Photos from the Philando Castile Memorial

'I need justice. I need peace.'

Lavish Reynolds bravely broadcast the death of her boyfriend, Philando Castile, at the hands of a Falcon Heights, Minn., police officer last week. Still raw with grief, she tells here the painful story of Castile's final moments and the events that followed.

How can I, in good conscience, raise two biracial boys in America?

I woke up just after three this morning having fallen asleep with my computer open next to me, a blank page on the screen. I fell asleep with literally no words and woke with the same.

So, I went back to sleep and woke again a few hours later with my one-year-old son. I made breakfast. I watched the highlights from last night’s Twins/Rangers game with my almost-eight-year-old. I let the dog outside. And just I keep on thinking and thinking.

Philando Castile (left) and Alton Sterling

I've watched two different videos this week of Alton Sterling being murdered, and now they’re in my brain on loop, playing over and over in my head no matter what I intend to be thinking about or focusing on.

I watched a video of Philando Castile dying with a bloody hole in his shoulder and a sweet little four-year-old girl in the backseat while his girlfriend cried for help and repeated the names of streets I recognized from my childhood.

Larpenteur. Snelling. Fry. “Five minutes without traffic,” according to Google, from where my dad grew up in St. Paul. Across the river from where my mother went to high school, from where my sisters both now live in Minneapolis.

Phil Castile punctured my personal bubble. If a police officer can stop his car and shoot him dead in the passenger seat “five minutes without traffic” from the first place I ever went home to, then no ground is sacred. No place is safe.

And that should come as no surprise, really. Minnesota hasn’t changed. In a way, it’s never been safe, like nowhere else has ever been safe, and yet it’s still as safe for me as the day I was born.

I have changed, though — or the shape and color of my bubble have, anyway. Now I’m the white partner of a black woman, and I’m the white parent of two biracial boys. The idea of safety requires a more nuanced thought process for me than it used to.

Our country was founded on racism and brutality, and let’s be clear — that remains its backbone. My predecessors in white supremacy, privilege and oppression did their best to physically eradicate the native people they encountered. My public school textbooks in Fargo, ND, called this genocide “manifest destiny.”

Our founding fathers, meanwhile, lived and died believing they owned black people, and that they were justified in doing so. When that practice was scrutinized, my predecessors protected their privilege. The systemic oppression shifted, and it lived on as lynchings. As Jim Crow. The war on drugs. The Washington Redskins. Mass incarceration. Redlining. Police violence.

We talk of progress, of incremental change, but we live in a country whose founding machinery of systemic racism is still humming along uninterrupted.

Alton Sterling is dead because two police officers were brought up breathing that machine’s smog, along with the officer in Minnesota who killed Phil Castile, and along with you and me and pretty much everyone we know. That smog taught us all to unwittingly view black men as potentially threatening criminals. That smog has poisoned us with a latent belief in white superiority and an unspoken, unacknowledged fear of losing a privileged status that no one deserves to keep. It’s insidious.

And I have to admit, sometimes I just don’t want to understand my place in all this. Because I’m culpable. Whether I “want” this privileged status or not, here I am, still complicit by my mere presence, and still benefiting from the idea of whiteness even at the expense of my own family.

Whether I “want” to be or not, I am still supporting the infrastructure of this systemic oppression with my taxes, my donations, my livelihood — with my very life.

All this thinking keeps on leading me to one question in the end: How can I, in good conscience, continue to live in America?

I don’t have an answer.

It’s not possible for me to live in this country and not benefit from and support systemic racism. I can’t escape my whiteness any more than my sons and my partner can escape their blackness.

Does that mean we have to leave? Is there another responsible decision to make with two young, brown-skinned sons?

I try to fight the status quo. I write this blog you’re reading now about education and race in Seattle and Washington State. I try to call out racism and inequity where I see it and demand something better. I’ve been out on the streets in Ferguson. I’ve been an at-times-crazy person on Facebook and Twitter.

But it’s not enough. Can I ever do more to fight racism than I am already doing, simply by living in America as a white man, to support it?

Our incremental progress was too slow for Philando Castile and Alton Sterling, as it has been for so, so many others. What if it’s too slow for my sons? Why should this finely tuned machine suddenly blow a fuse now?

How can I, in good conscience, raise two biracial boys in America?

That’s what I keep asking myself. And no matter how much I think about it, no matter how hard I look, I’m not finding an answer.

I’m just finding a replay of Alton Sterling’s murder, playing on loop, with Philando Castile dying in the background, and it’s saying, “These could be your sons.”