Who Do You See When You Look in The Mirror?

I see a young woman born into a privileged body just for the color of her skin.

When I look in the mirror, I see a privileged young woman born into a vessel that happens to be white. I stare at my Italian skin, bronzed shoulders, and freckled face, as I wonder how different my life would be if I were Black.

I think about George Floyd, among other Black individuals that have been murdered during my lifetime, and find myself certain that if he were white, he would still be alive today. And a mixture of emotions rises within me while I sit in silence trying to piece recent events together and make sense of it all. But I can’t.

I first saw the horrendous video of George’s murder through Snapchat, and I figured it was a fake video from years ago blown out of proportion to generate income for a random website.

Soon enough, I turned on the news and logged into Facebook and realized it was very real, current, and the beginning of a series of events my future children would read about in their history books.

Overtly racist whites, hyper-masculine and excessive force-seeking cops, and men who considered themselves Godly, to be more specific. I tried to take it all in. I decided I wasn’t going to attend protests and such because hey, we’re still amidst a pandemic and I have a senior mom to worry about. And things were getting too dangerous for my liking.

So I figured that acknowledging my privilege is something that should have been done a long time ago. By doing that, I could do something, though very small in an effort to raise awareness for other white people.

By white folks simply acknowledging their privilege based on nothing other than the color of the skin, I believe that it holds enough power as a catalyst to change history. The only reason it took me so long is that the idea of white privilege hadn’t even existed in my vocabulary until my last semester of college.

Related posts:

No amount of pointers, no number of guidelines can prepare you to become a good listener. The tendency to listen must come from within you. It is a habit that takes time to develop, but once…

Trie is an approach to search or insert a string in complexity of O(n) where n is length of searched or inserted word. I am writing this post because i found Trie data structure very exciting but not…

A tale of innocence lost. Three girls enjoy their first holiday without adults. Anna learns some more sexual and dating firsts