I needed to hear this. Thanks for writing it.

I was reading the article thinking to myself “I do none of these! What a nice little white lady I am! Until I got to ‘I can’t believe it.’” Oh that one hit me. One thing that has always blown me away, are those moments where I see people I care about experiencing discrimination and racism, and I realize my own privilege. It enrages me, but also guilts me. Yes, I know racism exists, I know it’s awful, but when I see even a minor incident of it happen in front of me, to someone I care about, it has such an emotional impact and makes me so mad. Then I realize this is what they have to deal with every fucking day, and this alone is just a drop in the bucket. It’s one thing to understand there is racism in my world, it’s another experience feelings when it happens to someone you care about, and totally different than my friends experiencing it first hand.

Being in a collective denial about what happens, fueled by my own good intentions as a white person, the guilt about realizing I do benefit from racism as a white woman, perpetuates this problem and gaslights African Americans who are actually experiencing it. Yet I have seen myself hide behind “But I’m just a nice, humble lady, I had no idea.” I can claim myself to be innocent but am really just ignorantly contributing to a toxic group denial. It’s one thing to never understand what black people go through, it’s another to ignore what they experience because my fragile little emotions don’t want to face what they deal with daily.