Fellow White Americans: Search Deep, and Grow Up

Fellow white Americans:

By every conceivable measurement of human well-being, the lives of my two sons--and those of all others who look pretty much like them--are worth less to this country than those of whites.

I am so beyond parsing the details of this or that instance of police brutality, beyond listening to your feigned outrage over when or where or how grieving protesters attempt to make their voices heard, beyond tolerating any fragile white person's fabricated sense of racial or national victimhood.

Search deep, and grow up--or let posterity reckon you cowards.

Sing the national anthem all you want, but unless you stand up, speak out, and work for justice every day, your empty words will come back on your own heads as a curse and bring this republic down in flames.

This is not a threat, simply a fair reading of social reality.

Stop obfuscating.

Talk about why my children's lives are worth less--why any black or brown person's life is worth less--and what we're going to do to fix it. Talk as if your life depended on it. Because it does, both in this world and the next.

Talk about THIS, now, or speak not at all.

There is no other conversation to have.

"White Government Union," photograph of the coup in Wilmington, NC, 1898