“Americans have long been trained to see the deficiencies of people rather than policy. It’s a pretty easy mistake to make: People are in our faces. Policies are distant. We are particularly poor at seeing the policies lurking behind the struggles of people.”
― Ibram X. Kendi

Throughout history and all over the world, the “other” has been oppressed to serve and advance power for the majority culture. The United States, of course, is no different having our very foundation built on the elimination of indigenous people and then on the backs of slaves. We were also escaping religious persecution by fundamentalists and trying to implement a never-seen-before type of democratic Republic.

It was and still is a grand experiment and continues to be one of the greatest lands of opportunity the world has ever seen.

But like any experiment, we have to be willing to talk about our sullied history so we don’t repeat our mistakes.

I have no doubt that reservations (for indigenous people) and slavery and interment camps and segregation seemed good and moral and even necessary to those who silently allowed them to happen.

After all, those groups of people were dehumanized and painted as dangerous. Even the Bible includes many stories of God-ordered ethnic cleansing through genocide, told women to be silent (lest they disturb the peace), and ordered servants to be obedient to their masters.

Today, dehumanization is still a major political tactic used by all sides. I love how Brené Brown’s work explains this. And as Ibram X. Kendi demonstrates in Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, this is how racism persists both in policy and the subtle implicit biases we have today:

“Already, the American mind was accomplishing that indispensable intellectual activity of someone consumed with racist ideas: individualizing White negativity and generalizing Black negativity. Negative behavior by any Black person became proof of what was wrong with Black people, while negative behavior by any White person only proved what was wrong with that person.”

We see this played out when conservative pundits like Candace Owens use stats that claim 6% of the population (black men) is committing 50% of the total murders in the country as a way to paint black men as dangerous and deserving of the brutality they face by police. (To be clear, this stat is highly inaccurate – check out this video explaining why.)

On the flip side, we tend to agree that the few overtly racist white supremacists – like the man clearly heard shouting “white power” at a recent Trump rally – do not represent the majority of white Americans.

Dehumanization lessens the perceived severity or even existence of a problem. It helps us ignore the stats about racial inequality related to police violence (source: Rutgers University’s School of Criminal Justice), the wealth gap (Source: FederalReserve.gov), and employment opportunities (U.S. Bureau of Labor).

However, I always hesitate to rely on stats without the stories. Like pulling verses from the Bible and using them to support a specific position, we can parse and parcel numbers to serve our own purposes.

For me, the most compelling evidence of inequality comes through the multitude of personal experiences I’ve heard from family, friends, and friends of friends.

They hail from different parts of the country, from different communities, various familial structures, varying socio-economic classes, and both sides of the aisle. And while I wholeheartedly think we should be listening to a variety of voices and stories, I do think we need to carefully consider what the overwhelming majority of black Americans – both conservatives and liberals, both evangelicals and non evangelicals – are sharing.

At this point, I’m not holding out for a silver bullet solution that will unify the country and solve all our issues. But, I do think we have to start with an agreement on the existence of the problem in the first place. Because, I also believe the majority of Americans think equality for all people is the ideal we should be holding ourselves up to as a country.

When we look back on this period in 10, 20, and 30 years, I wonder how this time will be viewed. And if this is the next phase of the Civil Rights movement (which I sincerely hope it is), we must ask ourselves, “What side of history do we want to be on?”

[Photo by Library of Congress on Unsplash]