Racism
Ongoing discussion…
Racism
Ongoing discussion…
But this isn’t about good and bad people. The covert nature of structural racism is difficult to hold to account. It slips out of your hands easily, like a water-snake toy. You can’t spot it as easily as a St George’s flag and a bare belly at an English Defence League march. It’s much more respectable than that.
“Our Constitution is color-blind,” U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Harlan proclaimed in his dissent to Plessy v. Ferguson, the case that legalized Jim Crow segregation in 1896. “The white race deems itself to be the dominant race in this country,” Justice Harlan went on. “I doubt not, it will continue to be for all time, if it remains true to its
... See moreCompassion practice motivates wise action.
accustomed to a life of burden as our appetite for liberation wanes.
This is a process of decolonization. Whether you are the descendants of colonizers or the colonized—or, like me, both—all of our peoples have experienced the loss of something essential to our liberated well-being. Whether that was taken from you or given away in the bargain to win power, it is loss.
When I was your age the only people I knew were black, and all of them were powerfully, adamantly, dangerously afraid. I had seen this fear all my young life, though I had not always recognized it as such.