The Wound We Dare Not Heal

Cornyn’s most heated exchange was with Vanita Gupta, a former Department of Justice official for during the Obama administration.

“Do you believe that, basically, all Americans are racist?” he asked Gupta.

“We all have implicit bias and racial bias, yes I do,” she said, to which Cornyn responded with “Wow.”

“And I think that we are an amazing country that strives to be better every single day,” she added. “It’s why I went into government to make a more perfect union.”

“You lost me when you … took the acts of a few misguided, perhaps malicious individuals, and ascribed that to all Americans, not just our 800,000 police officers, our 18,000 police departments,” Cornyn said.

Later, U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris, a California Democrat, alluded to Cornyn in the hearing.

“I was disheartened to hear our colleagues suggest that when we discuss the fact of systemic racism, we are accusing people within the system and all people within the system of being racist,” she said. “That kills the conversation, and it actually insults the intelligence of the American people. It is an extreme and simplistic attempt to reject the seriousness of this issue.”

“Let’s not fall in a trap of simplifying this in a way that then we don’t address the real issue,” she added. “And so I encourage our colleagues to not fall into these simplistic traps that are really about suggesting … if we have to reform the system it’s because we’re calling everyone racist.”

Actually, the fact that we all see people in terms of color is decided evidence that we all have racial bias.  We're taught to see people as members of a "race," even if we are taught at the same time that "race doesn't matter." If it doesn't matter, why do we identify it?

As for the idea that we have "a few misguied, perhaps malicious individuals" in America, I refer to Mr. Chris Rock who pointed out no white person wanted to trade places with him, and he's black.  "Systemic racism" is pernicious not in the fact it leads to police kneeling on the necks of black men alone, but in the fact it leads us to look at skin color and facial features and define them as "racial," as we are taught to do, and then to classify those people, at all.  More pernicious than classification of people by nationality or location, is the classification by race, because as xenophobic as it is to consider "foreigners" as NOK, how much worse is it to classify people, without thinking, without being aware of it except at the same level where we learned to walk and talk and now think no more about how we do those things, to determine at a glance what "race" you are?

Let's not fall in a trap of simplifying this issue.  Not one bit, not at all.  We are racists.  That's our original sin.  That's our hidden wound.  We have to expose it, if we're ever going to heal it.