ERACISM MINUTE May 10, 2020, Mary Alden

Eracism Mother’s Day 2020

I am a mother who gestated and birthed out five beautiful babies. I never knew I had white privilege.

I am a mother who had good prenatal care and carried all those babies to full term. I don’t recall ever worrying about their future access to what they needed to lead a long and healthy life.

I am a mother whose babies were raised in a house that their father and I owned, partly because my parents who owned the home I was brought up in helped us.

I am a mother who sent her children to schools that were not failing, partly because the banks gave us mortgages in those good neighborhoods.

I am a mother whose children could dream dreams of becoming teachers, writers, engineers, nurses, and doctors, because those who came before them had.

I am a mother who sent my children out to play, out to school, out to life, not even dreaming that before I could do that we needed to have “the talk” about what not to say or do or where not to put their hands so that they could be safe.

I am a mother who never knew I had white privilege, who never knew that I passed on white privilege to those five beautiful babies.

I am a grandmother who is just beginning to grasp the enormity of my white privilege but has no idea really, REALLY, what my life or motherhood would have been like without it.

I am a mother and grandmother who shares this awful and vulnerable truth about my unknowing, hoping to be a part of the change.

Because I am a mother who mourns for the Black mothers and their children who were gestated and birthed and grew, just as mine did, with the very same hopes and dreams and cells and DNA and beautiful little bodies, and who were denied because of pigment, what I never even knew I had.