Ignorance is sometimes a lack of opportunity. We don’t have access to resources, including people and their lived experiences, to understand the width and depth of racism. I can understand that there might be such people, although in the connected world of today, I can’t accept that it is a frequent occurrence.
But in almost every case, our ignorance is deliberate and our culpability in our lack of understanding is a deliberate choice to avoid the hard truths of American racism, and to avoid the very hard work of breaking that.
That awareness and confession and breaking apply to our own individual selves, of course. It is such a common thing to recoil from such examination and restoration that a term is coined to describe it: “White Fragility.”
I can understand it, because I have used it myself. I’m ashamed of my own actions because I have successfully used it for five decades to defend myself from my own conscience.
Getting past that fragility is hard work. And it is not a one-time thing: “Today I have resolved to forever be anti-racist.” Maybe that is something that works for other heroic people who can bend their character to their will in a single moment, or even who have the will to do so. I haven’t experienced it.
Instead, we must daily take up the effort to acknowledge our flawed character that is formed to be tribal and patriarchal and race-supremacist, and then we must do the hard work, choice by choice.
Every day.
But it is worth it—really!—to walk in freedom each day. Having to choose anti-racist behaviors makes the moments where we are free that much sweeter.
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