Thread by @MattWaldman

Here are additional thoughts based on questions I received from the first three threads about U.S. racism and what we can do about it

I hope you'll find this helpful. Again, these are my thoughts based on my experiences. We all have much more to learn.

"How do I convince..."

Whether it is family or friends, this is the essential question I get most often.

It's nice to have solidarity, joint causes, alignment with people you love, and enjoy associating with but the topic of justice and human rights is creating an impasse.

I have bad news. All of this information you've gained through conversation and research isn't going to change your friends' and family's minds. At least not quickly.

You've emerged from your lifelong brainwashing. They have not. Systemic racism has a brainwashing effect.

Wonder why some black people are in disbelief that white people on Twitter seem to be bragging/"scoring points" about just waking up to this?

The brainwashing impact hasn't really hit home for them.

They can't believe that folks who are otherwise sensible can be this clueless

I understand their feelings but I also emerged from that brainwashing gradually between ages 15-30.

Brainwashing seems like a heavy word for it, but it's exactly what it is. The systems of our society reinforce it--even if not always complicit in a connected way.

Even if you've lived your life with the goal of not being hateful based on skin color if you were born and raised in the U.S., you were raised in a racist system.

Intentionally or not, you learned and/or perpetuated racist behaviors based on learning to live in our society's system that was built on it. It doesn't automatically make you hateful. It does make you a product of the system. We are all products of the system.

Kenny King (earlier thread) was an innocent black boy who taught me the epithet for back people and white people. An adult taught me the destructive power of it and the people and society around me intentionally and unintentionally taught me a mixed message about those words.

If you didn't have black neighbors, teachers, judges, policemen, Ivy league grads, professors, managers, governors, odds are likely it was ingrained in you that you didn't expect blacks to be capable of those roles. Even if it's subconscious.

And the first time it happens, (say, Obama as President) it's not suddenly going to wipe away all of those decades of ingrained belief. If the only time you saw black people and they were on TV as athletes, entertainers, criminals, poor, and uneducated...

it also leads to ingrained beliefs that you had to consciously work past so you didn't make assumptions.

If you're told over and over how great and available the American Dream is by teachers, businesses, fictional characters on TV, and politicians, you'll believe it's for all.

You'll be in denial when informed by others that it is not. Your denial will force you to logically think first that those people didn't work hard enough or are making excuses for a lack of skill. Or, at best, you presume what happened was a misunderstanding or bad luck.

You've been brainwashed into thinking that our system wouldn't be targeting or holding back a group of people. We're about freedom, liberty, and working our way to the top. Right?

For those not brought here in chains or not descended from those born in chains? Sure.

American slavery was the most brutal form of slavery in world history. When over, there was no recompense, training, or enforcement of the new laws. Jim Crow laws were awful--Nazis studied them to prepare for their regime of government. They rejected many of them as too harsh!

Jim Crow laws benefited whites and hurt blacks in quality of real estate, education, law enforcement--institutions that set you and your family up for life and the lives of your children and children's children or can derail and hurt those dependent on you early in life.

Why wasn't the Tusla massacre taught in most U.S. schools? A thriving black area of town with black-owned businesses bombed from the air, and black families massacred and buried in unmarked graves--set off by a woman behaving like Amy Cooper.

Why are textbooks in many states equating the indentured servitude of the Irish with the slavery of Africans in America? And if you can't get with "why" you can still acknowledge how these elements brainwash us into denial that anything needs to be fixed.

The point is that we've been brainwashed in this country by people who didn't want to own up to what they did to blacks and how it earned them power and money. We may not be directly complicit with those acts but it set the foundation for inherent advantages/disadvantages.

If you've woken up from the brainwashing, get involved. Here are 75 Things Corinne Shutack wrote about that White People Can Do for Racial Justice. medium.com/equality-inclu…

Do one a day or one a week. Do something.

If your friends and family haven't woken up. I hate to tell you this but...in most cases, don't try. Spend your time doing what you can do to help now--without them. There are enough of us to counteract those who are still brainwashed at the voting booth and in the community.

Your friends and family may need more time and you trying to debate them, shame them, or educate them is time better spent doing constructive things to help. It doesn't mean you abandon them--though in some cases, they may abandon you and I'm sorry.

Your friends and family will be on their own timeline. Some will come around, some may not. But battling with social media posts and debates is not the efficient or productive use of time as actually doing something constructive.

It's why I'm doing this instead of posting things to shame people for their racist behavior. All that does is make you and your like-minded colleagues feel superior and right but it puts up a wall between you and folks who are closer to learning than you think. And...

you're spending inordinately more time being an unintentional ass rather than constructively teaching, assisting, or helping. I see many colleagues with their 5x's daily FB/twitter posts being social justice warriors. The same people are still arguing w/them a decade later.

Not to say I haven't been this unintentional ass before but I've learned that I get far more people who want to learn from not engaging this way and those conversations privately create more meaningful change--because they are ready. I hope this helps.