An Open Wound

Too many innocent black men and women have been battered and killed by law enforcement officers who are never held accountable for their crimes. Between 2013 and 2019, 99% of killings by police officers resulted in no charges, according to Mapping Police Violence.

Americans are frustrated and fatigued and know that without dismantling the horrors of institutionalized white supremacy, our nation will never recover from this.

“What you’re seeing now is a curtain falling away. Those of us who have been burdened by this every minute, every second of our entire lives are fragile right now. We are tired.” Said CNN commentator Van Jones.

He is not the only one. Everywhere you look, the emotional energy is an unusual combination of exhaustion and strength. It’s this simultaneous eruption of two contradictory forces that will lead to meaningful change.

“I can’t breathe” has come to signify something deeper about the American experience: One where the moral crime of racism and our great original sin- American slavery will suffocate all of us until and unless this nation has a reckoning for its sins. 

The practice of slavery may have ended. But even after the passing of Civil Rights legislation, including the voting right act in the 1960s, the United States has not fully done all that it should to heal the open wounds of our past.

The call to defeat racism is a moral calling that begins by understanding the nature of this evil disease.  

The Evil of Racism

Racism is the belief that a particular race is superior or inferior to another on the bases of some biological characteristics. It is driven by a primitive need to ascribe moral or political significance to a man’s identity, not on the basis of his character, but on the basis of some predetermined inherited attributes.

Racism is the belief in the helplessness of the individual and his ability to think and reason. It’s the belief that the value of a man can only be determined in relation to the group to which he belongs.

Racism is a form of pathological insecurity disguising itself as supremacy.

Racism is the manifestation of irrationalism. It relies exclusively on the idea that your worth is determined by the inherited not chosen. And that the survival of your identity depends on the preservation of the group to which you belong, not by choice but by default of your genetics.

Racism is a short cut to self-esteem.  It’s the subconscious belief that self-actualization is not possible except by clinging to the status, privilege, and comfort you are told is yours by nature, or worse, divine decree.

Racism is a tool of control. It gives unearned privileges to some at the expense of others in order to fortify the position of the ruling elite who can only survive through the blind loyalty and support of those who stand to benefit from their crimes.

Racism proliferates in societies where generations are raised without a sense of reality outside of the one that is being socially engineered for them by those who wish to maintain a particular status quo. A reality built on lies; The lie that black people are not as good as white people. The lie that they are less human or less capable than whites. The lie of white supremacy.

These lies can no longer be granted the pretense of respectability or order. Protests against the police killings of black Americans continue to spread with no sign of dying down.

Protesters continue to march, armed with nothing but confident resistance and the moral conviction that truth must prevail because life and liberty can never last until we command – Justice for all!