Think Before You Message About Racism

It might seem right to reach out to people you aren’t CLOSE friends with, but wait.

When another white man kills more Black people or indigenous people or other people of color (BIPOC) and the news media makes it a national, dinnertime story, there’s this thing many well-meaning white people do. You reach out to the BIPOC people you know — even if you don’t know us very well — and tell us you’re sorry, this is terrible, you’re thinking about us, and are we okay? However well-intentioned these gestures are, they often do not land well on us.

If a Black person was murdered, you often text, email or otherwise message your Black friends, co-workers and colleagues. If it was an Asian American person, you tend to message your Asian American friends, co-workers and colleagues. Et cetera.

The problem is that if we aren’t good friends who’ve talked about racism before, these gestures often feel performative. They don’t feel like genuine concern for our well-being. They feel like attempts to prove that you aren’t racist.

Don’t Do This on a Zoom Chat

I was on a Zoom where one of very few people of color there expressed pain and anger about the recent killing of several Asian American women by a white man. For long minutes afterwards…