The Other Talk by Brendan Kiely

The Other Talk by Brendan Kiely

Author:Brendan Kiely [Kiely, Brendan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atheneum/Caitlyn Dlouhy Books
Published: 2021-09-21T00:00:00+00:00


* * *

So who needs to take responsibility for that white supremacist?

I take a hard look in the mirror and say, Brendan, you need to be responsible for her.

All of us white people need to be responsible for that white supremacist. We need to take some responsibility for the violent language in the elevator in South Carolina. We need to take some responsibility for the profound misunderstanding about the dignity and sacredness of human life when people are shouting “Blue Lives Matter.”

“Responsibility,” Brendan? Isn’t that a bit much?

No. It’s what my father was trying to get me to understand after he found out about the white-boy runs.

Too many of us white people let all the racism around us just slide. We give it a pass. We don’t confront it…

And therefore it continues. When we let it slide, it gives permission for others to let it slide too, and then others to mimic that behavior, and still others to even escalate it.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. We can take some of the responsibility so that we can help change some of the damage and injustice done by racism.

What if we made that a priority in our lives, like our nightly prayers maybe, or thought about it as often as we checked Instagram or TikTok, so it burned like a candle in the window of our hearts all the time? Like, 24/7. Not just for an hour. Not just after some public incident that’s all over everyone’s news feeds. Not just for a week, as though we were “responsibility tourists.” Like we take a quick trip to the land of responsibility, snap a few photos, post a few rants on social media, but then check back out for the rest of our lives—or at least until we decide to mosey on back to the land of responsibility, when we’re in the mood (or feeling a little extra guilty).

What does that mean?

For too many of us, that Uber driver is someone we work with. For too many of us, the guys dropping the N-word in the elevator are kids we go to school with. For too many of us, the people talking about how blue lives matter are sitting around our kitchen table having dinner with us.

Those kinds of comments are flying around everywhere. Just ask any person of the Global Majority in the United States if they’ve ever heard racist comments made about them to their face or in their presence. Those. Comments. Are. Everywhere. And they aren’t just floating in the air like smoke drifting from some distant fire.

Someone lit the spark. Someone stoked the flame.

White people, we’ve done that.

Whether it is a comment in the lunchroom cafeteria or it is the rigged system denying textbooks…

… or starving some school systems of the money needed for proper supplies…

… or the history of segregation…

… or the practices of real estate brokers that have caused differences in property values that are the reason for unequal funds for school districts…

… or



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