When I talk to people who have racist beliefs, I’m careful about the language I use. There are certain terms I will not use. I will not call them racist.
I’ll call an idea, a belief, a statement, a system, or an action, racist. But I will not call that person a racist. Because the instant that I do, they will not hear anything else that I say.
I won’t use the words critical race theory or systemic racism because they’ve probably heard those words countless times and have no idea what they mean. I find it much more productive to describe what they are and then name them later.
An example of this is if I hear someone say, why are we still talking about this? Slavery ended over 150 years ago. And then I’ll ask them, have you ever heard of black codes?
I’ll say, I actually learned recently that after black men and women were released from slave plantations, they had no jobs and they had no homes. And so the local governments made new laws called black codes specifically designed to arrest them.
They were things like no loitering and vagrancy laws that made it illegal to just be standing there in public. And if you have no home and you have no job, you have nothing, what else are you going to do?
They would go out and round up as many black people as they could find, and they put them in these penal camps, these penal farms that they built just for this purpose.
They would live at this penal facility, but then every day, they would be transported back to the slave plantation that they were just freed from.
Then over the years, these penal facilities changed their names to penitentiaries. So all of the state penitentiaries, that’s what they were built for. And these prisons still exist today, where inmates work for pennies an hour, if they get paid. They make things like McDonald’s uniforms and office furniture for government buildings.
The entire U. S. Prison system was designed for slavery, and on top of that, we have to pay taxes to support it.
This is what should be required curriculum in every American history class.
My goal isn’t to change someone’s mind right now. But to give them something to research and find out for themselves. If they do that, then they are likely to run into a lot of other oppressive systems that they didn’t know about. After that, they might be ready to have a conversation about systemic racism and critical race theory.