I Am Racist (And So Is America)

Two days ago Brittany and I were walking through Cuenca when a street dog attacked her. It got its teeth around her leg before we were able to scare it off. There was no physical harm but the event left her a little jittery.

The next day I could see that she was acting more cautiously around the dogs in town. She was visibly scared. I asked her if she was okay.

“Yeah I’m okay. I’m just a little shaken.”

I know how she felt because eleven years ago something similar happened to me. I was walking to a party in Washington, DC. when I got jumped by a group of six or seven teenagers. They came up behind us, punched my friend in the face and pointed a gun at both of us. I dropped my wallet. They took it and ran off.

The kids were black.

Ever since then I’ve acted a little more cautiously around black teens. I’m not proud of this. In fact, it makes my stomach turn to even write these words down.

But I’m sharing this because I think it’s important to acknowledge, and I think it’s intellectually dishonest to deny.

On that day, eleven years ago fear crept into my heart. I hate that it exists in there, and as much as I’ve tried to vanquish it, a tiny part of it remains.

Unfortunately I don’t think I’m alone in my biases. In fact, I know I am not alone.

America as a whole is racist.

From slavery to Jim Crow to the age of mass incarceration, racism has always been at the very heart of America and endorsed by our government overtly or tacitly. It is the cornerstone upon which we built the world’s largest economy and it is the lingering noose around our neck that will eventually bring our country down if we fail to address it.

I know when I say this it makes people uncomfortable but it’s the truth.

When I say America is racist I’m not talking about KKK or Donald Trump style racism. I’m talking about unconscious biases, and we all have them whether we choose to acknowledge them or not.

Our brand of racism today is more insidious than the racism of our past. It is baked into every institution and every facet of our society from our media to our schools to our criminal justice system. It’s all around us. It’s everywhere.

The sooner we are honest about our own biases and the role we play in perpetuating this racial caste the sooner we can do something about it.

On the surface we all say we are against racism and racist policies, but we witness the same horrific incidences over and over and nothing seems to ever change. Why are we so impotent? What is getting in the way of change?

Well, for one there are the racism deniers. Despite all the overwhelming evidence of institutionalized racism, there are people who want to pretend that racism is a thing of the past.

I’m not talking about fringe groups of people wearing “make America great again” hats. I’m talking about everyday, normal people.

They are our friends, our family, our elected officials, our CEOs, our church leaders, our media pundits, our judges and our jurors. They are all around us. These are the people that will find every plausible reason to explain away nearly every police shooting as justified. These are the people who think there is nothing unusual with the fact that whites and blacks use drugs at the same rate yet blacks are ten times more likely to be sent to jail for drug offenses. These are the people who fool themselves into thinking that success in life has everything to do with hard work and nothing to do with the privilege you are born into. Perhaps you know people like this. Or perhaps this is you.

In the days of slavery, slaveholders would deny that the institution of slavery was amoral. They would explain it away in myriad ways that seemed perfectly reasonable at the time but today, of course seems totally ludicrous.

The people that deny that racism exists today are no different than the slaveholders of the past. Their arguments at times may sound reasonable but there is no doubt history will judge these folks as harshly as history has judged the slaveholders of the past.

The racism deniers, however, are not actually the biggest obstacle to fixing America’s racism problem.

The biggest obstacle to progress is the person who doesn’t realize she is part of the problem. She probably has some racial biases just like everyone else but she is not outwardly racist. She likely considers herself progressive and feels genuine sadness every time she sees a new shooting on the news.

Yet, for whatever reason she chooses to sit on the sidelines.

As we’ve seen over this past week with the heartbreaking violence in Baton Rouge, Minnesota, and Dallas things have not gotten any better since Ferguson. Arguably they have gotten worse.

People are still dying needlessly. There is no end in sight.

There comes a point where we no longer have a right to sit on the sidelines with a clear concisous. There comes a point where we have an obligation to act.

Because at the end of the day, it’s not the activists who are going to fix this problem. The activists can spark a flame but you need more than a spark to create change.

It’s the sideline sitters who are going to have to fix this. Because it’s the sideline sitters who make up the great majority of America and when this group wakes up and decides enough is enough that’s when this mess we are in finally ends.