In George Floyd’s eulogy, Reverend Al Sharpton said,  “But the thing I want us to be real cognizant of is there’s a difference between those calling for peace and those calling for quiet. Some of y’all don’t want peace, you just want quiet.” 

As a white woman, I understand white people must learn to sustain their discomfort, build their capacity for empathy and take responsibility for their own learning. Some have made a public stand, but every white person can be part of the solution.

Former Defense Secretary James Mattis denounced the use of military force against the American people praising protestors for “a wholesome and unifying demand – one that all of us should be able to get behind.” 

Mattis’ statement is critical and encourages others to take similar risks. When enough people stand up for truth, silence becomes more uncomfortable than the consequences of taking a position. 

Social psychologists call this “the bandwagon effect,”  a cognitive bias that leads people to do something because they see other people doing it. It’s part of why visuals of the growing protests make it more likely that people will sustain their attention.

American Airlines CEO Doug Parker reported a moving encounter with Southwest Airlines flight attendant, JacqueRae Hill, reportedly sparked by Parker reading Robin DiAngelo’s  White Fragility.  

The heartfelt story is relational, and relationships help our brains embrace change. Marion Solomon and Dan Siegel in their book, How People Change: Relationships and Neuroplasticity in Psychotherapy, explore how social brains work and in order to tolerate the anxiety of change, there needs to be a sense of safety. “Our minds are more apt to change when linked to other minds.” 

Yet, American Airlines ranks 478 in America’s Best Employers for Diversity  and earns a “D” on the Diversity Scorecard for Airlines. Their executive leadership team is 89% white and their Board of Directors is 80% white. 

Ben & Jerry’s owners put out their statement to dismantle white supremacy, calling for white America to “collectively acknowledge its privilege, take responsibility for its past and the impact it has on the present, and commit to creating a future steeped in justice.” Of all the statements that have been made by companies, this is one of the most powerful, with no hint of “Let’s look at all sides” or “Let’s walk this line closely so as not to anger any stakeholders.” Their statement rings authentic, because it is backed by years of activism.

Looking genuinely at how white systems and culture have upheld racism is uncomfortable. White people need to recognize being able to dip in and out of discomfort is a privilege.  

In 2018, Yale University researchers wrote in Neuron that the brain kicks in for learning when there is uncertainty or unpredictability. According to this research, 2020 brains  are uniquely prepared for learning. 

Philosopher Roman Krznaric, writes in his 2014 book, Empathy: Why it Matters and How to Get It that empathy “is an ideal that has the power to both transform our lives and to bring about fundamental social change.” Sitting with discomfort and recognizing the experiences of Black people, cultivates empathy. 

A meta-analysis, published in the Personality and Social Psychology Review, looked at 13,000 American college students between 1979 and 2009 and found that empathetic concern and perspective taking dropped sharply over time. 

Fewer college students endorsed statements such as, “I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me,” and “I sometimes try to understand my friends better by imagining how things look from their perspective.”

A study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 2019 classified empathy as hard work, especially with strangers. This indicates that people choose to avoid empathy because of its cognitive costs.

Building empathy is a start. Yale University Professor Claudia Rankine, in a recent podcast reading of her essay, “The Condition of Black Life is One of Mourning,” shares, “There really is no mode of empathy that can replicate the daily strain of knowing that as a Black person you can be killed for simply being Black.”

White people can work to understand systemic oppression and have the courage to realize their “long straw good-luck” is directly connected to the “short-straw misfortune” of others. It’s not accidental and has nothing to do with bootstraps. A specific group of people with power put intentional policies and practices in place to hoard it. 

No one is waiting to applaud as white people finally learn about this old news. Nikole Hannah-Jones in her Pulitzer Prize winning work, The 1619 Project, explores the exploitation of Black people that this country is built on followed by the socially constructed concept of race that serves to maintain the injustices.

Figuring out where to start as white allies can be an overwhelming task and it requires broadening the sphere of who is influencing one’s thinking. 

If white people are only listening to each other about history and this period of unrest, the story continues to be self-protective or self-indulgent. 

Black people do not need the additional burden and emotional labor associated with helping white people do their work around racism. There are many helpful tools available. 

Sitting with discomfort, building capacity for empathy and taking responsibility for one’s own learning is just a start. Clarity about how to plug in and use your privilege will follow. As Maya Angelou wrote, “When you know better, you do better.” 

I’m a family therapist and social emotional health expert, my whole life is about context and understanding all sides of a story before jumping to conclusions. But in cases like these, the “we don’t know the whole story” approach just adds insult to injury, and it’s time for us to be unified in our outrage.

As a white woman – even if my thumb was on the nuclear button, there is absolutely no scenario where I get treated like Mr. Ames and Ms. Harper were. If my children walked out of a store without paying for something, things would easily be made right again, and the manager and I might even act as co-conspirators to bring an important lesson home if the doll was taken on purpose. If instead of a peaceful resolution, an officer pointed a gun at me and my children and showered me with threatening F-bombs, there would be no question as to whom the victim was.

In order to move away from this bifurcated reality for white and black families, several narratives must change (I’m talking to my fellow white people here, people of color have always known this).

1) We must drop the pretense and the defensive posture fueled by the narrative that racism is something that happened long ago that we have nothing to do with. Indeed, we have come a long way from separate water fountains, but it’s a mistake to think those overt policies and the racism that informed them didn’t transmute into more subtle but equally harmful structural barriers and racial disparities that are alive and well today.

As explored by the Urban Institute and many others, evidence abounds in our criminal justice system, in access to housing, healthcare, employment and education and in how people of color are treated by some who are charged to protect and serve. In addition, to the overt, Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative has carefully laid out the many ways that people of color bear the weight of always being presumed dangerous, which requires an enormous amount of energy to navigate and is traumatizing – on a daily basis.

2) We must move away from the toxic narrative that you either support police or you believe Black Lives Matter. We have been recruited into that false dichotomy by people who want to justify or ignore the systemic and structural racism that is braided into our psyches and our policies. We can fully support and be grateful to the men and women who serve as police officers and still be outraged when one of them abuses their power. In fact, we can be outraged in the very name of the many officers who would never behave the way the police officers in Phoenix acted in the video.

3) We must look deeply and honestly at what we have gained as white people over the many decades by continuing to perpetuate, in little and big ways, the narratives that keep white supremacy in place and undercut the voices, views, vote and veto of our fellow citizens who happen to not have the same skin color as we do. (You know race is a made up construct right?)

In a recent interview with Pacific Standard, Stevenson points out that this work belongs to all of us, “You can be very progressive, you can be very educated, and you can still be complicit in the kind of microaggression that takes place when you look at people through this lens of racial difference.” Robin Diangelo in her New York Times bestseller, White Fragility reminds us that “being friendly, open-minded and surrounding yourself with diverse people is not enough.”

Changing our society will require us to do the work of looking at the role each of us plays in perpetuating racism. Over 80,000 people have downloaded Layla Saad’s Me and White Supremacy in just six months, which will now be available next February in book form. It’s a 28-day challenge for white people to explore our privilege and examine how we can stop even the unconscious ways we participate in keeping troubling narratives alive that do harm.

Without question there may be more to the story in Phoenix, new facts will emerge. And without question, there are good police officers in every city. None of that should cool our outrage, and the fact that we continue to introduce these commentaries as counterpoints to shocking, abusive and racist behavior just highlights how much work we still have to do for families of color to truly have an equitable experience in this so-called land of the free.