The Racism Beat — Matter

The Racism Beat — Matter:

Maybe it was the realization that writing anything would be to listlessly participate in the carousel ride: an inciting incident, 1,000 angry thinkpieces, 1,000 tweeted links, and back to where we started, until next time. Perhaps it was a feeling that writing anything would finally be too redundant to bear, a pursuit of too many sad and obvious words to heap onto so many other nearly identical words written down before, by me, by thousands of others. 

What’s a person to say when a Wolfeboro police commissioner outs himself as a proud racist? The same thing everyone wrote when, soon after Obama was first inaugurated, another small-time politician sent out a picture of the White House lawn planted with a watermelon patch? The same thing they wrote when Ted Nugent, a Republican guest to last year’s State of the Union address, called President Obama a “subhuman mongrel”? Or the same thing they wrote when a California woman took to her Facebook page in 2012 to call Obama a “nigger” and wish for his assassination.

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It’s exhausting to feel compelled on a consistent basis to defend your claim to dignity. It’s exhausting to then watch those defenses drift beyond the reaches of the internet’s short memory, or to coffee tables in dentists’ offices, to be forgotten about until you link to them the next time you need to say essentially the same thing.

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How many different ways can you find to say that you’re a human being?