On May 29, 2020, CNN Senior Producer Christy Oglesby wrote a piece title: I need white mamas to come running.
Dear Christy Oglesby,
I'm a white mama, and I'm here, and I see you.
I was born and raised in Utah. No, I wasn't Mormon, but my ancestors were, and my extended family members were, and my friends were, and my neighbors were, and my teachers and politicians were. They also were all white.
I grew up calling men and women "sisters" and "brothers" because that is what was normal in the Mormon culture that permeated every facet of life, whether you were a believer or not. It was a trait I carried with me into adulthood that would often be met with disapproval when I was no longer living amongst my people. I later learned those terms meant something else when you entered Black communities, and as a white person, I hadn't earned the right to use those terms of affection. They weren't "my people," yet.
In school, I had no reason to disbelieve what my teachers were teaching until 7th-grade history class, when we were learning about the Constitution. The teacher instructed us to sit at our desks and read all of the Amendments. So, I did, until I got to the 19th one.
Something didn't make sense. The 19th Amendment granted women the right to vote nearly half a century after the 15th Amendment granted African American men the right to vote. The Constitution was signed in 1776, meaning it took nearly a century to pass the 15th Amendment in 1870. So, when did the Constitution grant white men the right to vote?
I turned page after page, and I couldn't find the answer. I jumped from my seat and went to the teacher and asked him, "I've looked everywhere, and I can't see where white men were given the right to vote. Why is that?"
A smile slowly crossed his face. To this day, I don't know if it was because he was witnessing an awakening or he was smug; I'll never know. But he looked me straight in the eyes and said, "They were born with that right."
I stood there stunned. Wait, what? I couldn't wrap my brain around his words. They were born with it, but it would take a century to begrudgingly grant African American men the right to vote and then another 50 years to grant women the right to vote? I looked at him with an expression that is known today as, "WTF?"
I had so many more questions, but he told me to sit down, so I slowly returned to my seat, dumbfounded and confused.
This psychological disequilibrium would continue throughout high school and not find the first hints of stability until college. It wouldn't be the professor standing in front of the room who would teach me about equal rights. My teachers were on the pages of a book of literary classics I was assigned to read in English 101. Dr. King shared his Letter from a Birmingham Jail with me, and with tears streaming down my face, I questioned, "Why would that happen to a man like King? It's so unfair!"
When I read Salvation by Langston Hughes, I shook with deep resonating sobs, as I too had felt like a phony growing up non-Mormon and being publicly asked to "bear my testimony" and doing so only under duress. I knew I wasn't a believer in Mormonism, but I didn't know what I believed in. That was until I read Salvation. Now I believed in Langston Hughes because he spoke to my heart and head and reassured me I was okay just as I was in a way no one, Black or white, ever had.
After my first year of college, I knew I needed to leave Utah because it was too small to contain my growing curiosity and too full of despair at learning my ancestors had been responsible for hurting an entire race of human beings. I had to leave the place where I was born to become the person I was meant to be.
When I told my family that I was moving to a suburb of Washington, DC, they protested and told story after story that I am too ashamed to ever repeat about the dangers of living among people of color. These were stories that had filled my childhood and never made sense, so I had no reason to believe them now.
About a year after arriving in the Nation's Capital, I met a charming, handsome young man at a party. I remember talking to my mom on the phone after that night and her asking how it went. I was afraid to say anything about this new guy who had caught my eye, but there must have been something in what I wasn't saying that made her say, "So these friends you made, is one a boy for you?"
I brushed it off. I wasn't prepared to make any revelation about it because I had never had a boyfriend and didn't know how these things went. After some time, she realized that I was no longer available for our weekly talks, so someone else must be occupying my time. She bluntly asked one day, "Are you seeing a boy or not?" I tried to respond in the vaguest way possible to soften the blow, but she saw through me. She finally asked, "Is he Black?" in her familiar harsh tone.
I took a deep breath and said, "Yes. Yes, he is. And he is also so warm and kind and funny and accepting." And then she said words that are seared in my memory so vividly that conjuring them up brings the trauma of that moment back each and every time.
"I will pay for you to go to Weight Watchers so you can lose weight so you can get a white man to fall in love with you," she said.
Yes, you read that right. Take a minute; I'll wait.
To spare you all the gory details, I'm going to fast forward a bit to my mother finally coming around after a very ugly period and her inviting us to hold our wedding in Utah. Out of obligation, mostly because she had always dreamed of this moment for me, I agreed. I felt like it was a small sacrifice to please my family as long as I ended up with the man who loved me for me—all of me.
