America is a melting-pot of beautiful cultures, ideas, institutions, and people. It is incumbent upon us all to work together in a way that does not give any one group an unfair advantage over other groups based upon race, economic standing, or creed. Equal rights, and equity of opportunity are the hallmarks of what make this county the greatest on earth. Those ideals have always been challenged by splinter-groups who lurk in the dark corners of society. In America we give those darkened minds the right to state their case in the marketplace of ideas just like everyone else - not so in places like Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Syria just to name a few. It is no mystery to me that many whites (according to Mr. Donald Trump) would like the US to "get back to the way things were" or they want to, "take our country back." They would deny immigrants the right to earn a living wage, they would allow the vestiges of our racist past (and present) to flourish once again, they would take away the single black mother's only hope of feeding and caring for the health of her kids by eliminating safety-net programs like TANF, affordable housing, or Medicaid benefits. If the tragedies of the past few days tell us anything, it is that racism, discrimination, and hate are simply unsustainable ideas because everything they create is negative and a net loss for the perpetrator and the victim.
As Americans, we have learned that the best way to fight a bad idea is to present a better idea, not to crush or inhibit any idea with which we disagree. Our political and social systems are designed to work for the masses generally, to not cause any one group to benefit more than everyone else. We must hold fast to what works for everyone, and aggressively discard ideas and laws that work for the few, but harm most everyone else. I believe we as a nation are better than what we just witnessed in Dallas...and in Minnesota... and in Louisiana. Our leaders have spoken up in protest to the reprehensible police brutality of young black men. However, the time for words is over. These recent events cry out for us to do more. We must take action now before, as President Obama said, "this becomes the new normal." In Chicago, this past Fourth of July, 64 people were shot and four fatally wounded. This year so far, there are 329 homicides in Chicago, more than New York and Los Angeles combined. Yet this is not considered as newsworthy as the death of 5 policemen at the hands of an angry and fed up black man. The only folks I know who can legally put a price on the value of human life are life insurance companies.
As I have grown older, I have come to understand and accept that my point of view is unique and not necessarily logical or reasonable to someone else. Social conservatives see the world through a lens that is completely different than my lens. But we must not let those differences of viewpoint degrade or prevent our conversations about race and class and equality. We will always have opposing opinions and that is okay because it is one of the things that make America so great. The dynamic that has kept us together as a nation is that we have always been willing to move a little to the left or right in our policies, laws and institutions. The polarization of the races is a natural reaction to events like what happened in Dallas. We tend to naturally go to our "safe" (separate) corners when events force us to witness hate crimes or obvious injustice. But we must not abandon the conversation that must occur to better understand each other. We must talk to each other. We must try to see the world from the point of view of the "other." Whites need to stop asking blacks to calm down. Blacks need to understand that most whites do not want to be racist, but they are living in an environment that supports and reinforces a white privilege that is very difficult for them to see. So does a person that experiences white privilege also experience the angst of racism? Hardly. But it is more complex than that. Because it is a well known fact that racism and discrimination are built-in to the social structure and systems of American society, it only makes sense that to not oppose institutional racism and directly benefit from white privilege is to promulgate racism tacitly. By doing nothing to oppose structural racism, while at the same time benefiting from it's effects, non-action becomes a definitive position in opposition to racial equality, which is the definition of a racist.
That is a hard pill to swallow for most whites. From their perspective, they are simply living their lives like everyone else. Yet we all live within the natural and artificial societal structures that make the world go 'round. If those structures are set up to give one group an advantage over another we cannot escape the inherent inequality it produces. The challenge for white people - and what makes it so difficult for them to take action is that any real action they take to eliminate racism is an action that takes something away from them. The hard lesson to be learned from Dallas is that the black man who shot those white police officers is simply a product of, and a reaction to racism and oppression. He wasn't crazy. Just fed up. Two wrongs do not make a right. And the police he killed were not individually wrong, but they were complicit in a system that is none the less killing blacks whether they (would) agree or acknowledge it or not! No one would blame a woman who kills an intruder in her home trying to rape her or kill one of her children. What white people don't understand about blacks is that we feel just like the woman protecting herself and her kids - only on a much larger scale. What's worse, is that we as a community feel helpless to save ourselves or our children. We as blacks know that only the best of us can sometimes elevate ourselves to a level some would call "successful" yet we see what most people would consider incompetent, stupid and unqualified whites elevated to positions of power and authority all the time. Identifying racism is not so elusive in such a context. It is quite plain to blacks and whites that a poor work ethic, or a dumb decision is easy to see, but what white person do you know who would stand up and say, "hey, the African American deserves that promotion more than the white guy". We blacks know that such inept behavior would only be tolerated coming from a white person as long as it doesn't become blatant and obviously destructive to the environment in which it exists. All other things being equal, that is racism resulting from white privilege.
Blacks and whites need to come together and continue to talk about racism and its affects upon the black community and the white community as well. However, it is not incumbent upon blacks to give whites a pass so they feel more comfortable coming to the table to talk. The affects of racism are so insidious and lethal that whites simply have to bear the brunt of the guilt they should rightly feel about what structural racism has produced since they created it. Whatever they feel, it does not compare to what blacks have been feeling for the last 250 years. But as I said earlier, the time for words is over. Action is what is needed and it appears now that some black people in this country are willing to take action that kills. That is a bad idea. It is a fight we cannot win, nor should we want to win that way. We must present a better idea. An idea that does not include injustice in the courts, that does not block opportunity, that does not include a young black man being shot by a police officer because that cop places no value on the life of a black man. It is a shame that whites have benefited from white privilege for so long that some don't even know what real equality for all even looks like. We must continue to speak to each other and together speak truth to power.
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