How Black Lives Matter In My Home

🙏🏻
Ahmaud Arbery.
Christian Cooper.
George Floyd.

I’ve been talking to Coleman over the last couple of weeks about each of them.
He’s seen the videos.
We’ve identified what we see as racism in each one.
We’ve contrasted each experience to what might have happened if that person was white. Like us.

Discrimination due to Jason’s disability was very real for us.
However, Coleman doesn’t experience racism like other children do. I don’t experience racism.
But I have a desire to teach us both to pay attention better and do our part to push back against it.
We are learning.

I showed him our friend Jonah Lewis’s FB story of the peaceful protestors in Salt Lake City.
Because protesting things that we don’t agree with or feel like needs to be changed is a vital part of freedom in our country.

We reinacted the George Floyd arrest on my bedroom floor so that Coleman could understand why people were kneeling.
And why the signs said what they did.

We could then compare the power of the message in this photo to the riots and looting that followed.

I was thinking about Jason this morning and how he was so good at loving people. He could make friends with anyone. Coleman has that quality.

So, we are starting here in our little family to do our part to create change. Talking about what is happening. Learning about what is happening. Then maybe, somehow, we can help shift what has been happening for far too long. ✊🏻💙

I learn a lot from Jasmine Bradshaw in her podcast First.Name.Basis. I listened to the original discussion back in January. Here’s an updated version with an intro. She shares a little of how to teach our children (and ourselves) about racism...and what I am beginning to understand more about....anti-racism:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/first-name-basis-podcast/id1474439369?i=1000474025134