By In 2020 a virus swept across the Earth
it wasn’t novel
it wasn’t an accident
it put a lot of people in hospitals
but not quite in the way you think
it wasn’t Trump’s fault
it didn’t come from China
it came from a land called “Academia”
when the progeny of a long line of post modernists
stuck a pitchfork into the grave of Marxism
and lightning struck
just our luck
it crawled up out of its resting place
and immediately turned its mutated, murderous eyes on race
this resuscitated cancer began dismantling humanity
disrupting progress
and deconstructing everything it could find
see, this virus
infected minds
it was so insidious
that it took good people and twisted them to its purpose
it took every gesture, every greeting, every glance and insisted that we interpret them in the most hideous way possible
it was all the buzz
it taught that character didn’t count
but that melanin does
it coerced allegiance
to a new religion
where we are created in the image of grievance
original sin is your race
but there’s no grace
no salvation, no savior
it urged the congregation to execute justice now
because there’s no God to do it later
its prophets profited greatly
any apostates who wouldn’t bear false witness
were berated from a preset potpourri of platitudes
you know them well, I’ll spare you
it championed misanthropy
and rebranded any manner of critique as “fragility”
it reinvented the word racism
lest it be condemned by its own rhetoric
this infection
stigmatized freedom
it claimed that there’s no correct way to look at the world
but certainly
the correct way of looking at the world is that all white people are evil
the irony of subjective certainty
the gall of solving systemic racism by being systemically racist
some called themselves anti-racist and tried to escape it
but by definition, they couldn’t
and by deposition, they wouldn’t
it taught that 2+2 is…
just a hegemonic discourse
along with individuality, self-reliance, logic, and science
and made a mockery of hard work, family,
planning for the future, and private property
it flipped a narrative as easily as a coin
heads I win, tails you lose
guilty until proven guilty
it taught that both speech and silence were violence
both resistance and admittance were violations
what were we to make of
a theory so critical that every smile must be scrutinized
a theory so cynical that every conversation must be euthanized
every handshake must harbor hostility
how would this increase the probability of peace?
perhaps peace wasn’t the point
if white people can’t shed their whiteness
and whiteness is irredeemable and must be dismantled then
what exactly are you saying should happen to them?
this malady manufactured the masochism
necessary for the nihilism that it implored
it trumpeted tribalism
and required that we imbibe the only lie large enough to incite a global civil war
and to all of this
it didn’t have to answer
because shrewdly rooted into its nucleus was the tenet
that it can never be questioned
by rejecting introspection
it stressed the projection of evil onto something else
conveniently other than oneself
malevolence disguised as righteousness
it’s no more a mystery
this virus just
plagiarized every other sadly savage story in human history
–
it’s crazy
this far into this experiment of humankind
we’re still trying to figure out what kind of humans
we are
this skin…
while it’s great for regulating our body temperature
and protecting our insides from threats on our outsides
it was never meant to define us
all the sweat glands and blood vessels and nerve endings in the world
can’t hold a candle to one soul
superimposing a superficial coating on divinity
is like stuffing infinity into a shoebox
such a disservice
to find the line between good and evil you’re going to need to dig a lot deeper than the epidermis
whatever kind of humans we are
we are not mere avatars of our accumulated ancestry
we are not oppressed or oppressor
each one of us is a genetically and spiritually unique being
never before seen in the history of the world
each one of us is responsible exclusively for what we’ve done
and for what we become
my argument is not that no wrongs have ever been wrought
nor that we should ignore them
but some ideologies are wrong too
and it just doesn’t behoove us to absorb them
instead of forming our identities from the intersection of our oppressions
what if they were borne out of the intersection of our compassions?
I’m just asking
what if instead of presuming that “racism is present everywhere and always”
we presumed that graciousness is present everywhere and always
and did our part to make it so
what if instead of investing in new methods of systemic failure
we aimed for systemic amelioration
and instead of assessing collective blame we recognized individual worth
looking for the best in someone is so much better than looking for the worst
there’s a reason you’ve never shopped for a box of 64 same colors
we are beautiful, diverse
sticks of pigmented wax
begging to make masterpieces
that
is the significance of what we learn when
instead of scrutinizing smiles, we return them
my argument is not that racism doesn’t exist
but that truth does
I’ve learned truth from black men and black women
and from West Europeans and East Indians and North Canadians and South Africans
and from every letter of the acronym
because truth is independent from the minds that decipher it
and the lips that deliver it
we must be willing to live for it
we must remain liberal enough to conserve the rights of free speech, free ideas, and freedom to criticize those ideas in the pursuit of progress, equality, justice, mercy, and goodness
as the human race
we need to understand how much we really have to lose
the good news about THIS pandemic is that
we know the cause
and we know the cure
we just have to choose
