Let me share an analogy with you. Say you inherit an old house. The house is ugly from the outside so you decide to make some renovations. You paint over the walls and cover up the old floors with carpeting, but soon you begin to notice that the drywall on your ceiling is beginning to crack, so you call an expert to come and look at it. When the expert comes, they tell you that the cracking isn’t your fault, the house is old and it’s expected to have some issues; however, considering that it’s your house now, it is your responsibility to repair those problems so that they dont get worse over time.
This house is America, and we have inherited a nation covered in cracks– systems rooted in racism and inequality. The problem is that we’ve spent years applying “paint” over the cracks and hoping they’ll just go away; if we don’t start addressing these issues from their root, the structure of our nation will eventually collapse.
The problem is that we– the people inheriting the house– aren’t even trying to fix it at all. This can be observed all across the country but also in our daily lives. One of our teachers recently shared with me that another series of antisemitic tagging occurred on our campus back in November; however, the administration did not share this information with teaching staff until January. This highlights a key issue that is contributing to prejudice on our campus: the lack of communication between administration, teachers, and students. If the student body isn’t aware that problems like this are happening, hiding the truth is not going to make them stop, it’s just going to allow for more issues to happen because people think that it’s okay. Personally, I dont want to be a part of a school that is widely known for teaching privileged assholes.
On a wider scale, America’s idealism swings like a pendulum between progress and regression, growing more severe with each shift. Right now, it’s swinging back into regression or conservatism. We’ve watched this cycle happen for years and we can predict the consequences, but society keeps focusing on the effects instead of addressing the causes.
As a society, we need to be okay with addressing the ugly parts of our history. Whether it makes you uncomfortable or not; learning about why things happened and why they are wrong is an important step in fostering progress. What people don’t understand is that, no, you don’t have to feel guilty about what happened in our history, but you should feel motivated to make a change because if things keep going the way they have been, systemic issues will inevitably worsen.
Leave a Reply