A Call to Educate Yourself

White people, can you for a minute, for a day, for as long as you can take it, stop trying to opine.  Can you suspend your need to be heard, express, influence, impose, or otherwise reinforce your viewpoint for long enough to really understand the other point.  Can you interrupt your reflex to respond, retort, interject or rebuff?  And just listen and really hear and really feel the other side?  What would it take for you to willingly immerse yourself in an attempt to imagine yourself having been raised in another cultural experience, utterly foreign, often painful or degrading, destitute or denigrating?  As a member of an oppressed minority from childhood, on the receiving end of racism?

Every childhood, home, family, cultural and economic experience is different, and all come with their ups and downs.  But to be able to talk as an educated person about something, you need to deeply grok all 3, 4, ...n sides of the issue.

Old white man and lady, it's easier than ever to explore these experiences.  Books are immediately available on your computer, kindle, iPad.  Movies are there for you.  You could probably even get a virtual reality experience if you looked for it.  You could chat with a willing black person.  If you told them you really want to understand the big deal of Black Lives Matter, and mean it, they might help you. But without bringing an open mind (is is still capable of letting something new in, or are you done?), it would be for nothing.  You'd stay unchanged.

Why would you want to spend your limited time and intellectual effort learning about Black Lives Matter, yes, I hear you.

1. Treatment of minorities, especially African and Native American is a metastatic cancer that we want to move into remission.  It has flared up and down, but has always been part of us, and though we can't change our past, living as a healthy country going forward requires we bring as much of our resources to bear to fight it as possible.  Especially the dominant power, which, today, is whitey.  The cancer is not blacks fighting back against the system, the cancer is the systemic discrimination, manufactured and delivered by mostly whites.  
2. It is the predominant social issue of our time, and it hurts all of us from the President and tip-top CEOs to the aborted fetus and high school dropout headed to prison.  It costs billions, it diminishes the greatness of our people, and undermines the American character (and consequent reputation) both in and outside our borders.  It diminishes the perpetrators equal to their transgressions because it damns their souls, their psyches, identities.  
3. You can be part of our national healing. It is possible. We can get better and use the experience of our past sins to live healthier in the future.  
4. Be on the side of the underdog, the bullied. Stand up in defense of good cops who break the code of silence by strengthening the defense from the bullied. Racist cops hurt their victims most, and their good-cop partners almost as much. Bad cops exponentially multiply the problem and get good cops killed. 
5. If your idea of adventure is picking a new shade of paint for the bathroom, don't you think God put you here for something more important than that?  If your adventures have always been for you and selfish, why not take one of them into the realm of helping others for no other reason than that you can and it matters outside yourself. Accumulate a legacy worth emulating, and leave your heirs something to be proud of instead of liquidate.

How long would it take to actually learn something substantial about a topic? A couple 40 hour weeks?  100 hours?  I challenge you to intentionally open your mind, allow your inbred beliefs to sit down and shut up for the duration as you drink of the foreign experience. What would your hero, idol, Jesus, do?