I want to talk about a pattern we have in the U.S. I’m not the first person to point it out. It goes something like this: White people commit violence in defense of power. Then, over time, the story changes. Photo by Dani Adkins on Unsplash The people who caused the harm become the ones who were really harmed. Persecuted. Treated unfairly. Accountability becomes oppression. Consequences become cruelty. And once the story flips, support often follows. Sympathy expands. Political legitimacy...

I try to stay away from the words always and never. I'm not all-knowing. There's no way I can parse out what will always or never be the case. Language matters. And here's the caveat I need to offer before we go any further — when it comes to my brown kids or my Black partner and protecting them — it's always white people who feel the most unsafe. Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash I also want to share this hope, that white folks can truly hear this and sit with it. I’m coming to you as a...

It isn’t. It never was. But that’s what I was taught — and for a long time, I believed it. Photo by Matheus Viana on Unsplash For most of my life, as a white person in the U.S., I carried an assumption I didn’t even realize I had: that race belonged to other people. Black people. Brown people. Indigenous people. Race was their story to navigate. And I — a white person who wasn’t openly or actively racist — somehow imagined myself standing outside of it all. Neutral. Exempt. It took years of...