Hi, I am watching Brooke be coached and I feel so pissed that she feels ashamed. I know I am projecting my experience on this situation, because I too DID NOT WANT TO PARTICIPATE in the blackout either. I feel like a narrative is being handed to me that is not accurate. I feel like I am being told to be ashamed of who I am because I am a white person. It is not an experience I have ever identified with—being privileged. I can accept that I my skin color has afforded me some privilege in my life, but there is not a period at the end of that sentence. My experience of BEING HUMAN is not reduced to my skin color. I have suffered a great deal of loss, and grief and shame, poverty and abuse. I feel like the narrative “you are white, you are privileged” is so divisive and my soul rejects it.
I feel like no one, of any color, would want my experiences or my trouble, and would not feel privileged if they had my human experience. The conversation is truncated when we stop at—you are white, you are privileged and if you will not assume that identification, we cannot talk.