Oppression happens everywhere

“The fact of the matter is that oppression happens everywhere.”

I heard that statement on NPR this morning.  Oppression happens everywhere.  A couple days ago a friend of mine posted an old interview with  Sister Souljah on FaceBook in which she said, in part, ""When white people have an issue they go out in the 100s of thousands to protest. Where is the outcry of white people against racist whites? It is nonexistent. Where are the "good" white people? I WOULD LIKE TOO MEET THEM!""  She also said,  “You can say no, but you haven't lived this life”.

What am I supposed to do with that?  What are we supposed to do with that?

It is true that I have not ‘lived that life’.  It is true that I do not cry out about racism. I don’t voice my outrage about anything really, about mental health disparity, women's rights, the way we treat our veterans, homelessness, the state of our prison system or the state of our environment.  I could go on.   Maybe I should be voicing my outrage.  Many think I should, think ‘we’ should collectively voice our outrage.

I do try to quietly do what I can to affect change.  I have tried to raise my children to be respectful of all and to have compassion for everyone rich or poor, black or white.  What else should I do?  Should I take to the streets?  Write a letter to the editor?  What can and what should I/we do to make change?

What happened in Ferguson but for the grace of God could easily happen here.  I think, I hope, we would not have a military style response from the police but the shooting that happened could happen anywhere.  In fact it does happen here, in the streets of Boston almost every night.  Not, thank God, police shooting people every night but it is not uncommon to hear about yet another young black man or boy being shot in the streets.  2014 and this is our reality.    

What can we do?  One thing that would help is to change the makeup of the teaching staff we have in our schools.  For sure Lincoln, Waltham and Lincoln Sudbury have made efforts to add more diversity to their staffs but there is a long way to go.  Lincoln students are about 60% white and the teaching staff is 95% white.  Slightly less than 50% of Waltham students are white and the teaching staff is almost 90% white.  If we want to teach our kids how to live in a diverse community, wouldn’t making sure they are educated in a diverse environment be a good first step? Is that one place I should be voicing my outrage?

Is this something ‘we’ collectively should be talking about if we want to identify steps we can take in our community to combat oppression in its many forms?