Precious Blood Volunteers
Unlearning Racism: A Volunteer’s Journey
by Leah Landry, Precious Blood Volunteer
Most white people do not want to talk about race.
In fact, I feel uncomfortable typing this article right
now. I am so scared of saying something wrong or
implying something hurtful that it would be easier to
stay silent. But after Chicago Regional Organizing for
Anti-Racism’s training (c-roar), I realize it does not
matter what I want or what is easy: we have to talk
about race.
I knew early on that racism existed. When I was
eight years old, my brother’s best friend joined our
family. Shaun is African-American and I saw that he
was treated differently than my Caucasian brothers
in our predominately white neighborhood. I remem-
ber Shaun and me getting weird looks when we were
together and the police pulling him over much more
often than my white brothers. But our conversations at
home were about how other people were discrimina-
tory, never about how racism worked through us as
white people. I knew I had white privilege, but I did
not realize I was part of the problem.
As a year-long volunteer at pbmr, all my suspi-
cions that racism ran deeper than I could articulate
intensified. I see every day how people are discrimi-
nated against because of the color of their skin. In the
Juvenile Temporary Detention Center, I was over-
whelmed and appalled by the disproportionate num-
ber of black and brown teens my city locks up. While
working at pbmr, I accompanied a young woman to
court and was immediately told I could use the shorter
line because the guard mistook me—the only white
woman in the crowd—as a lawyer. I met young men
who were given tickets for jaywalking and biking on
the sidewalk—while I had escaped every instance of a
police stop with nothing more than a warning. I wit-
nessed intense poverty: people struggling to pay rent,
afford clothes, or feed a family, always one crisis away
from losing everything. I saw all this and knew that
there must be root causes, but I did not understand the
depth to which racism and white supremacy created
and perpetuated these circumstances.
Through the anti-racism training and researching
on my own, I learned that racism is at the heart of
every one of these issues. I discovered that nationwide
6 • The New Wine Press • May 2018
policies of redlining forced black families into segre-
gated neighborhoods and denied them access to the
same government-backed loans that allowed my own
grandparents to buy a home (A Case for Reparations,
Ta-Nehesi Coates). I found out how the criminal
justice system is designed to target, imprison, and
harass people of color (The New Jim Crow, Michelle
Alexander). I learned how the inequities originated:
not because of something inherent or lacking in
communities of color, but because of structures that
intentionally privilege white people and subjugate
people of color.
The hardest lesson I learned is that racism is not
just the overt, stereotypical racism we immediately
think of, like the kkk or the rally in Charlottesville. It
is the deep-rooted racism of unconscious bias that lies
within all of us, because we were all raised in a racist
society. This was and still is hard to fully comprehend
for me. I, in my ignorant whiteness, perpetuate racism,