“I Know It Sounds Prejudiced…”

The professor asked us to describe what we’d just heard.

“A lynching,” was the calm reply from the black gentleman sitting next to me.

I had heard the word “lynching” associated with cowboys before. I didn’t know it had to do with black people. I didn’t know this ever happened. But he knew it. I’d never been told this hellish and inconvenient chapter of American history, but he had. I was the well-read, articulate homeschooler who’d been educated with good old fashioned textbooks from the 1930s, and I was totally ignorant. I had nothing to say.

I went home shaking with horror. I couldn’t tell my parents what I’d learned in school that day. Charismatics didn’t talk about things like that. I asked if I could withdraw from the course– I was still a minor, and needed a parent’s signature to withdraw. They said they didn’t want me to be a quitter.

The shock hasn’t exactly gone away, yet, all these years later. To live in a country where people are willing to pay good money for textbooks that use phrases like “Aryan races” because they’re “traditional” and will provide a good old-fashioned rigorous education; where people drive out of their way to avoid malls with unemployed people of a certain skin color lurking inside. To exist in a culture that could do that to a fellow human being, so frequently that it had a name which my classmate readily supplied from memory, and to be told that that era of history had nothing in it more unjust than having to sit at the back of the bus. To have all of this excused by the use of the phrase, “I know it sounds prejudiced, but it’s not.”

When I hear white people furious with black people who protest against racism, asking what more they could possibly want now that we ride the buses together and have a black president, I assume that they had the same terrible education I did, and then somehow skipped the American literature courses in college. I assume they’re ignorant rather than malicious. When they protest that “Black Lives Matter” is a slogan that sounds prejudiced to them, because all lives are supposed to matter, I usually assume their concern is genuine even if I disagree.

Except lately. Lately, with all the killings in the news, one after the other so that the victims’ names run together. At first, I could accept they were just being cautious, just trying to see both sides to the story. This victim was fleeing the police (when he was shot in the back). That victim had a record. Maybe they thought the gun was real. Maybe the witnesses lied. Maybe if they’d learn to respect the police. Again and again, I hear excuses. But after awhile, it stops making sense. These shootings keep happening, over and over again, and the only common denominator is that the victim is black.

You can’t claim simple ignorance, of something you see happening right in front of you, day after day. This isn’t a case of history nobody told you about because you read the wrong books. It’s happening right now. You have to deliberately look away to not see it.

Black lives do matter.

I know that sounds prejudiced, but it’s not.