#@theroot

It may go without saying Upon seeing my brown face That I will always And emphatically insist that Black Lives Matter. I have heard the arguments And listened patiently to the counterpoint Knowing I am neither heard Nor understood, in the wind of the flatulent rebuttal, “all lives….” But really, this isn’t about black lives It is actually about black deaths and how they have never really mattered

You can’t truly hear another until you know yourself-- was the breakthrough I needed after having repeatedly beaten my head against the veiled wall of systematic oppression and the fact that I was racially ignorant. I always attempted to fix my ignorance through reading and listening to others experiences instead of just looking at myself first and the things that have happened in my own life.  It wasn’t until I looked at my own fuck ups and loved them that I was able to move into a new space.

I grew up in the suburbs of Detroit—a byproduct of the redlining and strategic measures to keep people of color at arm’s length. Needless to say the 89.1% of white people that surrounded my daily existence left me comfortable, ignorant and unaware.

When I stole a sizable amount of money from a fellow classmate in 7th grade and the person blamed for it was the only brown male in the 30 students in our class, I stayed silent subconsciously hoping that he would remain my scapegoat so that I wouldn’t have to own up to my wrong doing.

When I was on a Road trip for a soccer tournament in the south with my childhood friends Kyle and Oliver, we stopped at a rest stop in the late hours of the night to use the restroom. As we walked into the gas station and saw that there was only one unisex bathroom and it was occupied, we decided to be the thirteen year old assholes that we were and repeatedly pound on the door. Pretending not to hear the loud grunts, “I’m in here God Damnit”, we lined up single file and acted as if we had been quietly waiting our turns, but as the door unlocked and an angry older white gentleman emerged from the bathroom, our snickers and wily grins quickly turned to fear as he began to berate us and tell us we weren’t worth a damn. The eery thing is he only looked at Kyle and Oliver --looking back and forth, back and forth with this energy that presumed them to be nothing. My only thought during this episode was one of gratitude for not being yelled at.

During my senior year when I began my first interracial relationship and a white girl that I had previously been seeing texted me, “Really Alex??? A black girl…..” My only thought was, “At least she is jealous”, completely bypassing the racist comment.

After college I moved to downtown Baltimore and about six months after having lived there, my brown girlfriend at the time, along with another white friend of ours got into a discussion about the current state of the city and the groups of citizens that inhabited its different Burroughs. When we started talking about the epidemic of homeless people that littered the city, my white friend said, “It is isn’t that I don’t like black people, it’s just that I hate laziness.” Again I said nothing and justified it with the argument that he is entitled to his opinion.

I share only a few of my thousands of moments of ignorance in the truth that every time I share one I am closer to uncovering the true way that I was created to look at the world. When I suppress or shame myself-- the anger and frustration only grow and get to the point of being unmanageable. So on Day 4, take a moment and journal the moments in which you acted differently than what you know as your true self and be amazed at the freedom you feel from the self-love.