"I'm glad I had lunch with you guys today," I said. "I'm having trouble with my anxiety because of what's happening in Ferguson."

That we were well into our lunch was not lost on me. It's all I can think of when I see other people: that I want to talk about it, that it's like the sixties out there, that it's still happening and so many white people still think the protests are unfounded at worst or an overreaction at best. But I didn't immediately launch into it because of my white privilege. I wanted to talk about it but I waited for my window, even knowing these friends felt the same way that I did about it all. Because I wasn't positive they'd want to talk about it. 

She asked me why I didn't write about the anxiety. I thought to myself because Stacy Morrison already did it so well, and also because I don't want to co-opt the pain for myself when it is not my pain. My pain is watching their pain, and it seems selfish to claim my pain. I didn't say that part, though. I don't know why.

---

I feel like I felt after Hurricane Katrina when I saw all those black people standing on bridges, shielding their babies from the hot sun, squished into that dome, stuck.

Just. Stuck. 

And then white people focused on any little bad thing those black people did while they were stuck instead of pulling them out faster.

---

She called me this morning to say she'd been thinking of our conversation. We'd talked about how there is racial tension and even genocide going on all over the world. We'd talked about the Holy Land and Ukraine. We talked about this again, and I wanted to cry and I said, "But this is happening HERE. This is my country and we are supposed to be better than this. We get up on our high horse and police the world but look at this."

She said yes. And the Declaration of Independence was written by a slave owner. 

And we sat with that, we white ladies. 

---

She told me this ability to feel is a gift. And it is, it's what helps me to write this post and the novel about the girl with anorexia and a lot of other things that were so raw and hard to write about. I know that it is a gift. That I can't look away sometimes becomes a problem when I let it paralyze me from taking useful action. Someone very smart who works with a population who have had it very rough told me you have to let it flow through you. You can't let it stop with you. You just have to open yourself up and feel it and show it to others. 

Here. Here is the pain. 

Credit: Debra Sweet on Flickr, Creative Commons -- Howard University

It's about Mike Brown, but it's also about all of it, everything. Being followed, being pulled over, being misrepresented on the 6 o'clock news, being told what you can and can't wear, being told to hunch so you don't look threatening, having to produce ID when the white woman in front of you didn't have to, having your receipt checked with a side-eye. I don't have all the links and if I go looking for them I might not have the energy to push publish, so please believe me that those posts are real and those things really happened to people who are not white.

I say a lot that I took the red pill six years ago when Kelly Wickham asked me why there were no black people in SLEEP IS FOR THE WEAK. The whole event knocked me so hard on my ass I could barely get back up. It was like seeing scaffolding where before I saw buildings. I saw what is underneath, what is not part of my daily experience, both the overt and the covert. 

---

Sometimes I try to talk about race with white people in my daily life, and I see their mouths tighten and their eyes glaze over and I know that they will turn away because they can, because the ability to not talk about it is white privilege. It's not getting into the best school or getting the best job, it's getting to ignore things that happen to people who aren't white. It's not having to care.

---

People say to me all the time it'll change with this new generation, that they aren't like us. I don't know, though. Don't you suppose people in the sixties said that about their kids? 

How many times does a little white girl have to watch the news or read the paper before she's scared of black men?

---

After 9/11 I developed a racist fear of brown men. At the time, I worked with dozens of brown men from India. Every time I got on a plane and saw brown men, I had to tell myself, just like Rajeev. Just like Rajeev. Just like Rajeev. I had to root my thoughts in a brown man I knew and liked and trusted, one of many, but the one I chose.

What if you don't know a black man?

---

These are my thoughts as I sit down I-70 a few hundred miles from the protests that continue in Ferguson. Once you take the red pill, you don't get to go back to absently pinning bento boxes and pretending a black body didn't lie on the pavement for four hours less than two weeks ago. 

Once you take the red pill, you have to let the pain flow through you. 

HERE IS MY PAIN.

I had some hard conversations at BlogHer '14 with white women who thought the women of color at Voices of the Year were exaggerating their feelings of otherness. It's true, world: White people still think people of color are making this stuff up.

The events of this week in Ferguson, Missouri, once again magnify the truth: My friends of color are not exaggerating. White people may not see it because we are not treated this way, but stigma/skepticism/suspicion is still their reality in 2014. 

We can wish it weren't true. 

We can pretend it isn't true.

Or we can amplify what is true.

We can continue to insist on the education of our white colleagues and friends and strangers about how we intentionally or unintentionally are contributing to the racism problem we have boiling in this country. We can continue to insist on change. If you're confused about what I'm talking about, click here. It's time to share what's being said.

Here are some posts written about race this week that I believe are worth reading. Please amplify them.

