Take a Minute, My White Brethren Before We Speak

Looking at violence and protest might summon tropes of indignation, but I think every white person should look at their ancestry.com history and reckon with how many people did your people own?

They might be hard to find as they’re often recorded under Property with furniture and buckets. Look at wills and notice how Property was handed around like less-than “the good china” for dining.

There was a cost of looting generations of lives.

We have to reckon with this at some point. In a real, measurable, economic (to say nothing of humanitarian) privation happened. That the legacy of that privation haunts us in ways that ruptures loose often should be addressed and healed. But my goodness, there’s not much hope of effectively addressing it in the near term.