White People: The Speeding Train or the Pond?

Karen Fleshman
4 min readNov 27, 2021

Recently, a new friend, a white man, convened a group of antiracist white people. He opened our call by sharing a dream he had that inspired him to bring us together.

He dreamt that he and a few other people were beside a speeding train. A white canister of toxic gas occupied every seat on the train. He and the people he was with recognized the train as tremendously dangerous and jumped on board, climbed on top and tried to derail the train. Their actions were in vain: the train had too much momentum and was going too fast for them to stop it. He looked for a body of water so he could jump off and survive, but there was none nearby. Terrified, he jumped off onto the cold hard ground, at which point he woke up.

Later in the same call, a white woman spoke of antiracist people in America. She said that on our own, we are like drops of water and have very little impact.

But when the drops unite we become a puddle, as more join us we become a pond, then we become a lake, then we become an ocean.

White Americans: our country is in a state of great danger.

Who we choose to be will determine if the United States descends into a race-based civil war or becomes a more

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Karen Fleshman

Founder, Racy Conversations Inspiring the antiracist generation.