• The Ferguson Shooting Has Me Scared for My Son by Janene Davis
• Affected by Karen Walrond
• #IfTheyGunnedMeDown Hashtag Calls Out Media's Portrayal of Black People by Betty Fokker
• Racial Bias, Police Brutality and the Dangerous Act of Being Black by Kristen Howerton

Tonight my friend and colleague Feminista Jones has organized a 90-city National Moment of Silence for Mike Brown. Details are here. The gathering for Kansas City is at the Plaza fountain. Gather at 6 Central, moment of silence is 6:20. Wear red. I would be there but we are headed to a preplanned family reunion tonight. If you can't see things on Facebook, here are the details:

Peaceful vigils honoring the innocent lives lost and pay respect to those whose lives have been affected by police brutality will gather on August 14, 2014 at 7pm EST/4pm PT. Moment of silence will start at the: 20 minute mark.

To identify each other and show solidarity, wear a red ribbon/cloth/bandana on your right arm at the vigils. Do not wear red if in areas where doing so can cause conflict.

This google doc is so we can have a clear view of which states don’t have any vigils already established.

If you have any questions about the event, please ask them at the official facebook page or in the #NMOS14 tag on twitter.

 If you can't be there, share. Onward.

Y'all, I totally didn't watch the VMAs. a) I didn't realize they were on b) I have really never cared about music videos, even when MTV first came out -- I think it was the newness. I can't remember the last time I wanted my MTV. c) I hate awards shows, too.

So it wasn't until Monday morning that I realized Miley Cyrus had quite the bizarre performance. Such a performance that we actually created a series on BlogHer to house all the reactions. Now it's Friday, and I think it's taken me an entire week to absorb the stupidity of just all of it and the danger of at least one part of it.

I didn't even watch the whole video at first. After Miley-I-knew-that-girl-was-trouble-and-didn't-let-my-daughter-watch-Hannah-Montana walked out of a giant teddy bear and started yelling, I figured I was pretty sure how it was all going to go down. I didn't get to the full video watching until today, after I'd had time to read the responses and also pour bleach into my eyeballs. I've read a LOT of response posts to Miley -- people mad at people for judging her as a woman, people who are pissed about her gold grill, people who say as a society we've lost it.

Yeah, I thought she was pretty gross. Just as I really hated Madonna on a cross and Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction and any reference to bitches and hos no matter what color your skin. I hate all of it.

Was Miley's foam-fingered teddy bear worse or better? I don't know. But I really did think we'd come farther than this.

Get More:2013 VMA, Artists.MTV, Music, Miley Cyrus

Everybody in this medley had back-up dancers. The same red-pants-wearing black female back-up dancers appeared wearing teddy bears and not wearing teddy bears for Miley and for other singers, and they seemed to be doing fairly normal background dancer stuff. What I just couldn't figure out was this:

This woman in the tights was mostly shown ass-out to the crowd. You never really saw her face. Then Miley smacked that ass. Now. There are a variety of things going on here. While the robot teddy bears and the tongue wagging and the foam finger and the bikini are all annoying and just weird, the using a black woman as a prop and accentuating her ass in this way, THEN SMACKING IT just, no, Miley. And really, not just Miley, because who the hell produces this show? Where was the adult in the room to go OMG YOU HAVE NOW TRANSCENDED BAD TASTE AND MOVED INTO THE CULTURAL FUCK-UP ZONE?

You know, I never thought Miley was all that impressive as an artist, and that's fine. I don't have to like everyone. And I don't even watch this show, so it would be no worries to me except for that image above. That one is a little more powerful, and not at all in a good way.

I interrupt a swiftly-turning-boring conversation about raccoons (you're right, I should just take the birdfeeders in, even though that means the racoon won, dammit) to turn to what blew up the Internet yesterday and how it relates to other conversations I've been involved in that are way, way more important than raccoons.

So yesterday there was an incident with a ridiculous JC Penney t-shirt about girls being too pretty to do their own homework and giving it to their brothers. Shannon did a great job covering it at BlogHer, and Liz Gumbinner -- who works as an advertising exec on Madison Avenue -- said better than I could say -- because she works as an advertising exec on Madison Avenue -- what I believe about capitalism and also about racism and sexism. She wrote:

Messages are sexist because people are sexist.

Messages are sexist because people are lazy. They fall back on stereotypes because it’s easy to get a laugh, easy to get an idea approved, easy to move onto the next thing on your to-do list.

I know because I’ve done it.

