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THE OTHER PANDEMIC

Extremists tend to get a disproportionate platform in a click-driven information economy. The noisier the hate, the more it draws attention and commentary, as a magnet attracts metal shavings. This can obscure how marginal the viewpoint might be.

It’s long seemed to me that most Americans don’t embrace racism as a philosophy. Indeed, you’ll find that a great many people who utter horrifically intolerant sentiments would never consider themselves to be racists.

But racism is everywhere, permeating everything. It doesn’t need to be inculcated as a set of explicit principles because it is in the very air we breathe. It is like a pathogen, its tiny, insidious droplets relentlessly permeating the tissues of the culture. No mask can keep it out. We breathe it in, unwitting, and breathe it out, unthinking.

We grow up with these mephitic winds blowing through us. Policies and exclusions and strategies so vast as to be invisible. Glances and winks and inflections so small as to be invisible. Droplets.

Some people saunter through this toxic environment without concern, declaring the racial pandemic to be a hoax. A great many others know it exists but think they couldn’t possibly catch it from their families and close friends. Others think they’re just immune.

A country star puking up vile racist epithets while “having fun” is one of those zeitgeist moments, in this post-Trump, QAnon-crazy American twilight, that make declarations easy. “Don’t use the N-word in public” is a low bar but one that’s pretty straightforward to set.

But our takeaway from all this can’t just be a renewed commitment to not saying the quiet part out loud. Not when scores of innocent Black people keep getting killed by cops—while violent white racists are escorted gently down the Capitol steps or given a pass to go on vacation in Mexico. Not when unrepentant white supremacists run amok in government. Not when the cultural gatekeepers making anodyne statements about the perils of intolerance are still mostly white.

The insane double standards that the endless pandemic of racism has enforced are out in the open. The reckoning, the real conversation we so desperately need to have is the only treatment.

There’s no vaccine and we’re all in some way infected, debilitated, destroyed by this miasma. The only possible antibiotic? Real dialogue, which will be painful and which every cell in our systems is inclined to resist, and a rigorous dismantling of the laws, rules, systems and conventions that recirculate that poisoned air.

This isn’t about what we yell in the street. This is about what’s whispered in our ears, nonstop.

Illustrations by Gabby K from Pexels

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