Things I don’t understand: what it feels like to live life without white privilege

Things I don’t understand: what it feels like to submit an application with concern that the spelling of my name or the ethnicity box I checked will negatively impact my odds.

Things I don’t understand: what it feels like to enter an establishment and dread how I'll be treated based on the color of my skin.

Things I don’t understand: people attempting to proclaim racism is dead when there are obviously countless people dead due to aggressions based on their skin color.

Things I don’t understand: why it takes videos of humans being murdered to re-raise awareness and evoke deeper change.

Things I don’t understand: why humans getting shot needs to be rationalized away but a stand against the mistreatment of animals is easily made.

Things I don't understand: why there seems to be a necessity to define persons that lose their life to senseless police brutality and violence as good or bad-- no, they're a person, priors or not, they did not deserve it.

Things I don’t understand: white women that want to date men of color but won’t give a second thought to the safety of their future sons and daughters, and the millions of children presently living in terror.

Things I don’t understand: being pulled over and fearing whether it’s a good cop or a bad cop.

Things I don’t understand: fearing for my life because I’ve grown up in a world that has both told and shown me my life doesn’t matter.

Things I don’t understand: a presidential candidate that wants to make “America great again" -- a country that was ruthlessly built on the backs of enslaved people and the genocide of whole people groups in the name of "freedom and Christianity."

Things I don't understand: why we'd ever want to go back to that-- our disillusioned "American Dream," or where we ever thought of ourselves to be a "Christian nation," or the "chosen people" based on our American citizenship.

Things I don't understand: why our history classes teach the idolization of westernization but don't teach the historical trauma and grief it resulted-- why don't we tell the truth.

Things I don’t understand: how the white community isn’t burdened by an excruciating amount of conducive conviction and grief.

Things I don’t understand: how we don't see it's our very own white privilege telling us not to feel or process our discomfort, conviction, and guilt, for authentic change.

Things I don’t understand: how the white community is incapable of truly acknowledging that our ancestors are responsible for an astounding amount of death, violence, and loss of culture—all around the world.

Things I don't understand: as to why "different" became a synonym for "wrong," "unworthy," or "savage."

Things I don't understand: how we've become desensitized to our own corruption.

Things I don’t understand: how we can't seem to comprehend the need to presently redeem the sins of our white fathers.

Things I don’t understand: how we are not more heartbroken, angry, or at the very least frustrated for our brothers and sisters in Christ.

Things I don't understand: why the church thinks it can't play a role in bringing justice to all these tragedies.

Things I don't understand: how people that have faced immense injustice and violence are simply asking for equality and not vengeance -- the white man would have declared war.

Things I don't understand: why white people won't confess their real issue with equality--the fear of living life without the luxury of our privilege and power established in blood shed.

Things I don't understand: why God lets us continually destroy each other and ourselves.

Things I don't understand: why it's taken me this long to write this piece, publish it, and weep over the injustices I've seen, or as to why I've chosen my white privilege over my white conviction.

Things I don’t understand: how some are still confused about why #blacklivesmatter needs to exist—it’s because only white lives mattered for far too long.