Mary Canty Merrill was fed up. So she turned to Facebook.
“Dear White People: The terminology we use to define a problem determines how we attempt to solve it,” she wrote in an April 4 Facebook post.
“You are so accustomed to defining racism as people of color being the problem that you want to fix us, patronize us, save us and heal us. You rarely perceive yourselves as the problem (which is where its root lies). Thus, your interventions are most often ill-informed, misdirected and yield no meaningful or sustainable results.”
She logged in the next day to find her post removed and profile suspended for a week. A number of her older posts, which also used the “Dear white people” formulation, had been similarly erased.