Racial Injustice Must End

Two practical ways to end it

When Will Racial Injustice End

-and where does it begin?

Racial injustice in our country began on the slave ships sailing into harbors along the east coast of the United States. From that moment until the present day, African Americans have had to fight. They had to fight for the right to vote in the deep south, where bully tactics would keep them from the polls. They had to fight to get a good education where the Jim Crow laws kept their facilities separate and unequal. They had to fight for respect when a teenaged white kid would call a grown black man “Boy” in the sharecropper’s field.

They have put up with a justice system that offers a network of punishment and no level of justice. They have had to put up with lynching of their husbands, children, and wives, for any reason, or no reason at all. Every moment they had to fear the thought of looking a white person in the eye because they could be swinging from an oak tree at midnight for doing so.

It’s utterly infuriating.

So what do we do now?

Here we are in 2020, and yet another innocent black man has been murdered for the cause of nothing. They have had enough. The anger seething across this country is the cry of people who are fed up with this. The arrest and indictment of the cop who committed the latest murder will not be enough. That is just a Band-Aid of a system fundamentally flawed.

No longer will they tolerate a system that is designed for them to fail.

So, I ask again, what do we do now?

1. The Education of our Youth

Racism and a racist system are not matters of law; they are matters of the heart. The hearts of men are molded in their youth. It is cemented into their foundation when they are children. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 offered more federal protection for the civil rights of private citizens, but it did not change the heart of the American Caste System that left them on the bottom.

Schools need to start now to develop plans to teach the truth of our racist system. They need to learn most in the northern Union Army of the Civil War were still racists. That they mocked the president for whom they fought. They need to learn that lynching was common practice in the south.

Children must know that even though blacks gained the right to vote through the 15th Amendment on paper, in reality, daring to register could and “most likely would” cost them their lives. They need to learn about racial profiling, the true origins of suburbia, and the torment of black families who dared move into a white neighborhood.

Students across the country need to be taught this at the earliest age. They need to purpose in their heart to create a world that awards merit and character and refuses to allow melanin to dictate how far a man can go in life.

2. Police Training Needs to be Changed.

Allison Reinboth, a brilliant schoolteacher with keen insight into the situation, stated, “More oversight need to happen with how police are trained, how complaints are handled, and regular professional development. Furthermore, some implicit bias courses would be helpful. As a teacher, we have to do way more than cops to keep our credentials current and up to date.”

My husband is in military command, and before he could take this command, he had to go away for a two-week school to prepare for potential bias. They did psychological testing to see where bias lay in their subconscious. They spent time in groups discussing all of their findings before being placed in a position of leadership.

The US Military does not have the brutality among its ranks that our police force has in terms of racial profiling. The police force needs to implement the same into not only the police academy but into continual education and training. They need the same knowledge that our school children need about the truth of our racist history.

Allison also stated that we need more community policing, where police officers work in the community needs to happen as well as socialization within the community. Police need to have active roles in things like coaching youth teams and getting to know the human side of the communities they work in. If they see them as people, they are much less likely to shoot first ask questions later.

So, when you hear the roar of a people unheard across your television screen and computer, know that they need to do more than arrest the policeman in question. They need to see that the fundamental fabric of a society has failed to offer them justice has changed. They are broken and hurting. They mourn for their fathers and children. They want to ensure that their child will not be shot down in broad daylight for merely going for a jog.

They need justice, and a promise, that the rotten roots of our culture that has kept them in terror for almost 500 hundred years will be pulled and thrown in the fire never to emerge again.

The time is now. The battle has been waged. Justice must finally prevail.