For the simple reasons that I believed white people were more beautiful and intelligent, I wanted to be white until I was around 16 years old. I wanted white approval. I learned English and Spanish at the same time, but at certain points in my childhood I was embarrassed to speak the latter. Even as someone born and raised in Queens, one of the most diverse counties in the country, white supremacy had poisoned the synapses of my mind. We contort our bodies to fit nicely against the jagged geometry of society’s dominant values. Those values were loud and clear even when surrounded by other people of color. There is something deeply wrong about a society that makes a child feel that way, that their entire self is undesirable and lesser because of difference.
Most people do not consider themselves racists. That is an ugly word. That is a slur. Only southerners with confederate flags, KKK cardholders and Donald Trump are racists. But we live in a country where black students have their lives threatened on Yik Yak and Latinas get paid 55 cents to the white man’s dollar. We live in a country where a Supreme Court judge says students of color are being pushed into schools too advanced for them.
In the case of Antonin Scalia, he is a man who has been appointed to one of the most honorable and powerful positions this nation offers. He is a 79-year-old racist man who has been shaped by American racism. Not in the South, but in Elmhurst, Queens, the very neighborhood I was born in. Racism influences each and every one of us because we live in a country shaped by a violent and traumatic history of racism. Racism is not rooted in someone’s person. No one is born a racist. It is developed through socialization. But it is only through realizing our racism that we can eradicate it. Our collective racism, which is insidiously written into textbooks and law, and which is violently made visible through images of black victims of police violence, must be pulled out of our earth from it’s roots.
Only by getting to the root of an issue can we eradicate it. This can be seen in the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism: life is suffering, suffering is caused by desire, suffering will cease with the cessation of desire and putting an end to desire can be achieved by following the Buddha’s teachings. Suffering will only end through recognition of its cause. Not with bandages and certainly not with ignorance.
This is why I am an unabashed radical. Activist and writer Angela Davis said, “Radical simply means grasping things from the root.” That is what the word definitely means. Yet, we associate radicalism with extremism, fanaticism and “crazy”—these are all synonyms from Merriam-Webster. At some point, the word was poisoned and now everyone is too scared to take a bite. Most people don’t want to be associated with radicalism. And it makes sense because our society is reluctant to understand things from the root.
The roots of our society are not just problematic; they are violent, selfish and sad. Almost every day in or out of class, I learn about some aspect of our history and present that makes me nauseous. Government support for genocidal dictators, mass deportations of refugees, internment and segregation, slavery, sweatshops, all of the shootings in the past few years—these indisputable facts of our collective identity are so heartbreaking because there is no way to escape them. Of course we are so much more than that, but it is part of us too.
The shooting in San Bernardino was such an impossibly sad event to process because it seemed to be the latest in a string of similar acts of violence—most notably the shooting in Charleston and the attacks in Paris. Hearing about these deaths make the world seem so absolutely absurd. When this mass violence happens so often, we cannot assume that the people who commit these heartless crimes are just plain “crazy” anomalies. Psychological issues are certainly factors in these instances, but there has to be more to considering the frequency. I was not surprised to hear about the shooting in San Bernardino. I was shocked and deeply troubled, but not surprised. That is not OK. We should all be surprised when something so horribly inhuman happens. What this string of violence tells us is that there is something about our current state of affairs that is horribly alienating and uncompassionate.
We have to deal with that. We have to focus on increasing our compassion for others, and we have to stop glorifying any form of violence, either through fictional media or government propaganda. Love for each other is the only reason we should need to stop perpetuating violence and bigotry. Sadly, we do not live in that world. We live in a world where we need to rationalize compassion. We live in a world where we tell students they can’t be racist because it will not fly in corporate America. Well I am here to say that compassion is the rationale. It’s the bottom line; it’s the root of our humanity.
Donald Trump is from Queens too. When I was little I had this strange fear that my mother would be deported. She was a legal resident, and is now a proud citizen, but I was still scared because I didn’t really know how immigrant policy worked and I had heard stories. To hear him talking about deportation is scary and hurtful, but I know the problem is so much more than Trump. Strangely enough, he represents the most disgusting version of our culture in every possible way: gaudy materialism, greedy real estate development, bigotry, xenophobia, that unreal toupee and so much more. But Trump is leading the Republican polls. He is not an anomaly. If he does not win the candidacy, or the presidency, that doesn’t mean a damn thing. This country produced him, and it produced his supporters; his ideology is not separate from the dominant one, but a big part of it.
I appreciate bandages. I’ve had one on my hand for the past couple of weeks because my skin has been cracking, and I like to be protected. But I know that I need to moisturize, and put on gloves when the bandage comes off. We can’t stop at the bandage. Stricter gun laws are not going to eradicate mass violence because people in a violent culture will find a way to be violent, regardless of the law. Appointing a multicultural representative for our student government isn’t going to eradicate racist attitudes and feelings of exclusion at Bowdoin, because those kinds of people still get admitted. Kicking out a sex offender support group from a local church will not rid women on this campus of the fear of sexual violence, and it will not lessen the chances of it happening, because these sex offenders still exist (and now probably have negative feelings towards the College, which is just great for us).
These actions, which I know come from a place of well-meaning and compassion, are bandages. That does not necessarily mean they are unnecessary or undesired. But society has a tendency to stop at bandages, to pat themselves on the back for a job well done when things look better for the time being. But we need to destroy what cuts us in the first place.
Dig deeper, dig to the roots and pull out the toxic ones.