Not Being a Racist is not enough

When talk of reparation starts up—and for the record, this piece is not about reparation—but when talk of reparation arises, the immediate response from many is why anyone should have to pay for someone else’s bad behavior, especially if that behavior occurred hundreds of years ago.

Valid arguments can be made for both sides—I hate to even use that expression—but reparation seen as paying off a debt is one thing. Reparation as punishment for someone else’s sin is quite another thing.

My point is there are no easy answers to complicated problems.

We are, however, responsible for our own sins, especially if we refuse to stop committing them.

Many, perhaps most, would be right declaring, “I am not a racist. I don’t have a racist bone in my body. I deplore racism.”

Well good for you. We need more like you. If you lived on an island by yourself, you would be entitled to bragging rights. Unfortunately, we are a nation with a lot of people unlike you.

A racist nation isn’t one where everyone is a racist. A racist nation is one where racism is allowed to exist, even thrive in some areas, and accepted as something we don’t condone, but can’t do anything about. If racism is present in a nation, the nation is a racist nation. Nation-building is a team sport.

Racism isn’t something that occurs over weeks, months, or years. A nation doesn’t go through a racist phase, and then suddenly shape up.

Before we even were a nation, for 157 years from 1619 to 1788, we depended on slavery to build our nation. In 1788, we became a nation dedicated to the idea that all men were created equal, but continued for the next 75 years, until 1863, to condone slavery. From 1863, the year of the Emancipation Proclamation into the 1960’s Civil Rights movement, Jim Crow laws, segregationist policies, and hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan did everything in their power to prevent blacks from exercising the rights given to them by the 13^th, 14^th, and 15^th Amendments. For the last half-century many states, white supremacists groups, and yes, individual racists have continued to do everything in their power to weaken or remove entirely those rights given blacks in the 1860s and 1960s. We are the United States. 

"E pluribus unum" (Out of many, one) is a good motto when everything is going well and everyone is working together. 

"Sicut et nos omnes," (Just as one, so are we all) is what explains a bad situation we’d rather forget, or at least, ignore. A conversation about racism does not begin by pointing the finger at the other guy. It begins by admitting we have always been and continue to be a racist nation.

The only thing that changes is the personal involvement in racism as experienced by the white community. Sometimes, racism pushes everything else aside—even a pandemic. Most times, racism is so far out of mind that we might be tempted to convince ourselves it doesn’t even exists.

For blacks, racism is an ongoing way of life in the United States of America, always has been. It never goes away.

Money can help ease the pain, but money can’t make wrongs, right. No amount of money can put a black family in a white neighborhood if that neighborhood doesn’t want them. A college education cannot give a black person a job if a white employer doesn’t want to hire him. And what we continue to learn, as we have known for the last 150 years, no law can guarantee a black person his rights if a white person refused to concede them.

What we are increasingly learning is that no policeman can protect a black man if that policeman is part of the problem.

Money can’t fix the racism problem. Laws can’t fix it.

Again, we are a nation of individual, whose actions define the group. Every individual must decide, not whether he or she is a racist, but rather, do they want to live in a racist country, and if they don’t, what are they going to do about it?

I’m convinced the racists are not going to fix this problem. Introspection will not get them to where the country needs them to be. Saving the nation is more than protecting our own reputations. Racists have to know there is no place for them in this country. Non-racists have to tell them that, every chance they get.