Originally written on June 1, 2020/ Artwork by Shirien Damra
With liberty and justice for all! Americans know this phrase by heart… it’s the last line of our pledge of allegiance. As an elementary school student, my classmates and I would start every school day by standing up, putting our right hand over our heart, and reciting a promise of allegiance to our country. This might sound surprising or strange to people outside the U.S., but we really never gave it much thought. But I’ve been thinking a lot over the years about this promise– liberty and justice for all. Because as we keep seeing, there just isn’t liberty and justice for all in America. If there was justice for all, then George Floyd would still be alive.
Many Americans learn about this inequality but when and how we learn is still largely based on the color of our skin. Reality is often revealed far sooner to black, brown, and indigenous children than to white children. When I eventually learned about racism and inequality, it wasn’t because I personally experienced or witnessed it as black, brown or indigenous kids do. In fact when I was a kid I’m sure I wasn’t aware that racism was even a contemporary issue at all, and one of the reasons was that my school had so few minority students. Though America is commonly known as “the melting pot” to people around the world, many would be surprised to find out how segregated our neighborhoods and school districts really are today.
When I was my son’s age now, racism had been presented to me in mostly past tense terms, as something that had mostly disappeared because people got better in understanding that racism is wrong. Take, for example, the narrative on America’s original sin– slavery. In elementary school I learned about the “Middle Passage” as the transport of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic Ocean to North America. But perhaps to save us from the gruesome reality of Africans being ripped from their homes, sold as property, and forced into hard labor without rights, we focused a lot more on the good guys, the abolitionists, and of course the biggest hero in the slavery story, President Abraham Lincoln, who wasn’t an abolitionist himself but who understood that slavery was morally wrong. And rather than understand the causes or roots of slavery, we focused on the end result– that slavery was the main reason we fought our Civil War, and because the good guys won and Lincoln was finally able to deliver his Emancipation Proclamation, slavery in the U.S. ended with the 13th amendment and paved the way for reconciliation and healing…
Except of course that it didn’t. And imagine our surprise to learn that whole parts of the history of slavery were never told. Like the fact that slavery was actually sanctioned by the highest law in the land, the U.S. Constitution. And the man hailed as the father of our country, President George Washington, owned over 100 slaves and managed hundreds more on his estate. And that President Thomas Jefferson who wrote about peoples’ inalienable right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” had owned over 600 slaves. If we understand the enslavement of black people to be immoral and despicable, then how can such facts be such small footnotes to the legacies of these much-admired men? Well, I now understand that it’s because they were white men. We look at the faults of white men differently than we do others, and especially black men. We will often overlook or forgive the wrongdoings committed by a white man while coming to a swift condemnation of the same misconduct committed by a black man. If George Floyd was white, we know there’s far less chance, if any chance at all, that he would have been pinned down on the ground by the neck as he was. A white George Floyd would still be alive. Similarly, a white Ahmaud Arbery would still be alive too, as well as a white Breonna Taylor.
The fact is, because I am a white male, I have always had advantages and privileges in my life. I could write a long list of these, but it would still be incomplete because I have advantages I’m sure I’m not even aware of. Suffice it to say, I wouldn’t be the one in a public park who someone called 911 for, believing I looked suspicious and threatening. I wouldn’t be the one killed after being arrested because I was speeding, or because I was trying to get help. As a white person, I’ve had one of the privileges that so many black, brown and indigenous people will often not have– the benefit of the doubt.
Acknowledging that I have advantages and privileges as a white person is a start. And there’s something I’d encourage everyone to do– take the Implicit Association Test (IAT) about race. Most of us don’t think of ourselves as racist or prejudiced, but we all have blind spots called implicit biases– the thoughts and feelings we have about people that we may not even realize we have. The whole point of the assessment is to not to shame or label you but rather help you become aware that you may have blind spots like, for example, associating black people with more negative than positive words. Ultimately there are biases among all races, but it’s important to understand that we tend to favor the group we belong to and when we do so, we may misinterpret a particular situation or even a facial expression as a threat when in fact it isn’t.
For now, I just want to end by saying that I’m not ok about what is happening in my homeland right now. Being far away doesn’t make me feel any less pain for what happened to George Floyd, to his family, to the Black community, to the country. I grieve with those who are grieving. I pray for everyone’s safety and pray that the violence ends immediately. I hope our voices can be heard and our actions can be just and kind. I implore each of us to say STOP when we hear, read or see racism or hate of any kind! And although it’s so difficult to imagine coming true, I pray for no more hashtags in memory of someone whose life was robbed from them.