Racism is like a disease or virus. Hatred festers quietly, incubating in some obscure
corner. And like measles or Ebola we
think we have the monster controlled, perhaps even vanquished, until another
outbreak reminds us that the sickness is still in our midst and always has
been.
The senseless murder of nine worshipers in an African
Methodist Episcopal Church by a young, white supremacist ideologue, Dylan Roof,
is a searing reminder that America’s history of racial violence is with us
still. The passing of time, the turning
of generations, has not been sufficient to contain the illness. Racial hate has not been quarantined to the
past – to the bad old days of Bull Connor or the KKK – but continues to infect
the minds and hearts of even the youngest.
Signs of progress, hopes that the sickness is abating (like
the election of an African American president seven years ago) are countered by
the clear evidence that microbes of malice continue to multiply. Indeed, when President Obama opened his White
House twitter account for the first time last month and sent a message of
goodwill to his countrymen and women, the response was a flood of race-baiting
vitriol. Not only is the disease still
active. It threatens to reach epidemic
proportions.
In these plague times, indifference is not enough. Pretending to be “color-blind” or insensitive
to racial disparities is not sufficient.
Treating Dylan Roof’s act of savagery as the isolated blunder of a
misguided young man will not do, any more than treating a single viral specimen
of rabies as an isolated organism will do.
It is a symptom and harbinger of a malady that will linger until its
moment comes to manifest in fevers of madness and destruction.
Like doctors without borders or the CDC, decent-minded
people must not only look inward to purge and protect themselves from this
illness. They must travel to the front
lines to combat the virus where it exists.
We must become vigilant in our pro-active resistance to racism to build
resistance in others. We must name and
turn the microscopes of media examination on this animal, exposing it as the
malevolent beast that it is. We must join in public outcry. For exposure to the light is like a powerful
antiseptic.
Why did the KKK ride at night? Why do the authors of malicious tweets cloak
themselves in anonymity? The germs cannot breed, except in darkness.
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