...A new and brighter world!

"You're traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind." Perhaps you are a Baby Boomer like me and remember hearing Rod Sterling's iconic opening lines for the popular television series, "The Twilight Zone." Like most people, I was transfixed by Sterling's strange stories describing events in an alternate reality mixed with science fiction, psychological, and social horrors. Even the occasional lighthearted storylines revealed an uncomfortable truth about society and human nature.

Throughout the years, I've become aware that no Twilight Zone story can compare to the real-life American horror stories and pain inflicted on minorities through systematic racism.

Systemic or institutional racism is treated as a normal practice to ensure discrimination in education, criminal justice, employment, housing, health care, political power, and every other area of society. With systemic racism, the color of skin decides their value and limits their opportunities to achieve. With the first slaves' arrival in 1619, America began establishing a cruel apartheid system based on the dehumanization of people of color.

In his 1963 "I Have a Dream" speech, Dr. Martin Luther King reminds the nation of its "promise that all men, black men, and white men, would be guaranteed the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Efforts to fully collect on this promise are met with manipulation, threats, and violent pushback. Colin Kaepernick refused to stand during the playing of the national anthem to protest police brutality. He not only lost his professional football career, but he was demonized throughout the country as being anti-military, anti-democracy, anti-flag, and anti-American! Grooming people to see victims as villains and villains as heroes begin with an indoctrination of systemic racism in childhood.

I grew up in a rural, southern town during the '50s and '60s. Seeing "Colored," "White Ladies Only" signs were as normal as seeing salt and pepper shakers on eating tables. My friends and I sat in the movie theater's balcony and "accidentally "dropped popcorn on the whites who sat beneath us, which may have impacted the decision to close the theater. We entered on the "colored" side of the doctor's office, drank from the "colored" water fountain, attended the "colored" school, and got baptized in the "colored" Baptist church.

We lived on the colored side of town, often called the "Bottom," where whites came only to pick up or drop off their "colored" help. Economic life in the "Bottom" consisted of a mom and pop grocery store of nonperishable items and a hamburger grill, both short-lived and never replaced. The "Bottom" is where the men of a certain age gathered to shoot the breeze or, as my grandmother would say, "tell lies and sip on falling down juices." Little did we know that references to our community as the "Bottom" originated from the federal government housing laws, known as redlining.

Redlining, now illegal, increased segregation by ensuring banks systematically drew red lines around portions of a map to indicate neighborhoods they did not want to make loans. These undesirable areas were called the "Bottom" to identify them as high-poverty communities for black people and to label its residents on the bottom of the social status.

"You're traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind."  

“The Twilight Zone” stories transported characters from their familiar environment to a world that disturbed their sense of realty and wellbeing.  Fearful and uncertain, characters spoke with uncertainty and moved gingerly. Victims of systemic racism know what it is like to speak with hesitation and to move warily through the maze of social injustice and racial hatred. 

What a great time to remember that we are not those characters controlled by Rod Sterling’s pen and imagination.  Each of us can use the power of our vote to change our government from chaos to order; we can use the beauty of our dreams to conquer fears; we can use the power of love to dismantle systemic racism. We can adopt Dr. Carol François’s mantra – “see it, say it, confront it“ to break out of a Twilight Zone existence! We have the power to boldly create a new and brighter world!