white people who stand against white people who are trying to hurt non-white people: WPWSAWP(watthnwp)

(This was written last June with hope. Keep standing up, as I will, and it can turn out to be true.)

You should know about our group.

It isn’t a group in the normal sense, any more than “kind people” are a group. We don’t regularly meet.

We are predominantly white people, though we welcome anyone. We are the people who stand up against hateful people (who are also predominantly white, curiously enough) to protect innocent people (who are predominantly non-white).

We are white people who stand against white people who are trying to hurt non-white people: WPWSAWP(watthnwp).

There are a lot of us. Today (June, 2017) with the help of many great non-whites, we shut down “anti-Sharia” hate rallies across the country. If the haters would look up facts they would see that Sharia means “A path to life giving water,” which is pretty closely what “Torah” means. By saying they are “anti-Sharia,” they are actually saying they are anti-Muslim, by which they mean “anti-non-white.”

The recent deaths in Oregon were our group members (26/May/2017). A white hater was publicly hating/hurting some non-white people, and members of WPWSAWP(watthnwp) stood up and took the pain on themselves (and died).

The idea is that these hating/hurting white people are more our (white people’s) responsibility than anybody else’s. When we see hating/hurting going down, we stand in the way and say, “Hey, brother, do it to me. I’ll take it. These people have suffered from you long enough.”

The motivation to stand up might be guilt, or love, or common sense. Non-white people have been targeted for so, so long by white people! The time when “enough is enough” passed ages ago. Also, there’s pretty good evidence that letting non-whites take care of themselves against whites, or simply scolding or shaming whites after the fact of their violence, does not curb the violence.

So, we take it on ourselves at the moment it’s happening.

You’ve seen that great video about privilege? There’s a classroom full of students, and the teacher says everyone has to throw a rolled-up paper into the waste can from where they are sitting. It’s not easy for anyone, but it is much harder for the students in the back. Those students complain, naturally, about it not being fair to be so much farther away from the basket, so the teacher explains that everyone has the same task, no one has it easy, and everyone should just do their best. The important point in the video is how seldom, if ever, anyone in the front row complains about fairness. After all, it’s tough to get the shot just right even from the front row, and so the students up there are all occupied doing their best. When they make it, they naturally feel proud of their accomplishment. The lesson for us watching is, when we are praised or rewarded for doing something difficult, we don’t often think to refuse the reward or complain about other people not having as much of a chance as we did. It’s rare for us all.

So, maybe that explains why it took so long for us to stand up as a majority, not just the few Abolitionists or white Freedom Riders (a minority among the non-white Freedom Riders), but an actual white majority standing up against white racists/fascists/haters. I’m glad I’m living in such a time when the scales have tipped toward a solution.

You may certainly be skeptical about this “majority” of WPWSAWP, and I can’t blame you. How long have we been absent, busy making our own life as good as it can be, feeling our own accomplishment for just getting by and ignoring the unfairness of it all? You see us suddenly standing up, showing up, and you rightly wonder where we’ve been and how long until we’re gone again. But you and we have both noticed something that changes everything: Donald Trump and the rise of the old South, the reawakening of white supremacist actions in public settings. You may take it as more of the same, but we don’t. We take it as Time To Stand Up. We see what has happened by our not paying attention to the suffering of the innocent, by our not calling out the overall unfairness of our system here, and We Can Not Live With It.

We don’t seek death directly, and we are not committing suicide from shame, but We Will Not Live With The Way Things Are. We are fine and right with dying for love, dying for a better world, dying protecting the innocent, especially when we are protecting the innocent from our own kind (white people). Now that we accept this truth, we must say that with our numbers and our newfound strength, death from protecting the innocent is not a certain thing. When standing up against haters, we will see our fellow group members identify themselves by standing up with us, and with so many of us there the situation just as likely fades into a good day of action.

But I tell you this truly: living beyond the chance to stand up for the innocent, living even an hour after watching some white hater hurting someone within our reach and doing nothing to stop it, is worse than any death. This we believe, and this we act upon.

I’ll see you there. Let’s keep our eyes open for the opportunity to meet each other.