We white people live in a beautiful world – the world where all lives matter and all men are created equal, the world where the justice system is just about as fair and balanced as Fox News, the world where the only thing we see with an ever-increasing eagerness is our own color-blindness.
But this world is nothing but our collective dream, the same dream that we so greedily devoured and so cheerfully co-opted from the non-violent Dr. King for our not-so-non-violent purposes, the same dream that stands between the world and Coates.
In that world there’s no room for the people whose only ‘sin’ and whose only shield is their black skin, for whom red, white and blue is not so much the color of the stars and stripes as it is of a police car lights. No room for ‘person’ in black personhood and ‘child’ in black childhood, there’s only enough room for the ‘hood’.
This is the world we built and have sustained for so long, the dream we have been so meticulously sugarcoating and whitewashing. Now it is our responsibility to dismantle it and to contribute to creating something that is as beautiful as the dreams we live. It is the time when we should feel outraged, and channel that feeling into a constructive force. It is the moment for us to wake up and start living a life that will make our beliefs a reality.
#TamirRice #BlackLivesMatter
