Those Could Have Been My Neighbors; That Could Have Been My Child

These are the names of the people who were targeted and shot in a Buffalo Tops grocery store this past Saturday:

• Roberta A. Drury of Buffalo, N.Y. – age 32
• Margus D. Morrison of Buffalo, N.Y. – age 52
• Andre Mackneil of Auburn, N.Y. – age 53
• Aaron Salter of Lockport, N.Y. – age 55
• Geraldine Talley of Buffalo, N.Y. – age 62
• Celestine Chaney of Buffalo, N.Y. – age 65
• Heyward Patterson of Buffalo, N.Y. – age 67
• Katherine Massey of Buffalo, N.Y. – age 72
• Pearl Young of Buffalo, N.Y. – age 77
• Ruth Whitfield of Buffalo, N.Y. – age 86

That could have been my grocery store, my neighbors. I live in a neighborhood which is still one of the few places in Seattle that is minority white, in which a majority are Black folks and other people of color. But maybe more terrifyingly, the young man who perpetrated this act of terror could have been my child.

The teen who committed this horrifying violence - and live-streamed it for others to see! - was scarcely older than the children who live in many of our homes. He was influenced by the same social media and streaming platforms that many of our children use. How are we countering the influence of white nationalism and white supremacy with the white children in our homes? Especially the white boys.

I found Britt Hawthorne's comments in an Instagram Live video very inspiring and practical. She is an Anti-Racism educator who, in response to the Buffalo shooting, shared specifics tips about how to talk to children about this or any act of racist violence. It's about 15 minutes long and worth watching in its entirety, but she provides a brief written summary if you don't want to/have time to watch.

What I found particularly helpful was the way she shared the conversation she had with her 15-year-old son about her boundaries and expectations related to how he engages with this or other violent content he encounters on social media. She invited him to consider the way viewing this violence would affect him, how the families of victims would feel about having people viewing it and why the shooter might want others to see it. She also told him very clearly that if he did encounter this or other violent images like in in social media that he disclose it to her so that she could help process it.


Hawthorn's child is not white. He is not going to be a target on social media for the white nationalism that the Buffalo shooter was influenced by, but he will absolutely be harmed by it. For those of you who love children of color your conversation may sound more like hers. My child is in the demographic of young people who will be recruited to white nationalist. Many of our children are. They too need to know our boundaries and values. We need to give them the tools that they need to counter supremacist thinking. They may already know more than we think they do and our silence will not protect them.

Here are a few resources that I've found that I hope will help you (and me!) start or continue the conversation. I started with the first link at Embrace Race (where there are many other great resources) and found the next three there.Four Steps for helping kids push back against white supremacy

• Common beliefs and understanding of white nationalists, including how its spread online and in schools
• Dos and Don'ts of talking to kids about white supremacy - written after the attacks in Charlottesville, but extremely relevant to today
• How White Nationalism sneaks in through social media, calling out specific YouTubers and streamers.

Hawthorne starts her IG live with the encouragement to resist the ostrich effect, a strong temptation for those of us who are white and can easily give in to the overwhelm and stick our heads in the sand. But she ends with ideas for action and advocacy. This is where I find the most hope: taking action as an individual, as a family and in my community to identify and resist the ideas pit our differences against each other.

May God give us the strength and wisdom to be conspirators for love and justice.

Mennonites: The OG Anti-Racist Heroes

Three hundred and thirty seven years ago this week (1683, in case that math takes too long) the first Mennonites arrived in what's now the United States and founded Germantown - now a neighborhood in Philadelphia. After sharing a meal with the local indigenous people (probably Lenape) Francis Daniel Pastorius, a German Mennonite lawyer and teacher wrote, "they have never in their lives heard the teaching of Jesus concerning temperance and contentment, yet they far excel the Christians in carrying it out.”

Anniversaries are natural times to tell stories. We use birthdays to tell our children about when they were born, wedding anniversaries to tell the stories of meeting and getting married, the anniversary of our church to tell stories of its founding and its first families. For some of us white folks, though, telling our immigration stories has become a little cringe-y. Our histories include colonization, enslavement of other humans, intentional and internalized bias based on white supremacist notions. So, when I read the quote above on the Salt Project's Theologian's Almanac, and shortly afterward the following quote about those first Mennonites in Jason Reynolds YA book Stamped: Racism, Anti-Racism and You, (a "remix" of Ibram X. Kendi's Stamped from the Beginning) I was psyched!

Mennonites didn't want to leave behind one place of oppression to build another in America, so they circulated an antislavery petition on April, 1688, denouncing oppression due to skin color by equating it with oppression due to religion. Both oppressions were wrong. This petition - the 1688 Germantown Petition Against Slavery - was the first piece of writing that was antiracist among European settlers in colonial America.

Yes! Mennonites, recognized as the OG anti-racists! And they did it based on the teaching of Jesus. Patting myself on the back over here for coming from such enlightened and woke white folks. Well, sort of. My own Mennonite ancestors immigrated to Canada in the late 19th century also fleeing oppression in southern Russia, also seeking religious freedom and opportunity to thrive in a new environment. And, of course, using the advantages of whiteness to cheaply purchase land that had been stolen from indigenous people.

The theme this month for children's and youth spiritual formation is "Making Sense of Our Stories" and our stories are complicated. When we're building our storytelling repertoire, it's really important to be able to understand our story from all perspectives, so that we don't repeat mistakes of oppression and injustice - and so that we can participate in repair. Authors like Jennifer Harvey and Anastasia Higginbotham, who write about talking with white kids about race, talk about the importance for developing a white identity that's grounded in more than just stories of hate, destruction and oppression. We also need to find stories of ancestors and heroes (Mennonite and otherwise) who were active in interrupting patterns of oppressions like racism and white supremacy. Those are stories we can embrace and seek to identify with.

Reynolds writes about the history of race and racial inequity in Stamped but he's insistent that it isn't a history book. "This book, this not history history book, this present book, is meant to take you on a race journey from then to now, to show why we feel how we feel, why we live how we live, and why this poison, whether recognizable or unrecognizable, whether it's a scream or a whisper, just won't go away." And then he tells stories - stories of wrongness and stories of people getting in the way of that wrong.

All that to say: tell your stories. Look for the stories that are hidden and find out why. Look for the stories that haven't been told and tell them. Look at the stories of the country and community and think about where and how your people intersected with them. Amplify the stories of justice and learn from them. And may we be the ancestors whose stories our children will tell with pride.

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A final note, speaking of stories, here are a couple book related links I've come across recently. Of course, everyone should read Stamped and everything else that Jason Reynolds has written. And that Ibram X. Kendi has written (I'm still working on that myself.) Also, UW Bookstore has created anti-racist book kits for kids and adults of all ages. And The Conscious Kid has a reading list for kids from 0-18 on confronting anti-blackness and on how to support conversations on race, antiracism and resistance.
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image: Thones Kunder's house, 5109 Germantown Avenue, Philadelphia PA, where the 688 Petition Against Slavery was written