Ken Burch
1 min readJul 8, 2021

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As I've pointed out above, I am white, and personally, I have lived a lucky and in many ways privileged life, as have most white people- so none of this is about "my pain" or my emotions at all. Why would you assume any of this was about ME?

Also, neither Black people themselves nor myself have claimed that Black people are flawless- it's just that 1) white people cannot claim innate moral superiority over an innately greater capacity of "deservingness"; 2) We are not entitled to lecture Black people about whatever flaws they possess or to imply that their problems are entirely or even largely due to their own making, OR to assume that Black people simply never engage in self-improvement nor try to work for the improvement of their own communities- Black people do just as much of both of those as we do, sometimes more;; and 3) The natural flaws Black people possess, simply by virtue of being equal members of the human race, do not exempt the white power structure from responsibility for the toxic effects it has on Black lives- or its continuing tendency to end too many of those lives permaturely, OR exempt ordinary white people such as ourselves from our responsibility to end all forms of injustice against everyone else.- a project.

And whatever may have happened on the planet, there is no black- majority country that has ever inflicted anything remotely similar to slavery or Jim Crow on any white communities living within it.

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Ken Burch
Ken Burch

Written by Ken Burch

Retired Alaska ferryboat steward, grandparent, sometime poet. Radical yet independent of dogma. Likes nice days, playing banjo and not as yet dying of Covid.

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