Racism Hides, We Will Not

We live, raise children, and work in the US and this is about our country. Racial and nationalist privilege is a reality that can no longer be endured.

That it has been allowed to simmer in a supposed free society, is our collective shame and a burden of inestimable debt. Yet our mandate today, above all, is to safeguard our children from this scourge, and ensure a future that delivers on America’s promise of equal opportunity and protection for all.

Racism persists not only in overt action, but in discreet inaction. When yet another family loses a loved one in an unfathomable incident of institutionally tolerated brutality, we must speak out. When, at the highest level of our government, the response to the protest of such atrocity is condescending name-calling, threats of dominance, and more violence, we must take action.

We weep for George Floyd’s family and for all families of innumerable lives lost and injured by state sanctioned savagery.

Yet, racism does not begin with murder. It infects our communities whenever policy excludes and condemns along demographic lines and goes uncorrected, regardless of title, wording, or intent. Racism hides, not just in nationalist ideology of fear and anger, but in school funding, municipal zoning, neighborhood security, lack of jobs, mandatory sentencing, military recruitment, and congressional redistricting. We are committed to recognizing, calling out, and abolishing the subtle and insidious pretexts of supremacy that marginalize any people and perpetuate class barriers. We are not OK with unequal education, neighborhood gentrification, cultural obstacles, wealth/opportunity cycles, voting encumbrances, stereotyping, profiling, mass incarceration, and inhumane use of force by law enforcement.

In addition, while we can easily reject the outward dogma and action of hate and supremacy, we must also call-out a laundry list of cowardly contrivances. Racism hides within plausible deniability, anonymity, dog-whistling, historical whitewashing, misinformation, and the coded signaling used to preserve an obscene status quo and to communicate indecent, immoral, and often murderous messages.

Change won’t be easy or sudden. We are in this together, until it’s done. We will persevere with grace and non-violence, and succeed by peeling back the layers of deceit that have been lacquered over the most enlightened purposes of our constitution -even as it’s authors failed to recognize injustice. We will only prevail through the cooperation of good people of all colors. We will give, we will hug and hold hands, we will shout and hold signs, and we will vote.

end racism