I know you aren’t a racist but we are still dying
Second Lieutenant Richard Collins III was a gift to his community and his country. As a country we’ll never reap the benefit of all that was invested this national servant. His life was cut short. His potential snuffed out by a white supremacist two days before his college graduation. He didn’t walk across the stage into adulthood and all that awaited a young man with his talent. Instead, Lt. Collins’ father walked the stage to accept the diploma for a son he would bury a few days later.
What Lt. Collins might have become no longer matters. His death is a return on our national investment in racial hatred. He is dead because he was black. And in America, even in 2017, being black remains a death sentence. Death is certain for all humans but black people in America live subject to the whimsy of white supremacy. Our executions may be a slow process, inflicted by racially discriminatory government policies. Or they may be random and instantaneous, like the execution of Lt. Collins by a knife-wielding member of the Alt-Reich: Nation.
It is clear that some form of instability plagues murderers in situations like this. But mental instability doesn’t excuse Lt. Collins’ attacker from culpability. The rest of us aren’t excused either. We as a country must ask why racial hatred is so easily weaponized by the mentally fragile. Racism isn’t an emotional conviction fabricated out of thin air. Racism is a reality. Evidence of racial division permeates our history beginning with slavery and flows through to present day issues like immigration and mass incarceration. The hatred that metastasized in the mind and heart of Lt. Collins’ assailant originated in our national story.
I know plenty of self-declared ‘non-racists’ who proclaim their innocence every time the details of a new, racially motivated killing emerges. “I would never use that word,” they say. “We’re all the same,” they declare. “I don’t even see color.” They offer these statements to prove their goodness in the face of racial violence. But when we are a country struggling to overcome such an ugly, violent, racist legacy can passive innocence be an honorable defense? The spirit that propagated slavery and perpetuated Jim Crow is alive and well and producing racist killers. How can simply declaring yourself “not a racist” be considered helpful at all?
The life of Lt. Collins cries out for justice but also for community accountability. He was killed by the hate we wade in everyday. The question isn’t whether you’re a racist. The question is really about whether you’re a part of the team trying to beat the demon of racism to death in the American story. The question is about what you will do the next time someone in your neighborhood, workplace or family picks up the very present tool of racial hatred to tell a joke or make an assumption about “those people.” There isn’t a way to remain neutral in this battle between good and evil. There just isn’t.
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