I have often disagreed with the notion that racism is a permanent fixture in American society. I believe too strongly in humanity’s ability to change, to adapt, to dream. I believed that our country could someday become a semblance of the utopia it often claims to be.
Then I learned that 18-year-old Payton Gendron had walked into a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, and killed 10 people — eight of them Black — while wounding three others. I learned that Gendron had meticulously planned his actions after being indoctrinated by online racist conspiracy theories. I learned that there will always be someone else to take up the mantle of white supremacy. I learned, while watching a young man sacrifice years of freedom in the service of bigotry, that racism is indeed permanent.
Not because past generations have created systems that are meant to keep Black people in a condition as close to slavery as possible. And not because there is a conscious effort to keep the truth about America’s history of racism out of schools.
