Educate myself on the black lives movement

Let me start off by saying that I believe everybody should be treated equally. I’ve always felt that way, as long as I can remember.

Looking back I still learned on many occasions that there were things that I should change my opinion about, if I really would want to think about each person being equal. The most recent change of heart is thinking all lives matter when people are standing up for black lives. Every person’s life does matter, yes. But they are trying to tell us that their lives actually do matter, that’s all. Not that other lives don’t.

I won’t get into any more detail with this. Because my goal with this post is not to tell you what I already know. No, this post is to see what else i can learn. Up until this moment I’ve always had this information come to me, almost by accident. Today I’m going to do some research and try to educate myself on history, equality etc. I hope to grow my knowledge base so I can make even better informed decisions in life or have better conversations about such topics in the future.

I’ve looked into the history of Duch slave trade, which was way more wide spread than I thought. I was surprised that at first most people were against having slaves and trading them. But they found some loopholes in the bible to make it okay for themselves. Most people had an attitude of “as long as I don’t know about it, it’s fine”. A very nasty attitude to have, that is still prevalent on so many occasions in today’s world.

My eyes were opened to internalized racism. Where people are turning themselves into self fulfilling prophecies. I can’t even imagine how hard it is to tell yourself you’re worthy constantly while almost the whole world around you tells you you’re worthless.

I read this piece by a pastor that really resonated with me. Even though I’m really not religious. I enjoyed the video’s and research the Anne Frank foundation had on their website. A girl there tells the story of being fired at age 17. A tablet was stolen from her, what she called in about straight away. The next day they fired her with the words: “It’s not your hijab, but we cannot trust you now”. I’m 100% sure if that was me, who had the bad luck of having company property stolen from me, they wouldn’t have fired me.

This is just a short insight into the things I learned today. I hope you feel inspired to also gain more knowledge about this and any other important subjects. Let’s start that conversation.

Below I’ll list the websites I read or looked at.