Ferguson is burning and I have no right to be outraged.
I have no right to raise my hands for a Facebook photo op, or to scream at the TV, or sign online petitions, or forward the inspiring words of dead civil rights activists.
I shouldn’t be allowed to sit here and rail against racial bias, or mourn the senseless death of Michael Brown, or demand the heads of power-intoxicated law enforcement officers.
I’m doing it all, but I have no right to, because this is my fault.
I’ve lived nearly half a century on this planet. For all of it I’ve done so as a white guy, and for most of it, I’ve been oblivious to just how much easier that fact has made those years.
Oh, I’ve fancied myself enlightened and progressive. I’ve internally patted myself on the back for living in inner city Philadelphia during college, for having some black friends, for arguing with Conservative middle-class white folks about how our privilege blinds us to the struggles of people of color.
I’ve traveled to Kenya and served kids in the slums, and done mission projects in downtown Birmingham, and I fooled myself into thinking that was enough; that equality existed because I left my neighborhood for a bit.
I’ve felt the warm comfort of self-righteousness, and the quick high of moral superiority that comes when you feel like you have more compassion or insight than someone else.
Sure maybe I made a little noise at the horrendous handling of the Trayvon Martin murder, and yet even that didn’t last long after the noise on my news feed did.
The bottom line, as sick as it makes me, is that Michael Browns have been getting riddled with bullets for decades, and I’ve apparently been OK with it.
For people of color, this weeks’ news isn’t new.
These aren’t mere aberrations in their headlines.
For them, Furgeson isn’t the first, it’s just the latest.
These aren’t new wounds being cut-in to flesh, they are simply the most recent blow that’s broken the scabs open again.
As horribly as I’ve felt watching the news this week, and as angry as I’ve gotten seeing kids teargassed, and as incensed as I’ve been witnessing city streets become war zones, I’ve felt like a fraud for even commenting, simply because it’s comes after such a long, dangerous silence.
This is about Michael Brown and Ferguson for sure, but it’s about so many more young black men, and so many other small towns in my country. It’s certainly about now, but it’s about a thousand “nows” that I let slip by in the past; times I said nothing and did nothing.
Broken systems don’t spring-up overnight, and injustice isn’t usually an event, it’s a pattern; one created by the stringing together of a billion small silences and countless turns of the head.
I need to own the times I’ve been silent and the times I turned my head.
I can rationalize it all away, but the truth is, comfort and power and position lull us to sleep whenever they’re placed in our laps.
For as much as I’d like to think otherwise, when it comes to the issues of race, I’ve largely lived a cozy life that has left me sleepwalking past the struggles of people like those in Ferguson. It’s a realization that turns my stomach and breaks my heart.
Some will dismiss this, and call it all a case of “white guilt”. I prefer to call it the waking-up of my soul.
I don’t really know where to go from here; what to do with this mix of outrage, and sadness, and regret.
I only know that my greatest, most passionate prayer, is that I don’t ever allow myself to be lulled into complacent quiet again, once the streets of Ferguson are cleared, and after I’m able to once again convince myself that my easy reality… is everyone’s.
