What it means to be white.

A real easy way for white people to balance their sense of privilege is to own what they, as a people, have done and continue to do to humanity and the planet we live on.

White people take the privilege of whiteness when it suits, which is to say all day, every day, and so they should also try owning the shame of whiteness because it is, when you think about it, grossly shameful.

When I think of major human catastrophes, atrocities, crimes against humanity, major systems of oppression, slavery, the Holocaust, Apartheid, colonial atrocities, Jim Crow, the advent of systemic racism, oppression, greed, industry, weapons of mass destruction, global destruction, climate destruction, what 99% of them have in common is a firm root in Western Europe and the United States.

Have you ever come across those people in a family who just get crushed, sometimes they end up on drugs or dead? I’ve noticed that they are typically the sensitive ones, the ones who feel more, who just can't imagine people being unkind or unfair, and just don't know what to do when they are.

In this family of humanity, Western Civilization isn’t just the more successful hardworking older brother, it’s the one willing to stomp and bully, lie and cheat, steal and kill.

It's time for white people to own that, to deeply feel the weight and responsibility of it, and work to counterbalance it like their legacy depends on it… because it does.

Don't work on what it must feel like to be Black, work on what it should feel like to be white.

Because there is nothing better or more honorable about the white skin you live in, neither in fact nor in deed.

 Happy Black History Month.