My mother did have a come to Jesus moment after spending a month with us, and she apologized for how she had treated me. Then she said, "I don't know why I was so surprised when you stood your ground and refused to budge. You have always had this fire in you to go out and change the world. I didn't want to acknowledge it because I knew the world was cruel and dangerous unless you looked like us. And your children won't, and that will be hard, and I didn't want you to suffer if you didn't have to. But I see now that you are stronger than I ever imagined. And that fire is brighter than my fears, so I understand that you have to do what you have to do."
Not three months after we had that conversation, and I was finally beginning to feel like my family would be okay, she was diagnosed with lung cancer. She couldn't come to be with me when I gave birth to my first daughter because she was in the hospital.
By some miracle, she was able to beat a "4 months to live" prognosis and live long enough to learn that I was carrying a second child. I was 26 years old and seven months pregnant with my son when my mother died of lung cancer.
From the moment he was born, he demanded that the hand he held was mine. Maybe that was because we shared such a bond while he was snuggled in my womb. As I boarded that early morning flight at the Baltimore/Washington International airport to head to Salt Lake City for her funeral, I cradled my belly as if I were holding that baby in my arms. I desperately needed to feel this new life growing inside me as I mourned the passing of hers.
After struggling into my seat, the rude older white couple seated next to me appeared crowded and insisted I move to an empty seat a few rows up. Being a large woman anyway, this giant baby bump took up a lot of room, but couldn't they see I was grieving? I hadn't slept in 24 hours, and I just wanted to be left alone. Finally, after being frustrated with their repeated insistence, I moved. Ashamed and embarrassed, I clasped my seat belt extender around my belly and began sobbing. I felt the judgmental stares of the passengers—no one offering comfort to the sad fat lady.
As I sat there, crying at 30,000 feet over the Midwest, it all felt surreal. The woman who brought me into the world had exited it. I was now a motherless daughter, and in a few months, I would give birth as a motherless mother. But the full weight of my circumstance was more than that. I knew a secret that those judgmental passengers didn't. They had no way of knowing that my baby bump was a beautiful biracial boy that the world would only see as Black, but I did. At that moment, with tears streaming down my face, I wept not only for the loss of my mother but for the pain I knew the world would inflict on my son, and my white privilege couldn't protect him any more than my dead mother could protect me.
My mother had warned me that being in an interracial marriage would be hard and that the world would be unusually cruel to my children. She didn't want that for me. She wanted to protect me from that pain, but she realized she didn't have a choice. Now, here I am, realizing just how right she had been all along. The world has been cruel to my children, but I wouldn't trade this life for the safety of the one she wanted for me. Parenting my three children has changed me in ways I could never have imagined. But you're a mama, so you know what I mean.
My son and I continue to share a close bond, and even when he was away at college, I swear I could feel his pain as if it were my own. His first semester at Marshall University, on the border of West Virginia and Kentucky, put him only a state away from the protests that had erupted in Ferguson, Missouri, following the police killing of Michael Brown. That entire year it was hard to tell who was hurting more. I prayed my son would be safe and would return to me.
After a year, he found the environment too demoralizing, and he wanted to move to Baltimore to feel more connected to culture and opportunities. Shortly after he did, the city mourned Freddy Gray's murder at the hands of the Baltimore police. More protests. More pain and fear consumed me. More prayers.
Two years after that, he was assaulted while walking home from a club, and white bystanders quickly recorded the incident, but none offered help. His younger sister had been walking with him and felt the man come up behind them, pull my son around, and punch him in the face, knocking him to the ground. She claims it wasn't her US Navy training that kicked in, but more of her fierce protectiveness of her brother that made her scream and yell and to make use of all 5' 7" of her body to try and scare him away.
Once home, they called and told us what had happened. "Call the police!" was the first thing out of my mouth, but it was met with silence from my husband and my children. Finally, my son said, "Mom, I've got two words for you. Freddy Gray. I'm not calling the police."
I broke down. How? How in the world had it come to this? Why were all these beautiful children being murdered and no one being held accountable? When would it stop? Would it ever stop?
Throughout his 23 years, I have cried and screamed and argued with teachers and coaches and other kids' parents and bystanders whenever (and it was a lot) that my son was the target of microaggressions. Had I not attended Pacific Oaks College and learned about white privilege and social justice, that fire my mother saw would have likely burned me up because I couldn't understand why the world was so damned cruel and unfair. Not only to my son but to my two daughters as well.
My husband has been standing by my side for over 30 years. That's more than half my life. And just because he was Black, he couldn't help prepare me for life as a mother of children the world would only see as Black. He didn't have the best parental role models growing up, so he wasn't sure how to be a good father either. His father was a violent man from whom his mother fled with her young children to protect them. He had no idea that he had suffered from Adverse Childhood Experiences, and only until recently, realized he has PTSD from growing up as a Black man in America.
