Harboring racism in America is not only ugly – it’s expensive, painful, and unsustainable. Hatred carries a staggering price tag, yet it continues to be treated like an acceptable national expense.

Let’s take a brisk walk through a racist résumé:

Skills:

• Manufacturing fear and division.
• Whitewashing history while rewriting schoolbooks.
• Suppressing evidence of systemic harm.
• Controlling media narratives for outrage rather than solutions.

Tenure:

• Generations of unchecked violence: murders, school shootings, unsafe neighborhoods, domestic abuse.
• Cycles of addiction – pills, powders, needles – that devastate entire families.
• White-on-white crime swept under the rug, while the blame is shifted elsewhere.
• America kindly escorts sunscreen murderers into custody – a courtesy rarely extended to the melanated community, who too often end up reduced to chalk outlines instead of defendants with rights.
• White business executives steal their own people’s retirements while their communities stay silent.
• The IRS focuses on audits on the poorest and melanated households while billion-dollar tax theft goes unpunished.
• The U.S. government deliberately funneled crack cocaine into Black neighborhoods, making it nearly impossible for Black families to gain legitimate employment in a racially rigged economy – and then turned around and declared a hypocritical “War on Drugs.” America created the problem and then criminalized the very people it targeted.
• Fast-forward: the same government now watches as the sunscreen community leads the way in today’s zombie apocalypse – paint-huffing, soap-packet eating, overdosing on fentanyl and xylazine. Yet are called “patients.” They are given healthcare, not handcuffs.

Objectives:

• Protect privilege at all costs.
• Hoard resources – social welfare, pensions, stolen taxes – while vilifying others for “taking too much.”
• Keep women unsafe, children unprotected, and healthcare inaccessible, all to ensure that communities of color remain boxed in.
• Build a wall around honest conversation, refusing accountability while punishing those already burdened.
• Mourn racist hate-mongers who openly deny empathy and call for public executions while falling dead silent about innocent children gunned down in classrooms every week.
• Refuse accountability for the family, friends, and associates who harbor violent racists as accessories – enabling hate crimes by looking the other way.
• Rebrand sunscreen criminality as “troubled youth” or “misunderstood children,” even when the perpetrator is 31 years old – while a 12-year-old Black boy is instantly painted as a full-grown “savage adult.” Make it make sense.

This is the résumé of a “sunscreen” community that hides behind denial while fueling the very crises it projects onto others. The irony is brutal: the loudest voices blaming others for crime, drugs, and welfare are also the most responsible for them.

Hatred is not free – it drains our human wealth, destabilizes our homes, robs children of futures, and corrodes our humanity. But how can growth or healing ever take root when we keep running into a Berlin Wall – a deliberate refusal to talk about the sunscreen community’s role in our shared suffering?

America can not afford the luxury of racism any longer. The bill is already past due. Which side do you want to continue to feed? The picture on the left or the right is within your efforts.

“In a racist society, it is not enough to be non-racist, we must be anti-racist.” – Angela Y. Davis

“We can not use a double standard for measuring our own and other people’s policies. Our demands for democratic practices in other lands will be no more effective than the guarantees of those practiced in our own country.” – Hubert H. Humphrey

“The police can go to downtown Harlem and pick up a kid with a joint in the streets. But they can’t go into the elegant apartments and get a stockbroker who’s sniffing cocaine.” – Noam Chomsky

“You must take personal responsibility. You cannot change the circumstances, the seasons, or the wind, but you can change yourself. That is something you have charge of.” – Jim Rohn

“No childhood context. No empathy. No nuance. When Black people are victims of murder, especially at the hands of police, articles like this are nearly nonexistent. This kind of reporting is harmful. It reinforces the myth that white violence is somehow more understandable and more forgivable. That it deserves exploration instead of condemnation.” – Nekima Levy Armstrong

“We declare our right on this earth… to be a human being, to be respected as a human being, to be given the rights of a human being in this society… which we intend to bring into existence by any means necessary.” – Malcolm X

If today was judgment day, do you feel comfortable with receiving what you put into the world? Have you aided or abetted the pain of others simply because they didn’t look like you? Are you prepared for the consequences or your actions or lack-there-of? What if you had to spend the rest of eternity receiving the very same treatment that you acted in, cheered for, or closed your eyes to?

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” – Martin Luther King Jr.

“The time is always with to do what is right.” – Martin Luther King Jr.

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