During primary season, much is seen through eyes favoring one candidate over another. I support Bernie Sanders, but read this statement by Hillary Clinton this morning and noticed no one had shared it here. She's right on this. Does not mean you should or should not vote for her. Just means her words are worth listening to and thinking about, especially by white people. We are the only ones that can end the scourge of racism:
“Now, it’s tempting, it is tempting to dismiss a tragedy like this as an isolated incident, to believe that in today’s America, bigotry is largely behind us, that institutionalized racism no longer exists. But despite our best efforts and our highest hopes, America’s long struggle with race is far from finished.
“I know this is a difficult topic to talk about. I know that so many of us hoped by electing our first black president, we had turned the page on this chapter in our history. I know there are truths we don’t like to say out loud or discuss with our children. But we have to. That’s the only way we can possibly move forward together.
“Race remains a deep fault line in America. Millions of people of color still experience racism in their everyday lives…. More than a half century after Dr. King marched and Rosa Parks sat and John Lewis bled, after the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act and so much else, how can any of these things be true? But they are.
“And our problem is not all kooks and Klansman. It’s also in the cruel joke that goes unchallenged. It’s in the off-hand comments about not wanting ‘those people’ in the neighborhood.
“Let’s be honest: For a lot of well-meaning, open-minded white people, the sight of a young black man in a hoodie still evokes a twinge of fear. And news reports about poverty and crime and discrimination evoke sympathy, even empathy, but too rarely do they spur us to action or prompt us to question our own assumptions and privilege.
“We can’t hide from any of these hard truths about race and justice in America. We have to name them and own them and then change them.”
Hillary Clinton, quoted by Maddow Blog
It is up to all of us who are white to end this.