I thought we were putting racism behind us. I was wrong.

When I was younger, there were two kinds of people who talked about a colorblind society. Some of us wanted to believe it was true, not so we could ignore the beauty of our differences, but so we could celebrate them: because we knew they shouldn’t matter when it came to respect. When it came to equality. When it came to shared humanity.

Others, however, wanted to pretend it was true so they could continue being racist pigs.

I was in the first category. I wanted so badly for it was true, that I ignored the racist pigs. There weren’t very many of them anyway. They were just fringe radicals and nutjobs, who had no real power and no place in mainstream society. Or so I thought.

There was a time when someone might have said “all lives matter” as a way of saying that Black lives mattered, too. That of course they did. We’re all human, right? It might have been a celebration of something achieved: that racism had been ended, and that we could all be seen, equally, as one human race. It might have been a dream realized.

Instead, it was merely a nightmare concealed.

I am guilty of wishing too hard, and in so wishing, I turned a blind eye to the ugliness that was still there, lurking beneath the surface and, in some cases, there in plain sight.  

Blind eyes

I do not feel guilty, because feeling guilty accomplishes nothing. I was guilty, and so were many of us who saw the election of a biracial Black president as a sign that we, the HUMAN race, had overcome. That “someday” had arrived. I was guilty of looking past the wealth gap, the police brutality, and the other signs that were there, staring me right in the face.

I looked past it because I felt like we were making progress, and that we were in some kind of transitional state on the way to true equality. I looked past it because, frankly, I thought it “wasn’t my problem.” I looked past it because I could. Others don’t have that option.

In doing so, I was both selfish and shortsighted, because it was my problem, and it still is. It’s all our problem.

Jesus is said to have told his disciples that, “whatever you did not do for the least of these, you did not do to me.” He spoke of not visiting them in prison, of not feeding or clothing the hungry. But what about those who beat and revile and demean “the least of these” — who are really not the least at all, but every bit as human as you and I are? What does that say about such cruelty?

Jesus might have turned the other cheek. Then, if he were Black, the racist pigs would have hit him again and again, until he lay bleeding and gasping for breath on the ground.

We who practice and enable cruelty are truly the “least of these.”

Patience?

Saying something’s in a “transitional state” doesn’t help the people who are suffering through it. It doesn’t help someone who’s been evicted from their home to tell them that housing laws are fairer than they used to be. It doesn’t a lesbian couple to say, “You can get married now,” if they’ve just been fired from their jobs because of that marriage. It doesn’t help to tell a Black American, “Look how far you’ve come,” when a police officer is kneeling on his neck, choking the life out of him.  

Using calls for patience to justify inequality only enables it. And it allows the racist pigs who have gone underground to believe that, one day, when our guard is down, they can resurface and turn back the clock to an era when bigotry was the rule, not the exception.

It allows them to say, “all lives matter” when they really mean “Black lives don’t.” It allows them to turn a blind eye while demanding that their victims turn the other cheek, so they can be hit again. And again. And again.

I really wanted to celebrate equality, rather than continuing to fight inequality. I’m tired of doing that, but I can’t even imagine how tired the victims of that inequality must be. I’m not the victim of a system that conspires against me, that keeps me down for no reason other than the absurd excuse that my skin’s a certain color.

I saw the absurdity of it, and I thought everyone else would, too. Racism seemed so absurd to me that I was sure it was a historical aberration. I thought we would rise above the hatred and the shamefulness of our past, because I believed in hope and possibility. Because I believed that it was intuitively obvious that skin color had nothing to do with a person’s value or worthiness of respect.

I was not wrong in having hope. But I was wrong to think that hope was enough. Or that racist pigs would acknowledge what was intuitively obvious to me, because they were more intent on affirming their hatred than admitting what’s obvious to anyone who actually thinks for 2 seconds about it.

It’s there in the Declaration of Independence: “All men are created equal, and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights.” This truth is, in fact, self-evident, yet we continue to spit in the fact of that truth every day.

Progress?

It’s been 55 years, for God’s sake, since John Lewis and other civil-rights marchers were beaten by state troopers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

Mr. Lewis served almost 33 years in Congress and died at the age of 80. But police are still beating Black people in the streets, and that bridge is still named for the detestable Edmund Pettus, a former grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan. You call this progress? This isn’t a transition, it’s an outrage.

Are we really so stupid that we can’t learn from our mistakes? Are we really that unfeeling that we can keep defying our own core principles in order to kill and degrade and oppress people who don’t look like us? There was a time that I felt the answer to both those questions was a resounding “no,” and because of that, I ignored the signs to the contrary.

I won’t ignore them anymore. Black lives DO matter. Racist pigs have a lot more power than I thought they did, and that makes me both heartbroken and livid.

That said, I can’t even imagine how the men and women on the receiving end of this continued, baseless cruelty must feel.  

Photo by Andy Witchger, Minneapolis protest, July 9, 2016, CC-BY-2.0.