This is an article that one of my favorite teachers wrote about the Donald Sterling incident a while back. It applies just as much today as it did then, and stresses an invaluable lesson regarding recent events in the United States.

In the last year alone, we have seen overwhelming evidence showing that race relations aren’t quite right in our country, so much so that even the most blind now have no reason to deny it aside from their own stubbornness.

We have Dontre Hamilton.

We have Eric Garner.

We have John Crawford III.

We have Mike Brown.

We have Ezell Ford.

We have Tanisha Anderson.

We have Walter Scott.

We have Freddie Grey.

We have countless others.

But it’s far too easy for us to condemn the extreme cases (well, mostly). We need to think harder. We all do. Because Dylann Roof and Donald Sterling are not the exclusive manifestations of racism and hate. They are but byproducts of a much broader and more deeply ingrained trend. I invite you to look up what “systematic bias” means in statistics – this is what we have in the United States today. Against people of color. Against the LGBT community. And among many others that we call friends and neighbors.

As such, we cannot be at peace in denouncing only those who say, “I want nothing to do with Black people” outright. We cannot simply abhor the actions of the Roofs and the Sterlings and be on our merry way.

We cannot be satisfied by cleaning the polluted surface of the river; we must go further and dive into the depths of our tainted channels. We need to open our ears and listen to the hurting souls across the country; their cries are audible in all corners of the US. We must open our eyes and look inward to acknowledge and accept our own biases and prejudices. We must open our hearts and be courageous enough to have the conversations about how our behavior, our friends’ behavior, and our families’ behavior is propagating the rapid currents of hatred and prejudice.

We must not be passive bystanders. Our inaction silently communicates our approval of the status quo and our inability to be uncomfortable with spurring change: “We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.”

And so, we must be proactive. There are ways we can help. When we don’t understand why the people of Baltimore are protesting peacefully and buildings are incidentally set on fire, we can listen. When we are slightly inconvenienced by #BlackLivesMatter protesters who put their lives on the line to stop our traffic, we can listen. Holding our opinions isn’t difficult, it’s almost always just a matter of effort.

So, choose to learn. Choose to educate yourself from those around you and those across the country. Listening is half of participating in a conversation, and we tend to ignore it in lieu of hearing ourselves speak. Every single individual has something they can do.

Go further. Think harder. Push your comfort zone. And join the conversation.