Remember, when we were children, how important we thought it was
that our games be played fairly? If memory serves me correctly,
no one wanted to play at all unless fairness was assured. But as
we grew to adulthood, many of us, like baby geese, were
imprinted with the notion that the way things are is the natural
state of the way they should be. In other words, we didn’t
recognize social injustice in our midst; it was just reality. In
that frame of mind, one could observe uneducated people and,
without blinking, hold their ignorance against them, even if
there were unjust societal reasons for their lack of schooling.
The same applied to poor people, for whom it seemed self-evident
that they had made bad personal decisions. Racial inequality,
therefore, appeared to be a natural evolution of poor decisions
writ large. Moreover, many of our parents insisted on this being
the case. And then, like a lightning bolt, the reality of racial
injustice achieved coast-to-coast attention on television,
featuring police do