Dear White Friend, You No Longer Have the Luxury of Indifference

This piece was originally published on May 29th, 2020 a few days after George Floyd was killed by a former police officer now convict, Derek Chauvin.

I’ve held on to different configurations of these words over the last three years, and I’m not sure why. Maybe a part of me hoped black men and women would stop being killed at the hands of white people and police officers, and I wouldn’t have to go back to trying to delicately rearrange my thoughts. I wouldn’t have to go through the same motions. First, pain at another black life lost, then anger at the audacity of the perpetrator and then outrage at what inevitably comes next injustice. Perhaps I kept my draft, knowing deep down that it would heartbreakingly always find renewed relevance.

Well, here we are. Here we fucking are.

If you’re tempted to dismiss this as an American problem and not a Canadian problem, I invite you to disabuse yourself of that notion.

Did you know a black woman, alone with the police in her apartment, “fell” off her balcony in Toronto? Yes, the details of the incident are still unclear, but if you doubt the black person + police = death equation, remember Abdirahman Abdi and Machuar Madut.

I ask myself this question almost every time I see a police officer. If something bad were to happen to me, how many excuses will my white friends make to absolve them?

After all, I am prone to passionate arguments over minor details. I am a loud, unapologetically eccentric black man who doesn’t take well to abuses of authority. It would be easy to file a mishap under the standard trope “He ShOuLd HaVe LiStEnEd To ThEm” and other fairy tales used to dehumanize victims who look like me and absolve murderers who look like you.

If this approach to a conversation about race and police brutality makes you uncomfortable, then consider the unending discomfort of existing among people who feign discomfort in conversations about your reality. We have long moved past the time where your polite-but-never-too-inquisitive, receptive-but-never-in-a-hurry-to-address-anything-of-substance posture can be tolerated.

Dear white friends, you no longer have the luxury of indifference.

I can almost hear it already. “But I’m not racist.”

Sure. Racism is always there, not here. Him, not me. Karen, not *insert your own name*. To your fragile spirit, the racist acts we experience every day are much worse than your passivity. No, friend, I must bring this truth to your awareness, your passivity enables those very racist acts. They are one and the same. Two weapons forged from the same white supremacist ideology.

Invoking MLK may seem trite, especially as white voices have worked tirelessly to sanitize his stinging critiques, but he will forever be accurate in his analysis of the biggest roadblock we face when we talk about race and the violence black bodies are subjected to at the hands of the state. His frustration with the white moderate still rings true today because we now not only hear the stories of police brutality, we see them streamed live on Facebook, trending on Twitter, played over and over again on YouTube. We watch as an officer, no, coward shoots a man to his death while his four-year-old daughter watches from the back seat. Four years old.

White friend, in just under a month we have watched as your people chased down, accosted and shot Ahmad Aubrey for jogging where they thought he shouldn’t be. Breonna Taylor was shot eight times by police in her own home as they searched for someone who was already in police custody. And now, George. George Floyd suffocated to death on the street. A knee pressed down on his neck for over 8 minutes, three police officers applying pressure to his body as though he was resisting with the strength of a god. Or in their minds, a beast of no name. His crime? Forgery.

The night Donald Trump, racist-in-chief, got elected was an interesting one and not just in the US. Here in Canada, disbelief, shock, anger, disappointment and shame are all emotions you could sense in the air. Reactions on social media offered rationalizations ranging from economic anxiety to Hillary Clinton being a terrible candidate. But what surprised me the most is the genuine shock by large swathes of the white population that maybe, actually, indeed, racists do live among us.

I saw a lot of my white friends struggling with this idea and looking for something else to be the underlying cause. It just had to be something else. I’m not sorry to disappoint you, it isn’t. It amazes me how far and wide you will search to miss what is right in front of you. If it quacks like a duck, it’s a white supremacist.

So here we are, talking about racism again. But we know, as we have always known, that black people talking about racism isn’t the problem, the problem is racism itself. The problem is your unwillingness to look yourself in the mirror and look the white people around you in the face and ask the tough questions. Questions about all the ways you feel entitled, all the ways you bask in the benefits of your whiteness, and all the ways you perpetuate oppression. To confront your irrational fear of black people that is so often used to justify the inhuman treatment callously and remorselessly inflicted on us.

Ask yourself after all you’ve seen this month, who should really be afraid of whom?

I used to believe that there would come a time when we all need to stand up and say enough. In truth, that time has long since gone.

Enough of this behaviour.

It’s no longer just idiocy or ignorance or that’s just how my grandparents are. The leniency you give to this ideology under the guise of ‘meh’ only allows it to fester, cook, and kill. It kills black people. People like me.

You no longer have the luxury of indifference. Your indifference is racist.