount of privilege I have had in my life, and the understanding that I wanted to do more work around helping to balance the scales.

I don’t think a single black or brown person experienced an awakening. It has ALWAYS been terrible, and wht people were not listening. Way too much of “Oh, I don’t see color. I love everyone equally!” while blithely ignoring the plethora of ways we benefit from systemic racism. What’s different this year? Grave injustice is… Continue reading bree c.

2020 was not so much a racial justice awakening for me as reaching a turning point: the realization that awareness and talk are meaningless in solving the problem, and real world actions small and large are what will effect substantive change.