September 27, 2025
A white woman’s visit to the Roots 101 African American Museum in Louisville, Kentucky, went viral after she broke down in tears when founder Lamont Collins placed heavy shackles on her wrist.
A white woman’s visit to the Roots 101 African American Museum in Louisville, Kentucky, went viral after she broke down in tears when founder Lamont Collins placed heavy shackles on her wrist, the same kind once used to bind enslaved people. A video of her crying as he implored her to tell her what she’s feeling spread across social media like wildfire over the weekend, spreading with it a discussion of how necessary these kinds of viral moments are.
As The Root reports, Collins began by dropping the shackles on her wrists for dramatic effect as he told her, “Welcome to America.” Noticing her visceral reaction to the interaction, Collins instructed the older white woman, “Tell me what you’re thinking.”
“I’ve always been interested in history and the history of Black people,” the woman answered before noting that she’s taken classes to learn more about what Black people have collectively endured in America and joined a predominantly Black church in the state. “I wouldn’t [want to] be anywhere else,” she said as she ended her tearful reflection.
As the video spread on social media, so did the commentary, which ranged from effusive praise for the museum and its founder to humorous jabs at the lady’s reaction to being briefly shackled and defenses of her reaction as one grounded in empathy and not necessarily white guilt.
According to a 2024 excerpt of Hilary Giovale’s book “Becoming a Good Relative: Calling White Settlers Toward Truth, Healing, and Repair,” reprinted in Yes! Solutions Journalism, white guilt can sometimes be characterized by tears, but it must move beyond tears into concrete action for it to be useful.
As Giovale writes, “I am grateful that the ancestors have shown me the unpopular truth: Unleashing their tears and reviving their memory might just be the messy, raw, healing balm for the wounds our people sustained and perpetrated so long ago. If we muster the courage to traverse these shadows, who might we become on the other side of all that pain? Who are we underneath the denial, amnesia, grief, guilt, and shame? Let’s find out.”
As Jeffery Kass wrote for “ZORA,” a Medium publication, in 2023, there is a long history of white people jumping in the fight for equality with both feet, such as white people who joined the civil rights fight in the 1960s. And some, like Andrew Goodman and Michael Henry “Mickey” Schwerner, lost their lives in doing so.
As Fred Hampton noted in his 1969 speech, “Power Anywhere There’s People!” the way to a true anti-racist society is paved with folks who know that solidarity, that is a shared struggle, is necessary to achieve lasting change.
“We got to face some facts. That the masses are poor, that the masses belong to what you call the lower class, and when I talk about the masses, I’m talking about the white masses, I’m talking about the Black masses, and the brown masses, and the yellow masses, too. We’ve got to face the fact that some people say you fight fire best with fire, but we say you put fire out best with water,” said Hampton. “We say you don’t fight racism with racism—we’re gonna fight racism with solidarity.”
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