It is clear that American laws and policies are designed and intended to preserve the white person. What is not clear is how we start to dismantle them. Educating ourselves is a good first start, but there is an extraordinary amount of work to be done in so many areas. As was used in the house analogy - this oppression is the very foundation the US was built on - short of completely knocking down the house, tearing out the foundation, and starting over - how do we approach this systematically? While I would love to hit the "start over" button - I am skeptical that many Americans will agree to this freely and certainly not our current leaders. Do we understand which parts of the foundation need to be addressed first? What parts of the foundation are we willing to leave in tact for now while we repair and restore the weakest areas? How do we maintain the momentum and motivation? For this is going to be a long, ugly, and divisive restoration and I fear people will get weary of it.
On a separate reflection, I was aware of the disparity between incarcerated black people verse white people, but I did not realize that 70% of black men will be incarcerated at some point in their lives. This definitely was cause for pause. I can totally connect the dots between lack of opportunities, family history, social stereotypes, living conditions are contributing to this astounding statistic - but the line I never drew before was back to the beginnings of law enforcement. This was an a-ha moment for me. Particularly about the police being formed in the Carolinas in order to retrieve runaways and instill fear into slaves who may have been thinking about revolting, or running. I never questioned the formation of law enforcement and the reasoning behind it or when it actually institutionalized. I always assumed the police have been around as long as the US a country and they were there "to serve and protect". It was not clear that the piece missing in that statement was "to serve and protect 'white people and their property (e.g. slaves)'" - at least in the case of the Carolina law enforcement - I would have to dig deeper into the Boston scenario as the formation of the enforcement does seem to be more true to protecting goods of the merchants (v. people). However - who they were protecting against is not clear in the video. However, given Boston's history - it was most likely against "immigrants" in general - which at that time were predominantly Irish.
