Dear white people ...
By Evanston resident Melissa Blount.
Dear white people,
Are you so afraid of examining your whiteness that you will let the brutality visited upon Black people go because you don't understand the meaning of "Defund the police"?
Do you not understand that Republicans and Democrats alike criminalized Blackness, sanctified whiteness, and terrorized you into OVERFUNDING the police?
Overfunding resulted in the domestic terrorism of Black communities, encouraged lawlessness, toxic masculinity, cruelty and hyper-whiteness in police departments across the country. And please understand that you are paying the price of whiteness too. You are paying the price for the false assumption of superiority.
white people are going to jail for cheating their way into college. white people are working "so hard" to the point of disconnection from their families, becoming strangers to their families, all so they can afford the advantages of whiteness and white only communities.
And while you are so worried about Big Black Bucks raping your fragile, precious white daughters. Please ask college and universities what the real numbers are for rapes and sexual assaults on their campuses. What you will find, is your white sons, are in fact, raping your white daughters.
Ask them about how the campus counseling centers are overrun with white students, plagued with anxiety and depression because their ideas of white superiority are eroded outside of their protected bubbles. So I am asking you to do more than walk beside my people in "these" streets and interrogate your own white house. Then meet me at the table ready and prepared to DEFUND the police.
Sincerely, Melissa Blount
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Watch John Oliver talking about defunding the police here. Come to a community conversation on Thursday at 6 p.m. at Mason Park about what defunding the police means and what it could look like in Evanston, organized by Evanston Fight for Black Lives.
Purchase a Black Lives Matter sign from Ben Blount and Melissa Blount and support organizations committed to Black lives.
Read my 2016 interview with Melissa Blount about white supremacy and trauma.
