Good morning. It's Thursday, June 11, and just because things are (momentarily) peaceful between SPD and demonstrators doesn't mean this fight is over.
The movement to defund the police and reinvest that money in communities hardest hit by centuries of racist law enforcement is only just beginning. We need everyone in this fight. For years, The Stranger has been encouraging white people to start talking about racism as a white-person problem. Last week, the director Brandon Ivie made a message tackling this subject directly, and today the writer Bret Fetzer joins him.
"We can't put the responsibility for changing the system on the shoulders of people of color when that system is designed to prevent them from changing it," Bret says. "That is a whole other form of do-nothing racism. That is white people not taking responsibility for cleaning up their own shit."
Bret has been making theater, film, and fairy tales in Seattle for over 30 years. He's a former artistic director of Annex Theatre.
As he points out in his message: "In 2006, the FBI reported that white supremacists were infiltrating police departments throughout the country. And if anything was done about that—if that even came to be seen as something that something should be done about—I'm not aware of it."
He has a message to other white people who have not been engaged in this fight: "Speaking as a white person to other white people: Do something. Do whatever you can. March in protests. Donate to anti-racist causes..." His list of ideas goes on.
Thanks for speaking out and speaking up, Bret.
See you at tomorrow's Black Lives Matter march.
Have a good day, everyone.
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Previously in this series: