Racism: Takes Courage to Admit It('s Wrong)!

A REFLECTION

Racism, why did this such thing exist?

What drives people to believe that a certain community is much, much, gifted and blessed than others, and that this one particular community can pretty much "do anything" they want to?

Why do they exercise the practices of arrogance toward others?

What justifies their actions?

Why do certain people choose to serve other particular ones, only?

Why can’t people in charge serve to a bigger frame of society than just a single particular community?

The death of George Floyd (an unarmed Black, African American person who was killed by a white police officer in the US) has led to massive, and relatively violent, protests in several cities and states in the US. What happened to him is, arguably, a fatal mistake to the United States law enforcement system. It questions accountability and drains civilians’ trust in public institutions. But more than a legal issue, it is a blatant flaw of the American social system that seems to always allows racism to flourish within itself. It never dies, it never did, and pessimistically, it never will (unless the people themselves change!).

Learning mistakes, from the United States.

The United States has a long history of racism to people in color ever since its very birth. Toward the Black community alone, racism had never been abolished, even when the Thirteenth Amendment as the most crucial, fundamental milestone against racism in general, and to black people in specific, was issued.

Unawarely and intentionally, racism happens among people from "funny" daily jokes and normalized common practices around family and friends, to structural institutions products: decisions, regulations, policies—implying the presence of "others" as a group of people or community that are considered as subhuman, or even not equal to humans at all, does exist compared to how one’s practices of supremacy or domination over the "others" do.

What happened to George Floyd was a slap in the face to the practices of white supremacy in the US. The raising discussion is no longer a debate on how to serve justice to the case nor to properly punish the perpetrators, but rather "to get rid of the racism itself."

Evidently, theories are not enough (to wake people up).

There are a lot of different theories that can explain the birth and growth of racism, but none has ever really worked on practices in obviating it and causing it stays forever in our (history of) human civilization.

In the United States alone, the phrase ‘equality among men,’ that is explicitly written in the Constitution, was not able to embrace the true meaning of it—making it questioning the very meaning of the notion of equality and whose truth is used or experienced to challenge the prior existing definition and interpretation. Consequently, along the way, the notion of equality has to meet other or new standards and parameters in order to be able to fit into a broader context that can generally apply to universal values.

Perhaps, the long lived traditional definition and interpretation of ‘equality among men’ is what stays in the racist people's consciousness and unconsciousness realms, that leads them to (still) practice white supremacy in the United States, including in the George Floyd's case. But please do note that this case needs to be understood as a case that speaks for the greater good, which functions to highlight other racism cases that still happen and being preserved, all around the world—probably in your home; could be in my own backyard—and this needs to end now.

Even if we are all living in different cultures and traditions, racism has to come to our common sense, that: this is not right, this never was, and this never will be; and no theories can justify its practices as they can only function to explain.

(Picture Credit: Anti-Racism Education, City of Saskatoon; https://www.saskatoon.ca/community-culture-heritage/cultural-diversity/anti-racism-public-education)

How is it doing in your surroundings?

How is it doing with your own country & community?

Please be brave to speak when you notice one!

And have a courage to admit when you commit one!

-Alifa Salsabila, May 2020