America can’t “unfriend” racism
Justified outrage to unjustified prejudice. Ahmaud Arbery, Christian Cooper, and George Floyd. Their stories, their fates have flooded my headspace in the last two weeks. Cooper’s fate could have been no different than the latter, and it’s a reminder of why it hurts — racism has always been America’s virus long before COVID-19 entered the scene this year.
America can’t “unfriend” racism. Its inception dates back more than 400 years ago when Africans washed onto North American shores from a fleet of slave ships. It would be until 1865 that slavery was abolished in America, but racism continues to be a stubborn stain that cannot be washed out from our fabric.
Racism is not tangible. Jim Crow, war on drugs, and mass incarceration are to name a few reminders for me as to why America can’t undo racism. It is not a person we can only “unfriend” on Facebook or a group we publicly denounce. Some of us fight, others force it out of sight or mind, but racism is a chronic pain we can no longer tough out.
Four years ago, racism felt like a distant memory with Obama as our first Black president. That’s why it may feel hard for many of us to process our emotions regarding what we are seeing in front of us. When it feels like we’ve won, racism goes into remission, mutating into something invisible to the eye until it jerks us from our reverie.
