It’s Them, Not Me

Don’t expect me to explain them or defend them or excuse them or represent them. Those people in Virginia, the ones with the torches and the hatred, they aren’t my people.

You might assume they’re my people because I look like them. I could be the mother of any one or dozens of those young white men holding torches and screaming at people. But I’m not, they aren’t my people.

I don’t get what they are saying, I don’t understand it, condone it, or tolerate it. No one I know, no one I grew up with, would hold a torch and walk through a city’s streets yelling invective at other people. Hear me, they aren’t my people.

Don’t ‘dear white people’ me.  Your words are lost on me. I haven’t been unconscious, unaware, disbelieving. Maybe you are thinking of someone else you met once in the hallway of a cheap…