Watch this and take to your knees

I watched a YouTube video Sunday morning that I want you to watch before reading on. Search for "Brandon Brackins" on YouTube to find it. It happened in a small town in Ohio.

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We who are white may well now be thinking, Wow! It’s just awful what some idiot inflicted on that black FedEx driver. I really feel sorry for Brandon. No one in their right mind would do that, and whoever did it ought to be thrown in jail. I have never done anything like that and sure as heck never would.

Well, okay. But if that’s where our thinking stops, we are not thinking hard enough.

As a white person it is easy for me to see racism’s most obvious manifestations, and to excuse myself from being complicit in them: I do not say and do racist things, so I am not racist. So long as my thinking about racism stops with individual words and acts, I have not truly confronted racism in myself and in our society.

Americans are born into racism. It is like the air we breathe, all around us, largely invisible, and easy to ignore until something in it brings it to our awareness. 401 years of slavery and the denial of humanity by white society over black society is a condition we cannot escape just by wishing it away or pretending we are not part of it.

That is why we who are white in America must recognize and commit ourselves to dismantling the pervasive systemic and institutional racism that pollutes our political, social, economic, and religious life. Doing that will not be easy, and it will cost us something, maybe a lot, to do it. But we really have no choice, because the air of racial hatred and oppression is filthy and it is killing us all.

Drill down on Brandon Brackins’s fear, anger, rage, and near paralysis. Multiply it many times over. Expand it to a larger picture of whole “categories” of people subjected to unrelenting and persistent denial of the right to be human, generation after generation, by another “category” of people. Then, one day, something happens that wakes up those who have been denied so much for so long. Something comes just a little too close to in fact killing them perhaps, and they break out of the paralysis racism hopes will keep them forever enslaved and they are no longer afraid, but angry and enraged.

Is that so hard to imagine?

Now, maybe, I understand what’s continuing to take place on America’s streets since George Floyd’s death, and, tragically, hundreds of times before it. Perhaps I understand why simply claiming that I am not racist is neither true nor sufficient for this moment. Surely I can do something about it, beginning with doing something about myself, perhaps by being, at last, honest.

Maybe I start—maybe we all start—by taking to our knees, some to protest, some to confess, but most of us to do both.