Why Maybe I Was Responsible for the Death of Michael Brown, and What I Did to Change That

This is not a criticism of Darren Wilson. It is not a criticism of the United States judicial justice system. It is not even a criticism of privileged people in America. All that stuff tends to amount to nothing more than white noise, especially when coming from someone with my unmatched degree of legal and social ignorance. I admittedly know as much about the judicial intricacies of this country as I do about what it is to be a black teenager living in Ferguson, Missouri.

I do know a bit about myself, and I think the answer lies within. I think it always does. This has a lot to do with the fact that the problem, too, always seems to lie within. I see calloused cops and dubious documents and burning buildings, and am convinced that these are the issues. These are just manifestations, external consequences of the knots in my own personal, moral, spiritual fabric. I must work on these, first. How could I expect to change anyone else if I can’t change myself? I have to find, fix, and forgive the problem within. It might require more effort than lambasting the status quo or wielding angry signs through the streets, but it is much more lasting. If more people could gather the courage to do this, we wouldn't have to worry about ‘the system’. It will have no choice but to follow—a prisoner to the polarity of this unified, finely-tuned interpersonal compass we would create.

This is a criticism of me. It is a criticism of how I am racist. It is also a challenge. It is the challenge I overcame to falsify this truth.

I was raised in suburban New Jersey before continuing to college at a private university where tuition amounts to more than the average person accumulates premortem. I was the minority, the kid with an Ecuadorian-American father, making me just about as Incan as my buddy Tom O’Hagan and his profile picture at Machu Picchu.

In the places I grew up, I found it rather easy to hide from diversity. My eyes could readily deceive me and create a cozy world of visible uniformity—a world cloaked in North Face and decorated by designers. In other places, diversity is more perceptibly flying in the face of reconciliation, and the reality of disparity engenders too much neural priority for my brain to paint a false picture—where we are one and treated as one. Here, diversity does not hide from us, and therefore, we cannot hide from diversity.

Here, I learn that I am a little racist.

Baltimore is such a place. They call it ‘Charm City’. I never found it to be that, exactly. No doubt it is a city underscored with love and beauty, brought to life by the love and beauty of its people. But that endearing urban moniker conjures Oz-like images that often do too much to romanticize a scary truth: Baltimore is a city built on a fractured framework.

I spent the past year with the Bon Secours Volunteer Ministry (check it out!), serving at the Bon Secours Hospital in West Baltimore. It was challenging. I saw things that hurt my heavy heart and confused my microcephalic mind.

My volunteer community read the book Urban Injustice, in which Dr. David Hilfiker elucidates what was always unclear to me; namely, the events resulting in the unwritten rules of racial segregation—rules which have silently governed Baltimore since strange decisions sucked this port city dry. The decisions were strange but, as I would discover, not unfounded. They were decisions made out of a desperate, unfulfilled need for forgiveness.

The inception of the United States was accompanied by a practice of buying and selling humans as slaves. We know the story. The story continues to contaminate our nation today, with its residues all over, and especially observable in places like Baltimore. I’m glad the story is still told; it must not be forgotten. A major obstacle to any sort of racial harmony, however, is that the story of slavery has never even come close to being forgiven.

There still exists a cyclical hostility that clearly sidestepped the supposed finality of the Emancipation Proclamation. That’s no secret. It seems many (white) people who make decisions today feel they are responsible for decisions made then; they act accordingly with guilt and fear. And I am one of them. Those harmed by prejudice are then forced to reciprocate as protection. Protection is detected as wanton aggression, and thus validation for the original behavior which initiated the cycle. It’s vicious. Races approach each other tensely and defensively, which manifests in hostility. “Well look at what we did to them. They must hate us. We will attack them with discrimination and judgment, before they inevitably attack us.” These words are never spoken, but if you examine most racial tensions—especially those between blacks and whites—they can probably be heard.

This is when I realized I was racist-- when those same words echoed in my mind as I began my year of service. Working with an almost exclusively black population, I chose to approach with caution rather than aggression, a quieter but equally damaging defense. I questioned why people of another race would trust someone like me. Those questions were born out of nothing but our history. “There must be something that will keep us apart now as there was then,” I assumed. A right relationship was unachievable as long as I held onto this conviction.

As long as I was anchored by the past, I would drown in its troubled waters.

I soon found that these neighbors of mine held nothing against me, and that they welcomed me into their lives—if I was willing to enter. I soon found that race was nothing, and that love was everything. I could forgive myself for horrors of the past. It turns out I had already been forgiven by the targets of those horrors.

I am not responsible for slavery. I had no part in it, and I refuse to hold myself accountable for something I had no part in. I live today, and today I do not condone it. I do not condone it, and I forgive myself for being associated with a race that did.

What I am saying is this: I am saying I am racist because of slavery. I think slavery is the cause of racist beliefs. That is based in nothing but my opinion, which again, is all I got. I am racist because of the guilt I feel from this period of exploitation and violation. But I have the option to move on. It is my choice. It is one of the only ones I have in dictating reconciliation between races.

We must detach ourselves from slavery, once and for all. The only way I can see to do this, is with forgiveness. Reach back, forgive, and finally move forward with peace.

(This gets even more anecdotal, so if you're on the verge of snoozing at this point, don't bother continuing.)

When I was saying my final goodbye to a patient last year, she told me she loved me, and I told her I loved her, and then I cried. I cried because it was true. I thought about all the life she gave me, and I prayed to God that I gave some of that to her. I feel confident that I did, because they were the kind of tears that did not leave trails clouded by guilt or fear; they were clear and pure like the love that sent them.

The first time I met this patient, she told me she didn’t understand why in the world I would be doing what I was doing at Bon Secours, and that the fact that I was volunteering must mean I have rich parents. That ended our initial interaction.

At moments like these, I felt a barrier between me and the patients—a barrier constructed by centuries of the strange thinking, strange decisions, and stranger actions. It took some time, but I learned that the barrier was permeable. All I had to do was walk up to it and say “excuse me, Barrier, but there is someone I want to see.” We could then meet up and hold hands, and when that happened, the barrier collapsed around us, leaving piles of rubble at our feet. We could step atop that rubble and stand taller than we ever had before.

I think that is something I found out last year—that I did not have to knock down barriers, because it was much easier to just walk through them, and by doing so, make them disappear.

It took trial. It took some failure, but I freed myself of a weight that I now know I never had to bear. Greater than the struggle to forgive anyone else is the struggle to forgive myself. I think we can only find reconciliation with others by first forgiving ourselves. Last year, I was blessed with the opportunity to understand this, and my prayer is that others are blessed with the same. Forgive ourselves. If we can do that, it might just solve some stuff.

#baltimore