Why Everyone Should Care About Racism

 As the protests arising from the failure to indict in the Ferguson and Michael Brown cases, play out in the media I have been surprised and touched by the number of white people who are also outraged by injustice in the system. Racism was once a legal and socially acceptable part of life from the inception of our nation, which incidentally was founded by revolution and civil disobedience, lest we forget, to the late 1960’s civil rights movement. Since then it has been driven underground, but has remained a virulent force. It is time for it to go.

Beautiful lives are being destroyed everywhere from this pervasive moral decay of society. One that comes to the top of my mind is that of my younger brother Gabriel. He was a bright and gifted child, who happened to be born into an impoverished family. He was intellectually curious, so at the all white school he attended briefly (our family moved frequently due to evictions), he was excited to be assigned readings about the Incas in Peru. He read what the teacher assigned, and then went to the library to check out more books on the subject and read them too. When the teacher held a discussion on the assignment he excitedly raised his hand to contribute to the conversation what he had learned from his additional reading. The teacher scolded and shamed him in front of the class for not restricting the conversation to the reading she had assigned. My heart was heavy when he told me the story. I told our parents about it, but they did not go in to talk to the teacher about it. After that Gabriel lost interest in school, and a couple of years later he dropped out before graduating.

By the age of 17 Gabriel grew to be a tall and handsome young man of 6’4” with a quick wit who was very popular with the ladies. He wasn’t able to earn more than 3 dollars an hour at MacDonalds, and that money was taken from him by our always needy family. He learned that he could make quick money and buy new clothes by selling drugs. He almost died, but miraculously survived when someone cracked his skull open in an alleyway two months before his actual death. He promised me he would stop, but then, just before Christmas he wanted to do one last deal to buy presents for his family. He did not survive this time. My soul felt crushed and I mourned for well over a year. I could not enjoy Christmas for nearly 20 years. He was much younger than me and felt more like a son than a brother to me. There were many years in my life and my early education where I tried to ignore issues of race and social justice, and just focus on school and homework, and getting a job, but I came to learn that issues of social justice were an important part of my education and my full participation in life.

My family is bi-racial. My mother was white, and my father was black. They were so in love they bucked the social system in the early 1960’s to get married and have a family and had 3 children together. Dad went on to marry two more times and had 10 more children from each of those unions. All of the children , except the three from his second wife grew up with my father. Two of those children died in infancy, and one was adopted into a different family. We have reconnected with him, and he, incidentally, is a police officer. For his own protection in the current climate I will not share his name. Race was never discussed in our household, which never prepared me for the real world, where it mattered very much. I could see the devastation that being a black amputee married to a white woman was causing on Dad’s earning opportunities myself, whether or not he chose to acknowledge it. Every Spring Dad would put on his suit and tie and go out to look for a job, and most times come up empty handed. He would then take to his bed and drink, before starting the whole cycle over again. We barely scraped by on his disability check, and a lot of the time we went hungry, until the 3rd of the month, “big shopping day.”

All of my siblings have now grown up, and some of them are still struggling and living in poverty, which leaves them more vulnerable to crime, but in each of them I see a spark of hope, great spirit, and a will to survive. I see it even more in their children. We need a society with more open doors and less judgment. We need to start as early as possible with the children, encouraging them to make friends with others who are not like them, and share their toys. We need to make society a place that is safe to play on the streets, and to be curious about learning. At every stage in life there needs to be place, a door to walk through where there is opportunity for growth and change for the better. It is true that some individuals make bad choices that lead them to where they are, but then again, we need a society with more good choices.

I see many parallels between racism and misogyny. Women are told that they won’t get raped if they don’t dress too sexy, and blacks are told by the likes of Bill Cosby and others, that if they just dressed right and spoke proper English they wouldn’t be oppressed by racism. That is simply not true. The most fastidiously dressed, well educated, and well behaved black people still experience racism. Moreover, they are often afraid to speak out, or reach out and lend a hand to other black people who are struggling, because they feel their own positions are tenuous and highly dependent on the beneficence of white people. That is not true freedom.

Black people need and depend on leadership from everyone in the struggle for a more just society. They have become America’s scapegoats and bogeymen. They are randomly chosen as demonstration dummies for legalized murder, as if to say “let me demonstrate my power and authority on this life that doesn’t count. If you step out of line it will happen to you too.”

Tribute to Gabriel from Desiree Goodwin on Vimeo.