So here is the confession

 Growing up I was pretty sheltered in respect to racism. We actually said bigotry and many people were affected by the Archie Bunker racism where it didn’t seem so bad. And again I was pretty sheltered. 

It wasn’t until I was a teenager that I came across my first full blown case of someone who was racist unabashedly. This person said things without remorse and denigrated people solely based on their race. Just would not accept that Black people were people. Flat out racist. So I did what I thought was the right thing. I slowly disengaged myself from going to this person’s house and stopped calling this person a friend. 

I think many people growing up made this same mistake. It was easier to avoid racism than confront it. As a teenager I was still learning, when I became an adult and moved into my 20′s and 30′s I was well rounded enough to know that ignoring problems do not make them go away. I say many people behaved similar to me based on what I see other people write. There are other articles etc now posted or whatever that deal with this same topic. I do not think this “confession” is earth shattering right now. Yet it still leaves the gap between saying something and doing something.

Which leads us to the real confession. We just do not know what to say. Do we just walk up to all the people we quit hanging out with over the years and say, hey you racist POS, stop being that way. 

That won’t go far. 

So the internal conflict now is how do we approach others that we not just deem racist, but they make painfully aware they are racist. 

There are only racists. Some people will try to make an argument there is a sliding scale. There isn’t. There are racists and there are ugly racists. The only difference is ugly racists act out on their racism and it is anywhere from snide comments to job discrimination to shooting someone in the back. This just shows the ugly, but it doesn’t make the people not acting out, less racist. Overall people that have problems with other races have to admit to themselves they think others are inferior to overcome their own inadequacies. Yeah so easy to post in a blog, how do you constructively tell someone that? And this is barely a start.

Hate and ignorance are tools of evil and racism is one of the by products of these problems. This runs deep in people and then they start teaching their children the hate and keeping them ignorant. And now we have centuries of this ingrained into large segments of our country. 

So a rational person can understand where racism comes from, it still doesn’t help the rational person to confront the evil of it all. People who are racist, aren’t changing overnight no matter what anyone says, but we have waited too long to say anything. It is way past time to “need” to have a conversation. Now we are stuck with our own reflection staring back at us from the mirror shouting that the ugly is on us also. That is the real confession.

And no one knows what to say. Seriously, can anyone think of a way to start this conversation that can make a person stop and think for that one second so a door can open? We desperately need that answer right now.