30 Days of Mourning Day 15

#30DaysofMourning 

There’s a blog post that went viral in 2015 and it’s making its way around social again. It’s haunting me. I read it yesterday and the day before and it keeps floating back. It’s under my (white) skin.

Today I’m grieving and mourning HUMAN KINDNESS.

EVERY TIME another human is murdered in our names–and I mean EVERY TIME–SOMEONE will try to rationalize it, to minimize it. Because if that person’s experience doesn’t match our comfort zone and what we think we know, we find a way to make sense of it so we don’t have to be responsible for it. So we can wash our hands of it.

And that’s where this blog post comes in. Read it and then ask yourself why #rayshardbrooks ran. Read it and then ask why #blacklivesmatter instead of all lives matter. Read it and put yourself in Steve Locke’s shoes. Or Rayshard’s or #georgefloyd or ANYBODY else whose experience of life is DIFFERENT than your experience.

Steve Locke is that black man who makes white people comfortable–educated, a professor with a good job and a car. Pretty nonthreatening UNTIL he’s suspected of a crime just because he’s black and in the wrong place at a convenient time for the cops.

I hope you’ll read it with kindness–that human kindness we’re (mostly) all born with and slowly rationalize away. And I hope it haunts you, too, and that kindness grows from it.

I’m grieving and mourning human kindness. Who and what are you grieving today and how are you mourning?

Whatever you are grieving today, please know that you do not mourn alone. Let’s heal together.

https://www.stevelocke.com/blog/i-fit-the-description

#wawmt
#noonemournsalone
#humankindness
#blacklivesmatter
#bekindfirst