I had a few friends here or there I could talk to, and ever so slowly, some amazing Black women started to enter my life. I needed those sisters from day one, but understandably they didn't need me. See, in the early '90s, when I was dating my husband, my union's most vocal challengers were women of color. I'm not saying white people didn't show us how much they disapproved of us with their stares and by refusing to serve us. But they did this with their eyes—either seeing us and hating us or pretending not to see us and still hating us.
I hope I can be honest with you, Christy, because the truth is the sisters were not happy with me "stealing their man." At least that's what they said to me (along with various derogatory comments about my hair or body or whatever) as I walked by. I didn't understand then why they were so upset with me. But I listened, and I learned, and I discovered that their mamas had been abandoned by the same kind of man who beat my husband, leaving them to be raised by single mothers.
By the late 1980s, Black men were told that they wouldn't live much beyond their 21st birthday. They would either succumb to drugs as a user or a dealer or be murdered in gang- or drug-related crimes or by the police. Adult Black men were a rare, valuable commodity to a Black woman who wanted to believe she had a future with one to raise a family. I didn't know that then, but I know that now. They didn't hate me; they hated that I was part of systemic racism destroying their communities and cheating them out of their dreams.
No one in my white upbringing ever told me what to say when I would need to prepare my children for the world they would find themselves in. It didn't matter that they were both Black and white on the inside; they were only Black to the racist eyes that would judge them.
So, I listened to what the Black mamas said to their children, and I had "the talk" with my kids. Don't wear your hoodie up; if a white person is approaching you on the street, cross so they don't panic. Don't talk too loudly or draw attention to yourself. When you get pulled over, because you will get pulled over for driving while Black, always place your hands in plain sight, be more polite than the situation calls for because you will always be responsible for making white people feel comfortable around you and never the other way around.
I am the mother who weeps because my white privilege is of no use to my children. Even though I have two daughters, I will never know how they struggle as women of color. To find makeup shades that match their skin tone, how to properly take care of their kitchen when doing their hair, or what to say when they learn that some boys only want to date them, so they feel cool but won't bring them home to meet their family or take them to the prom.
And my biracial son, despite 50% of his DNA being white, is still three times as likely to be killed by the people who are there to protect and serve. His guilt or innocence is irrelevant. He knows this to be true, but his youthful innocence made him recently remark, "Mom, I know you're worried, but dad is more likely than me to be killed by cops." To me, this makes him even more vulnerable. He can't protect himself from the risks if he chooses to ignore them.
Then again, would it even matter? George Floyd surely knew the risks of being Black in America. As did Ahmaud Arbery, Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Philando Castile, and countless others, most of whom never received national attention. Breonna Taylor surely believed she was safe inside her own home, but we know she wasn't. It's not enough to know of the dangers when there is nothing you can do to protect yourself when the weapon on you is your skin.
The Central Park Exonerated story told through When They See Us should have been all the proof our country needed to believe that police brutality and corruption, and racism was continuing to cut short the lives of our Black children. That is until you argue with someone defending the police by saying, "Yeah, well, they were guilty of something!" Of what else, besides simply being Black, makes the punishment fit the crime? You realize more white people still don't get it than those who do.
Brian Stevenson has spent his entire adult life asking that question as he built the Equal Justice Initiative. The movie Just Mercy is good cinema, but I recommend everyone read the book instead. Stevenson shares stories of how our criminal justice system is more criminal than it is just by the way it treats the mentally ill and children as young as 10 when they are Black.
Through my protesting, I have made a conscious effort to engage in civil discourse that has made me and other white people uncomfortable. I've tried to actively disrupt the narrative that "there are other ways to protest" by sharing quotes from Dr. King, hoping, praying, that they too will recognize that "a riot is the language of the unheard."
I've put my money where my mouth is and quit spending it at businesses unwilling to support Black Lives Matter. I donated to not only the Minnesota Freedom Fund but to other bail relief funds through ActBlue. I took a sharpie and wrote, "No Justice! No Peace!" on my face mask that is now a required part of my wardrobe due to that "other" pandemic disproportionately devastating an already besieged population. And yet, it feels like I've done nothing to help the cause. But I'm trying. I'm trying to show up for my brothers and sisters and my children, and the man I love.
So, I see you, Christy. I've lived long enough to know that being a social justice warrior is not a badge to show off on my chest but a cross burned into my heart. So, I carry on, but I can't keep calm because I have a son the world only sees as a threat. And I'm here.
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