MY STORY
Here are a few examples in my own life:
Yesterday I had an incident shopping being a person of color. Briefly stated I was shopping while being a person of color. I was not followed around by one person, but by three. They were so obvious, they looked foolish. When I came home, I gave it a second thought and said whatever to these ignorant people.
Then I attempted to distract myself with a bit of YouTube entertainment scanning for music, upcoming movies, anything to remove my disgust. Google recommended some segments. I bit. It was about what if, but they were not about what if--these segments unbeknown to me were about racism. Instead of turning it off, I continued to look. One was for fifteen minutes, the other an hour. The reason I stayed with it was because I just wanted to feel good afterwards. I was hoping for positive outcomes that did not occur.
I logged off, ate a few vegetables and off to bed I went. I woke about 6am. Five minutes later, I began to think about what happened to me in the store. I felt my mood change. A mixture of unrest, anger, agitation and depression settled over me. My mind traveled back to my first encounter of living being a person of color. I went to 1979. My memory displayed pictures as though I was fanning quickly through a magazine. A new feeling developed.
Hopelessness.
First 1979 and now 2018. When will it ever end? I went to a diversity meeting a few hours later, sat silently for an hour and concluded that I was a spectator in a bureaucratic Pow Wow leading to nowhere. My mind recalled the words of the late Ruby Dee when she attended a similar meeting of change around 2007. Her words still resonate with me: she firmly spoke, “I keep coming to these meetings. What is my assignment? What is my assignment?" she never gets an answer.
I can only hope that this world will develop love because the vocabulary of diversity and tolerance, the latest jargon for the past ten years or so, is certainly not the answer.
The answer is something we have to bring out together, develop and then offer an assignment that solves these issues of racism.