Kari Kopnick

Whitewashing

I got two pieces of news today that would seem unrelated but they’re not. My youngest son was not cast in the big show for spring quarter. “Ghost in the Shell” appears to be a box office flop. Related? What? One word. Whitewashing. Whitewashing is a casting practice in which White actors are cast in rolesContinue reading “Whitewashing”

Doing it Wrong

So how do I, a White person, work on fighting white supremacy without, you know, trying to smear my white privilege all over and muck it up? I get a little frozen here, sometimes. OK, all the time. Because I don’t want to do it wrong. I don’t want to do something to make more trouble,Continue reading “Doing it Wrong”

So, tell me about your hair?

I was a late bloomer, as in I think I bloomed underground and then had to fight my goofy, wrecked up daisy head out of the dirt to see the sun. I didn’t finish my BA until one day before my oldest son graduated with an engineering degree. It meant a cobbling together of credits from allContinue reading “So, tell me about your hair?”

But, I have friends who are…

I am married to a person of color, mother to three mixed-race young men and the loving Aunt of two fabulous young Black women. I have friends from all over the country, the continent and world. That means nothing about my whiteness. Or whether or not I carry my cultural, racial bias with me like aContinue reading “But, I have friends who are…”

De-fense, De-fense!

When I first experienced being on the receiving end of hearing that yes, I TOO, could claim the title of white supremacist (not the hood wearing kind, instead the complicit with my culture kind) my first reaction was to defend myself. I am married to an Asian man, I CAN’T be racist. I am awareContinue reading “De-fense, De-fense!”

Nope. Not me. No.

The first time I heard the phrase “white supremacy” directed at me it was not yelled across a protest line or flung in a hateful way. I was taking a class on sex and gender from the local community college. I had just been trained as a sexulaity educator for young people and figured IContinue reading “Nope. Not me. No.”

Now. The time is now.

I am part of a happy little liberal faith. We sing. We donate to good causes. We fight injustice. Simple, right? Yeah. Nope. We have recently gone thru a crisis. And I really mean it. A full-on crisis. My friend saw injustice and in looking closer, she smelled a rat and then she brought that ratContinue reading “Now. The time is now.”

FIGHT LIKE HELL!

I’m wearing my favorite Hillary campaign t-shirt. No, not because I live in some dream land where Hillary is president. I don’t. I live right here in Trump’s America where the time I spend in lovely downtown Huntington Beach, California is with a protest sign and a threat that the police will arrest me if IContinue reading “FIGHT LIKE HELL!”

In My Pocket

I just got home from seeing “Singin’ in the Rain” on a big screen at my local SoCal theater. Or well, what passes for a big screen at those huge multiplex theaters. I have seen this movie dozens of times; never on anything but a house sized screen. I remember watching it more than once inContinue reading “In My Pocket”