A message to white people who are ânot racistâ:
Thereâs a metaphor that Muhammad Ali said about those ânon-racistâ white people and their counterparts.
âIf ten thousand snakes were coming down that aisle now, and I had a door that I could shut, and in that ten thousand, one thousand meant right - one thousand rattlesnakes didn't want to bite me, I knew they were good - should I let all these rattlesnakes come down, hoping that that thousand get together and form a shield? Or should I just close the door and stay safe?....So now I'm going to forget the 400 years of lynching and killing and raping and depriving my people of freedom and justice and equality...and I'm going to look at two or three white people who are trying to do right and ignore the million trying to kill me? I'm not that big of a fool."
Iâd like to add on to his metaphor.
Iâm from Wyoming and in Wyoming there are two types of snakes: a bull snake and a rattlesnake. Rattlesnakes are extremely venomous while bull snakes are mostly harmless and even hunt rattlesnakes themselves. The problem is if you glance at them out of the corner of your eye they have a similar enough pattern that they can easily be mistaken for one another. When I was out with my brothers watering our cattle I was standing next to a tree. Suddenly out of the corner of my eye a snake slithers down the branch and is literally inches away from my face. Naturally I screamed and hightailed it out of there. My brothers laughed at me and said, âRelax, Hannah, itâs only a bull snake.â The problem is even though bull snakes arenât venomous,they still bite. Even though those of us anti-racist white people (myself included) do not mean any harm to black men and women we can still harm them with our actions. We donât realize the ingrained racist habits taught to us by our white grandparents and parents. We have to be aware that even though we may not be âvenomousâ, we still bite. To all the white people: please take the time to self-educate yourself about racism and racist actionsâfrom police brutality and the KKK all the way down to micro-aggressions. Black Lives Matter.
