No Place To Hide

We keep looking for places to hide. But, racism seems to always find us. It is everywhere.

We no longer have to sit at the feet of our aged relatives or review sepia-tinted photos of days gone by to understand the pain of color-based evil. All you need is a Facebook account, a smartphone, or a television. State-sanctioned wrongdoing is routine and now recorded.

Let’s call these police-involved shootings exactly what they are. Murders. And for every one of us killed, there are many more dismissed, demoted, disrespected, disenfranchised, distrusted, denied, demeaned, disliked, and discredited simply because we inhabit a darker hue.

I want to start at the beginning. Like any decent investigator, let’s go back to the scene of the crime. The shores of America are where millions of Africans first sampled the bitterness of racism as they stepped in shackles from the hulls of the slave ships used to ferry them across the Atlantic from West Africa. These were the ancestors who defied the agonizing odds by refusing to die during the Middle Passage, surrounded by scared, hungry, sick men, women, and children who were being hauled from their homes without their permission.

Imagine their fear. The trauma they suffered. And, this was merely the meet-and-greet.

There’s a phenomenon called Intergenerational trauma. It is explained as “the transmission of historical oppression and its negative consequences across generations.” Studies have discovered its presence among Holocaust survivors and indigenous peoples in Canada.

It seems to me that we are prime candidates for a similar understanding. Certainly, there is more than ample evidence. But, oddly enough, when we dare raise the specter of the incalculable generational damage of racism, we are “playing the race card.”

Let us not despair. There is an upside to this malady. The experts say intergenerational trauma can also cultivate a superhero/superheroine resilience. And, that, my brothers and sisters, is where we can make our mark.

In the backwash of two police involved killings in 48 hours, we are legitimately grieved…again. We are emoting privately and publicly. But, we can and must do more.

Flip the script on that trauma all while wearing your cape. Reach out in your community and build relationships that strengthen the whole of us. We already see that we cannot hide from racism because it always finds us: in our neighborhoods, driving our taxpayer-funded highways, standing in public places minding our own business, praising our God in our churches, just breathing. But, when it does come looking for us, let it find a people unmoved by terror, united by resilience, and unanimous in purpose.