My Friend Has Become An Activist

Although she grew up with white privilege

Black lives matter as do all lives

My friend, Sarah (not her real name), has become an activist. She has lately decided to support the Black Lives Matter movement. She and her husband have been to peaceful protests to fight against racism. She has empathy for those who are facing racism. She has decided to speak out against the injustice and racism that Black people regularly endure.

Sarah is a pretty, blonde woman in her forties. She grew up in an affluent area of what was at the time a small city in the Bay Area of California. I knew her there when she was a teenager. I worked with youth groups in our church so I knew most of the “kids” in the congregation. Sarah was from a good family and grew up with white privilege in a predominantly white community. It is unlikely that she knew many racial minorities other than a few Asian Americans like myself and my family.

We lost touch for a lot of years after we moved from the area, but we reconnected on Facebook several years ago. Sarah had grown up, married, and had children. We had ended up in the same state before the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, which set off protests against racism and police brutality of Black men. Sarah and her husband attended an early morning protest gathering where I was able to meet up with them.

Being a conservative and active member of her church, Sarah has found resisance to her ideas from her fellow church members. Her friends at her church have criticized her sharply for working on racist issues. Although the leaders in her church have recently spoken out against racism, some of Sarah’s friends continue to condemn the Black Lives Matter movement and attempts to say that racism needs to stop.

People who are Democrats can be conservative. Republicans can be activists. It is not unusual for people in political parties to oppose some of the stances that their particular party seems to encourage and espouse. People pick their party because they agree more with it than another party. They feel that their party is more in line with their general way of thinking and the values to which they adhere. They don’t have to agree with everything.

Sarah is not a Democrat, but she said she was voting for Joe Biden. She does not feel that Donald Trump shares her values. The constant bullying of people that he does and his behavior is not to her liking. She has decided that racism is wrong. She has empathy for the mainly Black and Brown people who face racism on a regular basis. She thinks that racism is unjust, and she wants to help erase it.

When the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. was trying to envision a world without racism, he tried to bring the matter to everyone’s attention through non-violent means. He wanted life to be fair and just for his children and everyone else. Reverend King was assassinated in 1968 at the age of thirty-nine. He was still a young man when he gave his life for the causes in which he believed deeply.

It has been over fifty years since Reverend King died. There has been some progress made against segregation and the injustice of racism. However, racism has not disappeared. It is still evident and continues to be a problem in the United States of America.

If more people would think like Sarah and be willing to fight against racism, it would help the cause. It cannot be accomplished only by political leaders and Black people. It needs to be looked at as the universal problem that it is. Hate is the root cause. More love is needed.

The general public needs to help eradicate the hate and injustice that continues to cause racism.

[Source: Wikipedia]