Opinion | Keith Magee: Guilty verdicts in Ahmaud Arbery murder trial are bandages on festering racial wounds. - NBCNewsTHINK
For nonwhite citizens like me, the toxic effects of others’ assumptions about us can literally shorten our lives, and not just through racist violence. When you are viewed with suspicion everywhere you go through no fault of your own, when you know that your country’s criminal justice system was actually designed to incarcerate as many people who look like you as possible, and when you are struggling against discrimination every day, you exist in a permanent state of hypervigilance.
If we are ever to end racial injustice and the countless injurious effects it spawns – including hate crimes like the one that stole Arbery’s life – we must examine where harmful assumptions about Black and brown people come from and then overturn them.
Positive change is possible, but we won’t achieve it just by exposing the darkness in our past and present. As a nation, in addition to stripping our justice and electoral systems of structural racism and creating equal access to opportunity for every person in America, we also need to begin the process of dismantling race altogether so we can move forward.
It will not be an easy task, but all of us who care about making America more equitable must be willing to put in the work. And it will take more than refusing to elect lawmakers determined to infringe on the voting rights of Black and brown people, challenging a loved one’s racist comments at the holiday dinner table or carefully curating our friendship groups to make them more diverse.
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