Can we keep it all the way real?
Racism in America will never end.
This isn't pessimism. It's deeply ingrained in the very fiber of our country. Removing racism from America would be like baking a chocolate cake and later deciding you want to unbake it to get your eggs, milk, sugar, chocolate and flour back in their original form.
While racism will never end here, we can at least chip away at its symptoms.
Slavery was a gross symptom of American racism. The Emancipation Proclamation didn't end the heart condition of slavery, but it did end a sick symptom.
Jim Crow laws and lynchings were horrendous symptoms of American racism. The Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act chipped away at these symptoms, but that legislation didn't end racism. It simply ended a few of its essential outlets.
Today, racism has shape-shifted. African Americans are still called niggers and threatened to be hung from a tree, police officers in at least seven states, including respected captains, have been caught calling African Americans niggers and monkeys and apes, and racist white men with guns are walking into black churches and killing people, but the main outlet for American racism may be the deep inequities in our so-called justice system where young black men like Kalief Browder are locked up for years and years without ever being charged, then unceremoniously released. And in Kalief's case, only to commit suicide in the wake of it all.
When over 95% of elected prosecutors are white, and some, like DA Dale Cox of Shreveport, Louisiana, are stone cold racists, we have a long way to go.
To be clear, no single vote, no single action, no single piece of legislation could ever end American racism, but today we chipped away at it a little bit. Today, by bringing down the Confederate flag from the state grounds of the South Carolina capitol, racism didn't end, but it was just made a little more difficult and a little less celebrated.
Never should a single penny of tax payer dollars be spent on anything related to the Confederate flag. It's sad and disturbing that it took the loss of nine beautiful souls in Charleston for a lot of Americans to get to where we are today, but here we are nonetheless.
May today be the spark, the start of a movement, to do more than our nation has in decades to end modern day racism.