Imagine a track race. The contestants are lined up, ready to give it their all. When the gun goes off, they take off running, except for the Black man; someone has put heavy weights on his ankles. He struggles to run as the others pull farther and farther ahead. As the other contestants reach the home stretch, a race official finally stops the race and points out that the Black man has been wrongly and unfairly handicapped. The race officials take the weights off the Black man’s ankles, pat themselves on the back for achieving equality, and prepare to resume the race. But the Black man has been held back for the entire race thus far, and he won’t be able to catch up to the other contestants before they cross the finish line. The right thing to do is to send everybody back to the starting line and begin again, but the other contestants protest angrily. They say they’ve worked hard to get this far, and it isn’t right to take that away from them – after all, everything is equal now, right? Doesn’t the Black man have the same opportunity to win as everyone else?
So it goes in the United States of America.
When the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified in 1920, giving (white) women the right to vote, it did not automatically dismantle well more than a century’s worth of policy designed by, and for the benefit of, men. Women would spend the next hundred years fighting and working to re-shape policy and culture to better include and serve them, as men complained loudly of the harm and injustice being done to them by women’s demands for “special treatment.” Women have made progress, but glass ceilings, closed doors, and inequities persist as men protect their privilege. This is because equality and justice are two very different things.
For American descendants of slavery, the multi-generational impacts of four hundred years of oppression, dehumanization, torture, humiliation, terrorizing, exploitation, mistreatment, discrimination, marginalization, incarceration, and murder at the hands of their fellow Americans can be seen in every aspect of society, culture, and government. Four centuries’ worth of policies and institutions designed and constructed to benefit white Americans have endured in spite of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments; Brown v. Board of Education; the Civil Rights Act; the Voting Rights Act; and the Fair Housing Act. In many ways, Black Americans still have weights on their ankles. In other ways, the weights have been removed, but Black Americans have been left behind by people who had a four-hundred-year head start.
Equality has made a lot of progress in the United States. Yet, like the metaphorical race contestants, those of us who haven’t been subjected to centuries of oppression tend to protest angrily when anyone suggests anything akin to returning to the starting line. We make it about us. Our interests. Our hard work. Our suffering. “All lives matter!” “No forced busing!” “Not in my backyard!” “What about me?” That any of us, white or otherwise, would see attempts to achieve justice as a threat to our own interests only further demonstrates the advantages we’ve enjoyed and to which we continue to cling. It reveals a fundamental ignorance, willful or not, of the dark history of the United States, the magnitude of its impact on Black Americans, and the fact that many Americans, even non-white Americans, benefit disproportionately from societal systems shaped by anti-Blackness.
Life is not a metaphor. Undoing the effects of four hundred years of oppression is a long, arduous process, and sending everyone back to the starting line is impossible. But we non-Black Americans can sure as heck stop getting in the way, stop obstructing, stop pushing back, stop preserving our privilege and self-interest at Black expense. We can support policy change, systemic change, and societal change in support of Black lives and interests. We can stop looking out only for ourselves and help justice happen. We can stop pretending that equality is enough.
Until we all make a conscious choice to support not just equality but justice as well, crossing the finish line will be a hollow victory.