Daniel Bryan: ‘Your black friends are not your Google’

Daniel Bryan was on The Bellas Podcast this week, where he spoke about white privilege and the importance of being anti-racist:

“What I realize too is that like, ‘Oh, if I have a question I’ll just ask Big E!’, right? The last thing, I don’t want to say the last thing, but your black friends are not your Google, right? They’re not there to answer all your white person questions about race.

I wanted to do a lot of education myself and to look up to the black men and women that have been fighting this fight for a long time. Big E actually retweeted a woman named Victoria Alexander. She put out a list of books. Like, here’s an anti-racist book club. So, not only do I want to be not racist, being not racist isn’t good enough. Being anti-racist, right? And not just from an individual level, but from a structural societal level, I want to be anti-racist. I want to support things that bring the black community up because it’s not right...”

The internet is your friend and research tool, who you can ask all sorts of embarrassing questions to, such as I do every time I try to remember whether or not Mustafa Ali is a Raw or SmackDown superstar.

When a white person has a white person question about race, it’s okay to go ahead and consult the internet to start the process of education and learning. It’s not up to black people to educate white people about racial issues, nor is it up to black people to rid the world of racism.

Here is the tweet that Bryan refers to, which includes an anti-racist reading list:

Which book is next on your reading list?