The Problem Lies Inside Us

I’m proud of the young men in the NBA willing to risk money to call out the injustice of America’s white supremacist policy that allows people of color to get shot for a taillight being out on a traffic stop, or for just doing what police say to do, or, as in Wisconsin, for being a good Samaritan and breaking up a fight. These extremely hard-working athletes are putting their livelihoods on the line, but more than that they are saying that we have a voice and we will not be ignored. They represent the best this country has to offer.

Remember these are people who’ve worked extremely hard to enjoy the fruits of a very short career. The time they really shine is right now. In the playoffs. That’s where the endorsements come. Forget the outliers like Lebron James who’ve already made gazilllions, how about the Fred Van Vleets of the world who need this kind of exposure to get a lucrative sneaker deal?  They could be risking untold millions if they cancel the season in protest, and injured next year. Their ability to make generational change money could go down the drain.

Don’t think of them as pampered athletes, think of them as smart, hard working young men who are fed up and are stepping up. The same kudus goes to the WNBA players who are using their voice to say enough is enough. I also applaud the soccer players, the baseball players and any other young athlete willing to take a stand for racial justice.

But these young men and woman can’t touch the dark heart of racial subjugation in America. Systemic racism in America, built on the racial justification of slavery and then the brutal Nazi-like Jim Crow that pervaded the south but set the tone for all of white society in America, is built on white people ignoring its consequences. The core problem to addressing racial inequality in America, which everyone sees on a daily basis, stems from the inability of white people to discuss the problems of racism without seeing it through a lens of their hurt feelings. Systemic racism has for generations both denied access to the good life to people of color (grand scale here, not individuals) through redlining, through crumbling, poorly funded schools in poor neighborhoods that both degrade and fail young children of color, through denial of access to good paying jobs open to whites with and without college degrees. And for generations white people have looked away, or if we’ve looked at all have tisked and said things should change and then looked away again.

It’s not that every white person is racist. It’s that our economic system and our system of governance are both built on racist ideology that we have not taken part in dismantling. When I discuss this with conservatives and liberals they often get angry, as if I am calling them out personally. Yes, racism is both personal and societal. But the personal has limited power, ugly as it is. Until white folks are able to look at how white America’s implicit embrace of the systemic subjugation of people of color has poisoned the dialogue, we’re going to be like the rat on the wheel. We’ll have more killings of unarmed men and woman whose only fault was skin tone, we’ll have more of the dismal generational skin-tone-based poverty that destroys community cohesion.

The answers to our problems are pretty clear, invest in schools and job training, invest in development in communities of color, invest in changing our hearts so we look closely at the problem without trying to get out of that by saying “I’m not a racist.” Until we look at the problem and address it through changes in laws and the distribution of funds, until we appreciate the sacrifice of athletes who want to make a stand, until we get to a place where a black person sees a cop car and is not worried that they might die in a traffic stop, than we are all implicitly (and, for too many outright haters like Donald Trump, explicitly) part of the racist problem at the heart of the American Dream.