As a resident of the Charlotte area and an alumna of The University of North Carolina at Charlotte, I've been paying close attention to not only the local and national news coverage of the protests and riots in Center City, but also to the commentary on the current events made by my Facebook friends. I can say I'm deeply disgusted but not surprised as to the response of my local community.
I could come up with an entire list of ways to tell that your Facebook friends are racist, but that's another article for another day. Living in the South, I know I'll never run out of material for such a piece. In the last 48+ hours, I've observed the absolute tell-tale sign that my Facebook friends are racist: they are assuming that all Black Lives Matter protesters are dangerous thugs inciting violence in an effort to get their point across.
It should be obvious that a commonality does not equate to a clone. Klan members are white, and I, too, am white. Does that commonality make me a Ku Klux Klan member? Of course not. So why, then, would people assume that all participants in a Black Lives Matter protest are dangerous, simply because there are comparatively few opportunistic anarchists and thieves in the same place at the same time?
The majority of the Black Lives Matter movement is very peaceful. The group of people occupying the center city of Charlotte last night wouldn't have even been out there were it not for the visible, peaceful protests that went unheard and deemed "controversial." I'm talking about Beyoncé's halftime performance and Kaepernick's sitting for the National Anthem. If the entire group of peaceful protesters hadn't been out there, I can almost guarantee that the individuals who took it upon themselves to be destructive and violent would not have had the opportunity to do such damage.
White privilege allows us Caucasian folks to pretend like all Black Lives Matter protesters are out-of-control savages so that we can ignore the fact that institutionalized racism is set up to benefit us only. We're comfortable with the way things are, so why would we want to change anything?
Our white privilege makes it all too easy to be unaffected and unsympathetic to a cause that we are fundamentally unable to understand. We don't fear for our lives when we spot blue lights behind us on the road. We don't worry about not getting called back about a job because our name sounds "too black." We aren't told that our natural hair is "unprofessional" for the workplace. We haven't had our land stolen from us for over a century.
If things were reversed, and there were decades upon decades of systemic racism set up to benefit black people while white people were oppressed, it would be you and I out there in the Center City of Charlotte, chanting, being tear gassed, and dodging bullets. An entire group's mission should not be condemned due to the heinous actions of the few who simply took advantage of a time of unrest. Let's not trash an entirely necessary and primarily peaceful movement over our inability to have compassion for a group of people.
