So to preface, I’m white and just kind of need a place to vent if that’s alright. Tell me to fuck off and do more googling or read a book if that’s what I need to do.

I’ve heard about trans-racialism (the foster care kind, not the Rachel Dolezal kind) but was wondering if anyone else had some personal experience with this. My sister grew up picking white dolls over black ones, insisting that she was pure Swedish, straightening and bleaching her hair, and the list goes on. Seeing how blatantly different she was treated in school was a huge part of my radicalization and let me see how easy it was to be blind to sort of thing. I love her dearly and I’m just worried about her. For context, she’s still not old enough to drink

She inherited some intense white fragility from my parents and never wanted to acknowledge lher race. Then a couple years ago in the span of a few months she went from dismissing all discussion of race to bringing it up constantly. To my mother’s horror, her favorite thing to do was make slave jokes at the dinner table. She’s mostly moved past the edgy “how much can I make my white family cringe?” phase and I think we’re better off for it. Like it broke the ice for better or worse.

Six months ago, we took in a friend of hers because she’d just gotten kicked out of her home. Mental health stuff. My family does foster care so inviting in friends in a rough spot isn’t unheard of. The issue is this friend deals weed and pills out of her car. I’m not judging the weed. I don’t give a shit. But they’d get fucked up and then drive around at all hours of the night with a bong, scales, a lit joint, and a pound of weed in the trunk. Two black girls in deep chudville going 20 mph over the speed limit in a rust trap at 3 am? Yeah, they’ve gotten pulled over several times and I have no fucking idea how they haven’t been arrested. They were doing this at the height of the George Floyd protests and I kinda freaked. I would have been freaked out by my white friends pulling shit like that, but for them I would have been afraid of them getting arrested or fined. For my sister I was just constantly imagining her getting shot over some weed.

So basically I told her as much. I quoted some stats at her. We talked about the protests for a bit. I referenced some of the racist assholes she’d dealt with in school and reminded her that several of them are the children of cops in the area. I think she was pretty receptive, but sometimes it’s hard to tell because she processes stuff differently than I do. And I just can’t shake the feeling that this wasn’t my place to tell her. That I’m missing some blind spot and have accidentally given her bad advice. But obviously no one else in my family was going to step up and talk to her, so I still felt like I needed to.