Ohiro Oni-Eseleh
Anyone who knows me well can attest that racism has never been at the fore of my discussions. That is because it has never even been at the fore of my thoughts. Although I had some unforgettable traumatic experiences with racism during the years that I lived in England, I still managed to maintain a mindset that racism was probably not as rampant as it indeed was, and that merit and success could temper its impact. That may in fact be, but here’s the rub: the members of a church congregation who discriminate against fellow members on the basis of the skin color of the latter often already know the status of those people against whom they are racist. On the other hand, a police officer who stops a person of color for driving an expensive car and asks him questions that he would never ask a white driver is definitely racist, but he does so without even knowing the social or economic status of the person of color. In other words, the successes that a black person attains is never a panacea against racism and never mitigates the emotional impact of racism on the victim.
Over the last few weeks, the United States has found itself in a state of reckoning, and so has much of the Western world. To the myopic, the protests occurring in many countries around the world are because a man, George Floyd, was murdered by policemen in Minneapolis. Well, I cannot fault that linear thought because, as humans, we often tend to make easy associations that help us to maintain our penchant for simplistic explanations to even complex matters. The only problem with the present situation is that the matters are not so complex, nor do they require us to make facile analysis. Instead, the matters and times just expect us to look in the mirror and tell the truth about what we see.
The simple question that we should ask is: If Mr. Floyd was not a famous man, why does the world care that he was killed by criminal police officers? But, what if we followed that with another logical question, which is: how is it that a system exists that allows anyone in authority to take the life of another in full view of the public even when he knows that he is being videotaped? I submit that such a system is as corrupt as any that has ever held freeborn people in chains in every country in this world just because they can. It is a system that encourages us to maintain the illusion that we are free when the free are only those who are privileged not because they contribute more to society, but because their socioeconomic status and pigmentation make them so.
To those who wonder why we now see young people of all racial backgrounds protesting together around the world, the focus should be on the lessons that they are teaching us. We are watching young people who have decided that they do not wish to live in the corrupt and tainted world of their parents; a hypocritical world in which their friends and neighbors are oppressed and denied opportunities by people who look like them. These are young people who understand that humanity does not reside in skin color and would rather believe, as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. did, that people ought to be judged not by “the color of their skin but by the content of their character”. As we watch the protesters and also watch how major organizations and institutions in our country have suddenly begun to scramble to change policies that have kept people diminished in our society for too long, we all also need to learn very quickly that we are watching the future leaders of our society and world. Even as they do tell us of the changes that they are making, our organizations and institutions must also understand that the time for roughshod actions intended to save face will come to an end, however long that takes. Those who are proud to be obstacles to good will be remembered as cruel dinosaurs when the history of our time is written.
For too long, too many of us have been silent because they have been beneficiaries of privilege conferred on them by their race. At some point, our churches will have to explain to children of color why God loves them less than people of a different skin color. Perhaps, then, they will no longer wonder why young people raised in church no longer attend church. They will know that it is because those young people saw adult church goers support and uphold a racist system that oppressed their friends. We know from history that the silence of the majority has led to the deaths of millions in our world. That continues to be the case while most of us stand on the sidelines of history. Each of us must now take a stand and choose whether we wish to be the allies of the oppressed or stand with the silent majority, In every situation of (and battle against) social injustice that has ever confronted the human conscience, even silence has always been an indication of where anyone stood. So it is now.