For the past few weeks, especially since George Floyd’s murder, I have been doing a lot of self-reflection. Analyzing as much as I can about myself, trying to figure out where I have the opportunity to change. I am working on recognizing the unconscious biases I have internalized, including the jokes I grew up with about the old wives tales that say I am lighter than my own sister because my mother ate more oranges when she was pregnant with me; or the fact that I lived in Washington D.C. and the Caribbean for a good amount of my life collectively, yet I still don’t have that many close Black friends.

I went down the rabbit hole of analyzing the people I am connected to on Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn. The colors of their faces. The diversity in my feed. (I apologize to the high school friends I may have freaked out by liking posts from a few years ago.) I wanted to see what choices I had made in friends, both in what they looked like, who they chose to marry and what they chose to do with their lives. It was interesting to see what kind of families I have crossed paths with and how they helped shape who I am.

We tend to gravitate towards the people we think will understand us. People with shared experiences. I can come up with a lot of excuses for my behavior and choices, including the fact that I chose a very privileged career path. I had an unpaid internship at the State Department before serving in the Peace Corps and then worked in the non-profit space focusing on poverty alleviation for the most part. There weren’t many Black people in my classrooms or on the same track as me. There also weren’t many desis (from the Indian subcontinent).

Most of my fellow brown friends were on track to become doctors, lawyers or engineers. But I still hung out with them, despite the difference in career choice. They understood being asked where you were really from. We thought we were above being racist ourselves, because we were POC and had experienced casual racism.

During the second Gulf War (or the Iraq War), I had to leave Kuwait and finish the second semester of my junior year of high school in Florida since Kuwait was being bombed at the time. I was called a sand nigger and asked if I rode a camel to school. But I didn’t look over my shoulder as I walked to the school bus station. I didn’t worry about being followed home. I didn’t worry about looking like I didn’t belong in my uncle’s gated neighborhood. I wasn’t shot like Trayvon Martin was. I am privileged enough to have been angry with my encounters with casual racism, instead of being scared.

I grew up with a father who made sure I knew that I didn’t deserve anything more than the next person. That I could have easily been born to the struggling woman begging for food on the side of the road in Lahore. Or to the tailor who worked in a dingy room in the markaz (market) that often lost electricity. Or even to my uncle, whose children have very different lives than mine. My father made sure my privilege was something I was always grateful for, and that is why I chose to work in the non-profit space. With privilege comes responsibility, and one day God will ask me what I did with everything He gave me.

I don’t deserve to have months worth of insulin in my fridge more than the mom choosing between food and another vial for her kid. I don’t deserve to have access to a sensor while the people I left behind in the Caribbean are walking miles to get their finger poked once a month when the clinic has a few test strips. And I definitely don’t deserve to be able to care for my family with the tools that we have simply because my husband is at the top of the totem pole as a white male, while a black man was killed just because of the color of his skin. Regardless of what walk of life we are from, all of us in the T1D space connected over the feeling of helplessness because of something that isn’t in our power to change. So we find things we can change. We rally together for affordable insulin as a human right, and raise funds for a cure so that one day, no other parent has to go through what we go through.

But racism is in our power to change. It is man-made, it is taught, and it is wrong. It's a long uphill battle, but we should all be on the journey and a part of the fight. Because whether we like it or not, we've almost all been complicit in it.

Outside of being more conscious of my role in systemic racism, here are a few things that have helped me:

Decolonizing my bookshelf. Here is my Goodreads BLM specific bookshelf. As you can see, there are a lot I haven’t read yet. I don’t want my attention to this cause to stop after it isn’t trendy anymore.
I am working on this list of tangible actions to take. It includes a lot of different ways you can contribute, depending on your capacity.
This is a list of amazing people and organizations to support and follow to educate yourself. I am guilty of social media being a source of a lot of my news. Make sure you are following the voices that need to be heard.
I'm trying to add in a daily practice of taking my dog for a walk and continuing my education on the topic at the same time with a podcast.
Check in on local protests you can safely participate at or log in to virtual town halls and let your voice be heard with your officials.

There is this one scene from Just Mercy that has really stuck with me. Bryan is talking to his mom about how she always told him to help the people who need it the most. This past week I have been struggling with feeling like I am not doing that. Like I don't know how to help all the people in the world who truly need it. But my father helped me realize there will always be a difference in who needs the most help and where I am needed the most.

There are a lot of people saying things like "but there are oppressed people everywhere!" in response to the Black Lives Matter movement. And sure, they're right. There are people that suffer from domestic abuse, from child abuse, that face religious persecution or lose their homes in the face of natural disaster. As a humanitarian at heart and by trade, I've often felt like I'm not doing enough. But rather than focusing on what I haven't done, I'm going to focus on what I can do moving forward. Know what is in your power to do, and don’t compare yourself to the activism or work other people are doing. Don't give up before even starting. Take the time to educate yourself, vote, petition, protest. Whatever you can. You don’t have to be vocal about how you choose to be a part of the change. It’s ok for us all to be a work in progress, but pretending this isn’t a problem that concerns you is not ok.

I'm going to continue doing the hard work for the black community, and I hope others do too. Black lives matter is not an opinion, but a fact.