Journal Journey

Week 27: 11 July 2016

This post is a day late. It’s late because I’m at a loss. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to say. I don’t know how to channel my anger and disappointment and fear into something constructive. I keep thinking about Alton Sterling and his family. I’m thinking of Philando Castile and his family. Of the five Dallas police officers and their families. This week has floored me. It’s struck me dumb.

I’m not alone in feeling this, I’m sure. But that doesn’t make it any easier. It just makes it all the more frustrating. There are thousands of us — at the very least — desperate to make or do or say something that will start to make a change in the nation we call home. Where to start?

First, let me admit something that isn’t easy to say: in high school, I was racist. I’m far from proud of that, which is why I don’t admit it often. I don’t excuse it, either. The truth is, I was ignorant. I was following the lead of people I was around. But, again, that doesn’t excuse it, it just explains it. The reasons for why I thought the way I did don’t really matter, and I don’t want to detail them here for fear airing them again could give them new life in the mind of someone else. They are as insignificant and illegitimate today as they were decades ago when I incorrectly thought they were valid. But we’re not here today to re-litigate the past. We’re here to learn from our mistakes and move forward in a better direction. I learned better, and I continue to learn every day. I know others can do the same.

“If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that.”
— William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice (III.i)

I’ve spent the last week like the rest of you, following one horrible news event after another, reading reactions and advice, and trying to cope with the realities of our nation’s debilitating problems with race. We compound it every day by not talking about it. Not looking it in the face and calling it what it is, much less doing anything about it.

This ends today.

You and I and everyone in this country must start learning something new about someone different from yourself. Find out about the circumstances in the lives around you. It’s the only way we’re going to be able to realize that people aren’t just extras in the movie of your life — they’re living lives of their own. They have triumphs and struggles. They have hopes and worries. They have entire histories just waiting to be told. Listen to them. Share with them. Commune with them. So we can do better.

I know this is easy for my to say. What’s hard is putting it into practice. Every day. I understand my privilege. I understand how lucky I am. And I now realize that it’s my responsibility to use the means and platforms I have access to celebrate what we have in common, and learn from the differences that separate us.

There are no easy answers. But it’s time we start asking the hard questions. In public. With the understanding that we are going to make mistakes, but we’ll be big enough to forgive them and educate each other on why learning from them is so important. We have to create a way to have an honest conversation without jumping to conclusions about the motives. There’s a disturbing lack of empathy, and it’s leading us down a path I’m worried we never be able to turn back from.

But I have faith in the inherent goodness of most of our neighbors to rise above the injustices baked into the systems we use everyday. Start questioning those systems. Why do we incarcerate so many minorities? Why do we criminalize the under-privileged? Why do we make so many assumptions based solely on the pigment of our largest organ? Why aren’t free men free?