A Letter to All of the White Girls I’ve Ever Known

A reflection of my feelings and experiences growing up in a predominantly white society and some of the insights and illuminations I’ve only recently come to understand and accept

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

“Sometimes people don’t want to hear the truth because they don’t want their illusions destroyed.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Race is one of those seemingly-impossible-to-talk-about topics where one or both parties — especially between people of different races — eventually grow defensive and give up in defeat. Regardless of whether we’re white, yellow, black, brown or blue, so many of our fears and insecurities are projected out onto the other; so many of our feelings and experiences are carried over through time and space, and transferred onto the person in front of us, where a single person becomes a symbolic representation — a reminder — of all of the accumulated injustices from our past.

Historically, society has not provided us with a framework with which to have productive conversations around race, but in recent years, individuals such as Michelle Alexander, Robin DiAngelo, Ta-Nehisi Coates and Daniel Dae…