I went to bed very sad about Alton Sterling’s senseless death, only to wake up to Philando Castile’s.

I was just asked by my colleague “With all the news of innocent black people shot by police, how do you deal with the fear of your own family being in public?”

My husband is from Ghana, West Africa. We have three children.

This morning I exchanged messages with a friend, who also is in an interracial marriage with children. She put it perfectly: To worry for him, and them, feels selfish, given I don’t have their reality, will never have their reality. Yet they are my family and a part of me. How can I best support them as a white person?

We have now technology in place that can ​*expose*​ injustice.. but (so far) it does nothing to ​*fix*​ injustice.

It allows us to bear witness, but it will not necessarily bring justice.

It also amplifies what is / has been commonplace for centuries into something more voyeuristic and less ephemeral. That video can be played and re-played and it is haunting.

My answer to my colleague is a very private thing I now share here:

In these events, I have learned to follow my husband’s lead. That is how I can best support him. My husband lives regularly with micro aggressions, subtleties of stereotype, systemic racism. He does what he can to navigate the reality he finds himself in as best he can. If he ruminates too long and too hard on all of it, it saps him of energy and inertia to move through the world and make a difference in the way he wants to, which has been his calling/mission in all he does. When he experiences racism, he has learned to let it go, not take it so personally, because the person who did it, whether maliciously/intentionally/unintentionally (doesn’t matter) certainly will let it go before him. They are just a cog in a great machine, and we can only Be Here Now, and deal with what is in front of us.

It’s like the Buddhist saying: “anger at someone/something is like grasping onto a hot coal… it only hurts the person holding it.” So his practice is to rise above and move on. I have followed suit in support of this, because to do differently is to waste energy in making the world better.

My kids will have to know this and understand this someday, too. We revolutionize with love, with civil disobedience, and most of all with success in our endeavors and passions. This is not passivity nor complicit acceptance, it’s living fearlessly and helping the world in our here and now in the best way we can.

This is not easy. Something my husband says, even as his heart breaks for innocent black people being killed everyday:

You cannot play into the fear that some day a broken tail light or a run stop sign might cost you (or your kids) your/their life. Because that is a waste of mental / emotional energy. We will all die someday, and we might die unjustly and unfairly and before our time… but to focus on that prevents us from living fully Today.

I can show solidarity and courage and focus on change with what I have, from right where I am, in kindness and compassion and action in everyday moments. It sounds preachy, it’s definitely Pollyanna, but letting myself feel anything else has just left me sad, depressed, angry, afraid, and raging at a storm that is too big to change on account of my rage. So I just Be Like Water, and comfort and love the ones in the storm instead, as if I were comforting the families and loved ones who died.

So I’ll cry for Philando, Alton, Michael Brown, Sandra Bland, Eric Garner. Again. Then I’ll amplify the injustice on social media in hopes that doing so will effect change. Then I’ll hug and kiss my family and tell them how wonderful and special and unique they are, and how I look forward to seeing how they find their passions and help the world in their own ways. And then I’ll go to work and continue my day doing my part to help humanity.

Where energy goes, attention flows. My husband chooses love, not anger, and definitely not fear. And I’ll do the same.