“‘Do they know they’re in the wrong place?’ I whispered. ‘Some rules have to be broken.’ Mama whispered back.”
I’ve never been in a situation where I had to break the rules to exercise my right for life, freedom or justice.
We read Freedom On The Menu this week by Carole Boston Weatherford, a picture book about the Greensboro Four at the Woolworth’s lunch counter, the movement kicking off the sit-ins. Beckett was thoroughly confused. He understood that the black people were treated very unfairly, and he didn’t want that to happen. He didn’t understand the protesting, despite the fact that this kid has been to quite a few protests since November 2016. His life, his freedom and his future success has never been on the line. Blissfully unaware, my little white boy, because the world has never been working against him.
Because of that, the protest is where his cognitive dissonance began, because the good guys in the story were breaking the rules.
The protestors were disrupting the peace.
The protestors were even being put in jail.
That’s when I began to see on such a base level the critical nature of the Civil Rights Movement and, now, the Black Lives Matter movement.
Protesting is loud, protesting is angry, protesting demands something break. There’s a disruption to the order of things that has to happen, and I see that real change won’t happen quietly or without literally and figuratively shattering reality as we know it. Although I know that I will never truly understand, I admire so deeply the incredible courage of these movements. I so admire the people that unite with bravery to disrupt the peace in order to be heard, to ignite change. This is not a distant past to which us white people can shake our heads and proclaim we would be on the right side of history. These horrors are right now. They are today.
I am going to do my part to respond with love in a braver and more courageous way. I am going to do better. As parents, we’re going to raise our boys to do better.
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