While you commit to elevating your racial fluency by reading books and listening to podcasts and watching films and validating the lived experiences of Black people, you also have to commit to developing your personal antiracist narrative.
How do you expect to continually show up for others when you don't continually show up as your authentic self?
If you're newly committed to racial justice, but not committed to the work of exploring and defining and embracing and embodying your personal values and beliefs and principles about racism, how will you sustain the antiracist effort on behalf of others beyond the present urgent moment?
Showing up for racial injustice isn't a charitable cause. It's not philanthropy. It's not transactional, a checklist, a one-off event.
It's a way of being. A way that you have to own and live and believe in.
And that takes commitment. Commitment to individuals and communities directly affected by racial injustices.
And commitment to yourself.
So yes, donate. Yes, march. Yes, write Black Lives Matter in sidewalk chalk. Yes, continue to learn.
But don't think it begins and ends there.
It begins with you exploring and articulating your personal story of why you care about all of this.
And it ends when we no longer have to talk about any of it.