Dear White People: The Photos.
Photographed June 8, 2015 in Philadelphia, PA.
It’s amazing how an idea can blossom into action. Today was one of those days, where, I needed to channel my anger and frustration about went down in McKinney, Texas into something productive. Turns out, today ended up being a fascinating social experiment that confirmed what I didn’t want to acknowledge, but already knew.
This morning, I was sitting at my desk, furious about the video I had seen on YouTube, and I yelled down to my friend YahNe Ndgo. She ran upstairs, thinking I had seen an animal (haha). Anytime either of us has a good idea, the other will give it a go, just to see it to its logical conclusion. Well, this was a good idea that gave us both the opportunity to be creative, while working out and working through some very complex emotions about what we saw in the video.
When we finished hanging the banners, I sat back and watched. Some people on foot or either in their cars stopped to look, react, talk, sign, and to be photographed. Others, on foot, or in their cars, just kept it moving. All of it was a moving experience for me, because it confirmed for me how powerful words are, and how they can bring us together or divide us in an instant.
I sat on the porch all afternoon, in the hot, heavy and hazy sunlight, chatting with old people, young people, black people, white people, men, women, children. We talked about power, black on black crime, how seeing so much violence leaves us numb and unable to feel sometimes. One young lady, in particular, was so angered by the police that she admitted that her feelings were on the verge of turning into pure hatred. She despited how she, an educated black woman, could be so easily disrespected by the very people that swear to serve and protect her.
White people (and some black people, too, like the older gentleman who stated calmly that “police brutality is part of American’s past,” to which I replied, “that doesn’t mean it has to be part of our future.”) need to understand that feelings are raw and volatile and running red hot like an iron poker, emerging from fire, unshaped and unformed and completely unpredictable
As I stated in the FB post I wrote today, time is running out. What are we going to do? We can’t continue to wait and allow incidences of police brutality to run rampant in our communities. We can’t continue to turn a blind eye, thinking that it can’t ever happen in our own communities because we live in a gated subdivision or whatever.
Time is running out.
