When I was a child...

[TygrBright]

20. Solly, thank you for sharing your experience and feelings.

The ONLY way we're going to kick racism out of our culture is by not just fighting it in the courts and the economy and the institutional settings that perpetuate it, but by focusing on our common humanity and fighting against the denial of that humanity and the gradations of "less human".

I remember my stepfather telling me, back in the 1960s, that the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act would be "enough" to change racism in America. Because it's easier to change peoples' thinking by changing their behavior, than to change their behavior by changing their thinking. This is, to some degree, technically accurate, in that the legal and institutional fixes are actually easier. And they do have some slow effect in shaping behavior patterns which, yes, do somewhat influence some peoples' thinking to some degree.

But NO, it is not enough. It never has been. Until we consciously and passionately make EVERY human being fully human in the eyes of every other human, the inequity and the suffering this stupidity produces will continue.

Stories like yours are painful to read and I imagine it's painful for you to put it all in words for an audience of comparative strangers. But this is a human story of how denying the full humanity of a child affected a real person and a real family. That has a lot of power.

gratefully,
Bright