Jay Grabow,
Omaha, NH.
I’m a 52 year old white guy, living in middle class suburbs. Yeah, I’ve struggled to get where I am in life and I’ll need to keep struggling to maintain it. I grew up absorbing the racism around me. But I witnessed two prime examples of how racism affects African Americans while in my teens and I’ve worked to reject racism ever since. Still, I can’t “walk a mile in their shoes”, because mere empathy won’t tell me exactly what it’s like to be black in America. For this reason, if an African American tells me that some event or some statement is “racist”, I’ll generally take their word for it. After all, it’s not for the perpetrators of hate to distinguish what’s racist and what isn’t – it’s up to the victims to do so. Listen more. Talk less.
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