Black Lives Matter
This article continues the ideas laid out in Why You Matter, where I describe how being, doing, and belonging influence our self-worth. Here I describe the obvious.
Black Lives Matter is a scream for basic human rights, the very concept that holds our society together. It’s clearly a direct response to a culture that makes black people feel like their lives don’t matter, like they’re some sort of sub-human species. Respect for the rights of others is the thin foundation that our society is built on. We’ve been pretending for years that the part of that foundation that holds up black America is fine, but academics have been arguing for decades that the problems black Americans face are largely structural. They’ve documented how unequal education, health care, air quality, lead pollution, school suspensions, incarceration rates, hiring processes, etc., lead to unequal results.
The big problem isn’t really the white people who hate black people and actively work against them. The stone racists are problematic, certainly, but they’re usually spread pretty thin, and most white people know that sort of racism is wrong. The big problem is that we assume the world is fair. That means when we see a black community struggling, we think it’s because of personal faults, not because it was intentionally designed decades ago to be less successful. That’s why it’s so important that we all learn the racist history of America. Only then can we learn to see and repair the cracks in the America’s foundation and heal the damage that has been done.
The killing of George Floyd was one of those moments where we all had to stop and face up to reality. A horrible thing had happened that was worse than the bad things that usually happen. It was so horrible that the whole world took notice, and for a few days we were too shocked to pretend everything was normal. Black activists were ready to call attention to the deeper issues, and a lot of white people were ready to listen. We started to believe that the problem wasn’t a few bad apples. We learned what qualified immunity is. We started to believe in the the blue wall of silence. We protested together. We talked to each other. It seemed that we might have the will to start fixing some of the underlying problems. So far that hasn’t happened. The question is whether the next government comes back from the hardware store with shovels and concrete, or, like usual, with wallpaper and paint.
I’m not an expert by any means. The things I’ve learned about race I’ve learned by saying a doing dumb things, then being corrected by others. I’ll never really know what it’s like to live with dark skin. No one has ever kicked me in my basic sense of human worth. The best we can do is to try to learn from the experts. I suggest learning bit from Ibram X. Kendi. He makes sense which, on this topic, is one of the most difficult things to make.