Liz wasn't talking about racism, she was talking about sexism, but it strikes me that all isms are isms because they are buried so deeply in our unconscious that we don't even realize we are doing it.That's why it's so hard to eradicate. It's one thing if someone says something sexist or racist on purpose, but it's something entirely different and so much more dangerous if the person saying it doesn't even realize he or she is doing it. The power humans have to believe their truths is strong. We'll die for our truths. It's very difficult for us to change our truths. It takes generations of conversations.

Liz's comments about the t-shirts and how she has caught herself making sexist jokes struck a nerve with me, because it reminded me of something I commented on Kelly Wickham's race post a week or two ago about my own growth when it comes to my awareness of cultural attitudes about race. I wrote:

The defensiveness comes from not realizing it doesn’t matter if you didn’t mean to hurt someone with your thinking and actions and not realizing it doesn’t make you an evil person, but it does make you unaware. And when you’re unaware, you participate in institutional racism without realizing it. And when you do that, you teach others by your example that it’s okay.

I used to tell my daughter there was no color until I realized it was total bullshit. There are colors, we have history, and the world is not perfect yet nor will it probably ever be — which is why race is such a dominant theme in science fiction. She knew there were colors — she’s not blind. She doesn’t care, nor does she mention it in descriptions, which is more than I could say for myself until I started noticing I did it. I still catch myself doing it. Here’s an example.

Kelly describes herself as a tall woman with icy looking eyes.
We already know Kelly is black.

You just met Kelly. How do you describe her so someone can find her in the crowd?

a) Kelly is a tall woman with curly hair.
b) Kelly is a tall black woman with curly hair.

Now, you’re describing me so someone can find me in the crowd.

a) Rita is a blond woman with blue eyes.
b) Rita is a white woman with blond hair.

(I know for a fact there are women who are not white with blond hair.)

I almost never hear anyone describe a white woman as a white woman. I almost always hear anyone who’s not white described by their race.

This is institutional racism, making the “other” before we even meet someone. It’s not necessarily intentional, but look what we’ve just done with what to us is an innocent description. This is the level of blindness white people have, and it’s why we’re getting nowhere fast trying to change things.

I watched Battlestar Galactica a while back and was at first shocked that both men and women in exec roles were referred to as “sir.” I spent about three days thinking about it. Finally, I decided I loved it, because it took gender out of a title of respect so it could apply unilaterally without indicating gender. But it took me three days to figure it out because the idea that men are usually in the position of authority is so ingrained in my mental model that I had to question what the word “sir” really meant.

When you start thinking about race in that context, it becomes much easier — for me — to talk about it. Am I evil? No. Do I need to question how the world works? YES YES YES.

At my Own Your Beauty panel at BlogHer, several white women talked about becoming invisible after they passed a certain age. It was surprising to them when they realized ads were no longer being targeted to them, that they saw no one representing their age group for anything other than vitamins and denture cream. And it was so surprising to no longer be targeted because they had grown accustomed to being the norm, to being what everyone else is supposed to be like: white and young.

When you're in the majority, you don't see the isms.

When you're plugged into the matrix, all you see is the matrix.

We are plugged into sexism and racism so completely that we have no idea we're even participating in it.

Kelly wrote recently about a comment her secretary made to her about her hair looking more professional when she straightened it:

It was one comment from one person, but the damage that this way of thinking does to young girls who are constantly trying to look like they fit in with white hair styles betrayed to me what she really thought. I’m no less professional because of my hair, but if my secretary thought that (and felt comfortable enough to say it to me) then what about the parents of my students? I pray to God that they don’t see me as less accomplished or proficient or respected in my job just because of the natural way in which I wear my hair.

And yes. I totally DID just make that all about hair.

I see these things as being connected, because they are all unconscious manifestations of institutional sexism and racism that we have to fight to make ourselves aware of. We have to fight to see the racism and sexism in our own thinking, correct it, call it out, teach our kids it is wrong and have those conversations over and over for however many generations it takes to make a change, to remove male connotations from words that really mean respect and white connotations from what someone's hair should look like and stop our culture's ridiculous obsession with young white women.

It's hard to look at yourself and realize you're part of the problem. It makes you feel icky and guilty and sad -- I know -- I've been there. I got past it by realizing it wasn't conscious but that I could consciously make a decision to stop. I could unlearn my truths, change them for the better, and I could teach my new truths to my daughter.

We can change it, but we have to vote with our dollars. This is capitalism. We have to stop voting for politicians who ignore sexism and racism, we have to stop listening to radio shows that spew hate, we have to stop buying Rolling Stone or whatever magazine it is when some female celebrity is naked on the cover, we have to refuse to let our young girls wear anything broadcast across their butts, we have to demand to be taken seriously and we have to allow change to be reflected in our media, in our programming and most importantly, in our schools.

Because it's not okay.