Make Shit Work Nice: The anti-racism version.
(I originally wrote this as a social media post on June 4th, and then again as an email a few days later. Both were just a few days after the Black Lives Matter and anti police brutality protests and riots began)
I don’t know the best thing or the right thing to be doing right now. But I do know I have a story I can share.
If you've been on social media at all in the past few days, you're fully aware of exactly what's been happening across America right now, and a lot of people don't know what to do.
Some people are becoming much stronger activists.
I've noticed some people are staying totally silent.
Some people are kind of in-between and some people are just really overwhelmed.
We all come from different countries, have been part of many different socioeconomic backgrounds, and comprise a wide variety of ethnicities. There can be no one message that resonates with everyone.
So I want to share a little bit of MY story.
I've lived in the southern U.S. for almost 15 years and I've experienced life in the southern U.S. over these past 15 years as a person of color.
But for the first 24 years of my life, I grew up in western Canada and where I grew up, black people weren't really the primary marginalized community. The First Nations people were.
While Canada does have its own bloody history with racism, it's been targeted to a different group.
I grew up in a low-income housing project in western Canada. I was the middle child of three, raised by a single mom who emigrated to Canada as a teenager. For a big chunk of my childhood, we were on social assistance and lived below the poverty line - but I never really felt unsafe growing up.
I'd walk through back alleys at night as a kid and never once did I think something bad could ever happen.
Fast forward - I'm in college and was studying with some friends pretty late into the night. One of the girls in the group asked me to escort me to her dorm (This wasn't some hookup type of thing, it was just like she wanted someone to walk with her for her safety).
Her dorm was on the other side of campus and I was totally oblivious to why she was asking.
Me: "Why? It's the total opposite direction from my dorm."
Her: "Moses, are you stupid? I'm a 100-pound girl."
She had grown up in a much bigger city than me. She showed me how she would hold her keys in her fist so if ever an attacker came around, she would be ready to take them out until she could get out her pepper spray.
She told me she never goes out when it's late if she's alone.
Privilege can be described as an advantage that's granted to some, but not to all.
At that moment, I realized that I grew up with the privilege of being able to walk around by myself at night, and never once did I have to worry about my safety.
If you have ever walked alone in a dark neighborhood and felt totally safe, you have a privilege that many women in North America don't. Through this conversation, I was able to see a blind spot that I didn't know that I had and I was able to start working on it.
Since then, I've had more and more conversations with women about their experiences and safety. And I feel like I'm able to be a better ally because of it.
Fast forward to last year, I was reading Malcolm Gladwell's book, Talking to Strangers (I highly recommend it if you want to start to dip your toes into conversations around privilege, as all the stories in the book kind of revolve around the Sandra Bland case.)
There's a chapter in the book about Brock Turner (if you don't know about the Brock Turner case, google it after you're done reading this.). One interesting idea that was discussed in the book was the idea of being blackout drunk. Please, don't get me wrong, Brock Turner was a predator, but being blackout drunk does result in a total shutdown of your ability to make new memories.
Depending on your physiology, that shutdown could happen before there are dramatic changes to your motor control or to your speech. You could be at a party having a conversation with someone appearing totally fine and you could ask them to do something - and they could say yes.
Again depending on their physiology - that person might be able to walk and talk and act like maybe they have a mild buzz at best, and they can remember absolutely nothing the next day.
This made me think back to all the times in my life where I woke up, hungover, knowing that if I drank to the point of being hungover, someone else in the room or on a date may have drank to the point of blackout.
So I asked some of my female friends if they ever felt like they were in a situation where they were too drunk to give consent. They all said yes.
I asked if they ever felt like they don't know whether they got taken advantage of the night before. They all said yes.
This led to what ended up being a multi day text conversation with my friend and colleague Shelby, who is a trainer out in California. (She's awesome. Check her out. Follow her. She is one of my favorite people for all sorts of different reasons.)
We've had really, really good conversations over the last couple of months about race and gender and privilege. She told me that almost EVERY single girl she knew had a story about being taken advantage of.
Privilege can be defined as an advantage that's granted to some, but not to all
Up until literally this year, I was oblivious to exactly how many women not only felt unsafe late at night, but actually had experienced a scenario where they were sexually assaulted to a degree.
If you’ve never had to think “Did I get raped last night?”, you have a privilege that most women in North America don’t.
Through this conversation with Shelby, I was able to see a blind spot that I didn’t know I had and was able to start working on it. Having conversations about uncomfortable topics has been a way for me to grow as a person, and learn about my blind spots.
It might work for you too...
You can watch the rest of the video if you’d like to hear about some of the other race related things that I've experienced in my lifetime. This isn’t me explaining anyone elses black experience or any commentary on racism in Canada. Simply a tale of my personal life experiences.
Regardless of your race, gender, nationality or sexual orientation, I invite you to join the conversation. As uncomfortable as it may or may not be.
-Moses