To the apathetic:
Your classmates feel threatened. Are you OK with that? Is it inconvenient for you? Are you emotionally exhausted from shouldering the shame of your relief that your skin is a safe place?
Would it not be exhausting to walk in fear every day because of a physical trait that the biological lottery wove into your genes before you ever breathed outside of the asylum of your mother?
If you have time to fool around on Facebook and stumble across these paragraphs, you have time to think about it.
In elementary or middle school, you likely read "Terrible Things," Eve Bunting’s allegory of the Holocaust. It’s worth a re-read. Not because recent events indicate that another grand scale atrocity is imminent—though plenty are playing out farther from our doorstep—but because it reminds us that the bad guys aren’t the only ones responsible for letting Terrible Things happen. Bystander apathy is a frequent accessory to intolerance, to hate crimes, to murder. What cowardice clamps our mouths shut in a country that affords us the freedom to speak up? In this world and its white-authored history, blind hate has justified violence and has been perpetuated by silence. But when we fail to defend each other, we lose the whole forest.
It is not enough to get mad. It is not enough to write an article and pray that somehow the people who will never read it come to understand. But what is enough? As far as I reach out, my hand will still be stained with a pigment that keeps me safer than my classmates. I’ve done nothing to earn that.
What we can do is look up for a moment from our internship applications and think about what kind of environment we want to raise our kids in. We can think about the friends and classmates we love and create the kind of community we want them to learn in. We can listen. Actively, with empathy, setting aside our personal agendas. No one wants to contribute their talent to a student body whose members use noise-canceling headphones to drown out everything that doesn’t directly impact their GPA. No matter what kind of income or prestige you secure, no matter what diseases you cure, this cancer will continue to creep into our systems until we make the effort to eradicate it.
To the apathetic, to students tired of reading incidents fueled by racial tensions in the headlines, to everyone making more of an effort to ignore the problem than to address it: Please think. “I’m here for you” takes very little time or breath and does a world more than silence. Just because the Terrible Things didn’t come for someone who looks like you today does not mean that they never will. And when they do, you’ll want allies.
