I’ve given thought lately to an unsettling reality, prompted by the upheaval after George Floyd, in light of the current efforts to restrict voting rights, and after having read Caste, a book by Isabel Wilkerson. It’s something that, for almost the entirety of my life, has never been a topic of conversation or accorded a bit of attention.
Lately, though, I’ve been thinking about it a lot, and it’s had the effect of casting everything in a different light.
My life has had its share of ups and downs, but in a relative way has been a pretty smooth ride because of the pigment of my epidermis. Like every other human being on earth, this is something I had no control over or choice in, yet I have enjoyed privileges that I’ve never treated or understood as privileges, most neither earned nor expressly deserved yet still taken for granted. Mere benefits of a collective, deeply rooted bias based on nothing more than the whiteness of my skin.
And, sadly, supported in part by a selective and unfortunate interpretation of scripture, along with successive generations of people who have embraced and perpetuated a gross, monstrous lie.
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