Racism is not “my cross to bear.” In fact, it’s not even a cross or a test of endurance. Systematic prejudice is social oppression and should not be met with strength and determination.

African Americans have long been conditioned to bear with bigots. Paul Lawrence Dunbar said, “We wear the mask,” and feign empathy as a survival instinct even while being subjected to hate speech. 

We are taught as children to assume a safe position: “Hands up, don’t shoot.” Even when a police officer is pointing a gun at our unarmed bodies, we are expected to reassure them that we are not going to kill them. Unironically, our deaths are blamed on “white fragility.”

“This is America,” Childish Gambino reminded us in his song of the same name. It is to be trapped in a narcissist’s narrative, where you are always characterized as the problem and expected to bear the blame. 

But I have a problem with the fact that African Americans are nearly three times more likely (2.8) to be killed by police officers than European Americans. The deaths of unarmed African Americans remain top of mind despite a recent $10 million settlement for the family of Sonya Massey.

Because it’s not enough. The men who murdered Ahmaud Arbery are seeking a new trial and Trayvon Martin should be experiencing life as a thirty-year-old man right now.

Ta-Nehisi Coates said rightly in “Between the World and Me”: “The destroyers will rarely be held accountable. Mostly they will receive pensions.” He continued, “And destruction is merely the superlative form of a dominion whose prerogatives include friskings, detainings, beatings, and humiliations.”

Worse still, the continuation of white supremacist terrorism depends, in part, on its victim spiritually bypassing its brutal sufferings, focusing not on the bitter and “strange fruit” that Billie Holiday sang about but the “sweet by and by” of heaven. It is a carryover from American slavery, wherein Bible passages were used to justify human bondage. 

Enslaved Africans and later African Americans were expected to “suffer through it” with the hope that their faithfulness would be rewarded in the afterlife (Genesis 9:18-27, Ephesians 6:5-7 and First Timothy 6:1-2). However, while many adopted Christianity as a practice of faith, they discerned a better way, as evidenced by the spirituals. Linked to the biblical narrative, the singers set boundaries that rang of resistance, singing: “And before I’ll be a slave/ I’ll be buried in my grave/ And go home to my Lord and be free.”

Rushing to situate ourselves in a Bible story to be painted as a saint rather than sit in the present moment of unbridled violence ensures we don’t scratch our heads or point the finger at the perpetrator. You are not experiencing microaggressions “for such a time as this” (Esther 4:14). That is a gun in your face after being pulled over for a busted taillight, for tinted windows, or for reaching for your wallet because the officer asked for I.D.

Spiritual bypassing is the height of dishonesty and disillusionment. Instead, stay present in your body. Because Christian scripture was not meant to justify assaults on a person’s dignity.

Further, racism is systemic and systematic antagonism. It is what James Baldwin described as “social terror.” We are being abused. 

Consequently, I side with Sonia Sanchez, who wrote in a poem titled “Malcolm”:

“Do not speak to me of martyrdom, 

of men who die to be remembered 

on some parish day. 

I don’t believe in dying 

though, I too shall die.”

She writes later in the poem:

“Do not speak to me of living.

life is obscene with crowds

Of white on black.”

It is her eulogy of the late el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz and her reckoning with the hopelessness of this version of life, riddled with the false and death-dealing binaries of race and its progeny.

Likewise, this is not your blood to spill. This is my life to live and no one should be able to take it freely after a falsified police report or because this is the American way things are done around here. 

I will not simply put up with it and have no interest in joining the survival business. I will not suffer without complaint or resentment. 

Instead, I agree with Maya Angelou. “My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor and some style,” she said.

Thus, some sufferings you must refuse to bear as all suffering is not redemptive. Much of it is just plain evil and evil is to be resisted.