Last week, as protests began to unfold following the death of George Floyd, the president of Seattle Central College sent out a tweet.
Sitting at my computer tonight trying to draft a statement for campus about the unrelenting assault on black people in this country. I just can’t. I am too tired, angry and sad to be coherent about racism in America.
— Sheila Edwards Lange (@EdwardsLange) May 29, 2020
Dr. Sheila Edwards Lange did find the words. In a message to her campus community, she talked about her anger as a Black woman … and the anger other Black people feel … and how many want to discount it. And, she wrote, “anger has a lot of information in it.”
“Being angry is just the first step,” she told KNKX. “How do you leverage that energy to do something different in the world?
“We need white America to step up and to educate themselves about what is going on, and why there is such rage and anger in the African American community,” she said. “One of my friends said we need more than white allies, we need white co-conspirators — people who put their bodies on the line the way Black lives have been on the line for hundreds of years."
She talked about that with KNKX All Things Considered host Ed Ronco. (Listen to the conversation above.)
