#blm movement

!!cw: bigotry, racism, Jim Crow (I think)!!

so brief explanation, I am not racist. never have been, never will be. But my family is (my grandmother and her son, my father at least, I do not like them) so I grew up hearing and seeing a LOTTT of mockery/bigotry toward the black and Asian communities.

My grandmother owns a very racist Christmas ornament(which she calls her ‘little n-word girl’ we are white), and a soap holder of a black girl

both look something like this

It got to the point I thought it was completely okay to say the n-word(I thought it was slang for friend for a while) and said it a few times. I was confused why people told me I can’t say that, until someone actually explained it to me. At which point I promptly stopped using it.

I dropped out after 1 semester because I couldn’t pay for it and I wanted to die. All I could think about was how much I didn’t want to live and how bad I was at activism and how much better people of color deserved. The BLM movement was slowly down because people were going back to work and that made sense. What didn’t make sense was how so many people, specifically white people, stopped caring.

In the 1 semester I had in college I read and listened to the 1619 project. I took weekend seminars focusing on how to be a good ally. The big class of the semester focused on how climate change and racism are interconnected. I learned about the prison system. I was horrible. And being a white person, it was very much my problem. The more I learned the more I realized that this is not something you ever stop learning about. My brain was buzzing with all the crimes white people have committed against people of color and I didn’t know how to behave around people of color when I knew that every time they interacted with me they were measuring how safe I was to be around and how they should best act to stay “on my good side.” By the time I dropped out of college I was starting to feel like the damage was insurmountable and there was no way to ever “fix” it. But I sure as hell knew that I didn’t want to make it worse.

Roughly a year later I was doing a lot better and jump right back into the scary anti-racism education. I was so focused on doing my part that I hadn’t really noticed that most white had stopped doing anything. The people I interacted with online were all leftist now. And they were the type that did the reading. I was taking all the tips Black people gave on TikTok (left because it’s evil) and taking book recommendations and listen to them on audiobook.

Now I know how to keep something of educating myself and taking a break so I don’t fall into despair balance. The 2020 George Floyd murder enlightened me a lot. It sped up my growth into a scary leftist a lot! And I don’t fucking understand how so many white people just stopped.

i should have been more prepared for how gut wrenching this movie would be. the acting was incredible and the replica of Emmett’s body made me sob.

everything was incredible and horrible at the same time, and the actress who plays Mamie (i dont remember her name right now) was impeccable in her portrayal of the grief, boldness and motherly love of the incredible woman she was portraying.

Emmett’s actor was adorable, i appreciated the inclusion of the boy’s stutter and he was so, so sweet at the beginning when they showed the short snippet of his time before and during his trip to Mississippi.

something i would like to say is that before this week, i was very uneducated on the lynching of Emmett. I knew that he was murdered, i knew that he was a child, and i knew that he had whistled. from the severity of the lynching i had presumed that this happened during slave times. it was that bad. i was shocked the other day while i was writing for a book project on Malcolm X’s autobiography, and i was bringing up lynchings in the paper. i decided to include Emmett, and was reading his wikipedia page and felt my stomach drop when seeing date of death:

1955.

My grandpa was 3 years old when Emmett was murdered. that poor baby could still be alive, and Carolyn (the woman who got him murdered) didn’t get much consequence. she died of cancer in 2023, when she should have been rotting in a prison cell for life.

please, be educated and aware of what happened in the past and in the current. alt-right borderline terroristic groups and the KKK are rising once more under this administration. it is our duty as white people to know exactly what we did to innocent children, women and men and still do to this day.

Rest in peace to Reverend George Lee, Emmett Till, Mamie Till Bradley Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, Malcolm Little, George Floyd, and the thousands of other murdered african americans in the past and those that will come in the future.