According to Wikipedia: “Ensler was born in New York City, the second of three children of Arthur Ensler, an executive in the food industry, and Chris Ensler.[5][6][7] She was raised in the northern suburb of Scarsdale.[7] Her father was Jewish and her mother Christian,[8] and she grew up in a predominantly Jewish community…”
is time for a collective reckoning, a moral accounting, a radical self-appraisal and calling out, fellow white Americans. Our explicit and implicit participation in crimes against black people has gone on for too long.
What allows us to justify murder? What selfish gene prevents us from intervening in the face of blatant injustice? What history of lies and distortions have we sold ourselves that keep us in our isolated boxes of superiority and denial? What truth would we have to tell about ourselves to unravel these strangulating tentacles of racism and violence?
I was a cop – but I still don’t know how to survive a police stop
Michael A Wood, Jr
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What systems would we have to abandon or lose or claim as bankrupt?Which one of us hasn’t seen the outright slaughter going on in the recent videos of police shootings, and the videos before them, and the lynchings before them?
Who doesn’t know the history of the very intentional policies that created abject conditions that so many black people are forced to live in: the poverty, the lack of opportunities, education, jobs, the exclusion? Which one of us doesn’t understand the daily terror that occupies the lifeblood of every black woman, man and child in America which inhibits their ability to breath, live and thrive? Which one of us hasn’t noticed the prisons filled with millions of black folks who are held and incarcerated at a rate 14 times higher than whites?
And if we don’t see or know these things, why the hell don’t we? Why have we created and allowed such a distance between us and the black people around us? Why have we inured ourselves to their suffering, their sorrow, their fear, their desires, their dreams?
