This is Personal

The past year in particular has brought a reckoning in this country on the issue of race and specifically the many layers of explicit, implicit, and structural racism visited upon our Black brothers and sisters throughout this nation's history and into the present.  There are now scarcely any people or spaces that are not sensitized to matters of justice and diversity.

With that has come a proliferation of conversations and initiatives to address matter of inequity and lift up our Black brethren.  Which is wonderful, but as you might imagine, also fraught.  Because, befitting the disparities that are endemic to this topic, there is a wide gap in how close these topics hit for different people.  

Many of us have the luxury of approaching racism as a matter of intellectual discourse, a social issue to take up the banner of when we feel moved to, even a point of pride that we are more aware than we once were or more aware than those "others" who we revel in positively comparing ourselves to.  

Yet for people who directly bear the trauma of present racial violence, who feel the weight of 400 years of oppression and see clearly how its effects permeate every interaction and institution to this day, this is not some salon.  It's personal, deeply so.  Every troubling video, every damning example, every micro-aggression cuts all the way through.  It hurts.  And it stings that others don't feel or even acknowledge that hurt, or can opt in and out when expedient.

In the era of COVID, it is infuriating for folks who have been adversely affected by this deadly disease - people who have lost loved ones, who have compromised immunities and need to take extra precautions, who have seen their livelihoods and mental wellbeing devastated by this ongoing pandemic - to watch people in their midst downplay the crisis, cheerily talk about silver linings, or get too philosophical or intellectual about the topic.  

This is how race and racism works too.  When an issue permeates every breath we take, when it hurts all over and there's no end in sight, when the pain is not theoretical but real and near, it is disrespectful to hear others pontificate from a place of shelter and privilege.  These matters are deeply personal matters to some, which means it should be personal to us all.  And when we act like it isn't, it is enraging for those of us for whom it is deeply personal.