Make them unacceptable.

[ismnotwasm]

31. I was raised by racists, I know racists.

They are quite unreachable except on rare occasions. What we are seeing didn’t suddenly appear—it’s been there all along. It’s not new. It hasn’t gotten “worse”, although acts of violence certainly have. And it’s far more pervasive that you seem to understand.

The majority of white people go along to get along at some point; the passive aggressive jokes, the occasional racial epithets, the distasteful person in a checkout line loudly talking about “those people” We haven’t learned to call out the small racists, much less the large ones. Yes we have people of color who are friends, spouses, children, that doesn’t make our experiences their experiences. That doesn’t necessarily make us brave.

Racism needs to be unacceptable, vile, repugnant—it need to be seen and felt as the horror it is. You couldn’t “reach out” to my brother in law--he’d laugh in your face but he has learned to keep his mouth shut around ME, as does his family. Because I do NOT ACCEPT racist bullshit in my life.

I think white people are starting to wake up; as Will Smith said, “Racism is not getting worse, it’s getting filmed” I like to think we are becoming braver in calling out racism, talking about it when we don’t have to, putting examples it on social media, more of us joining the anti-racist movement rather than staying safe in white spaces.

Being buddies with white supremacists is not particularly effective although you may have skill with reaching those people. I don’t know

Speaking up and speaking our against racism IS effective. We will never eradicate it, but we can damn sure clean the bigotry from ourselves and make racism completely unacceptable