In March of 1965, approximately 600 peaceful demonstrators attempted to march from Selma to Montgomery demanding voting rights for Black Americans. Led by civil rights leaders including John Lewis, Martin Luther King Jr., and Hosea Williams, the marchers were met with brutal violence at the Edmund Pettus Bridge. State troopers attacked peaceful citizens with clubs and tear gas while the nation watched in horror. The day became known as Bloody Sunday.

Recently, I heard a Black creator ask the question…

“What did Black people do to y’all?”

What did Black Americans do to deserve slavery, segregation, lynchings, redlining, voter suppression, unequal schools, mass incarceration, or being treated as “less than” in their own country?

The honest answer is nothing.

Black people were not hated because of something they did. Racism was never rooted in evidence that Black Americans were inferior. The ideology came first. The justifications were built afterward. Systems of power needed a group to exploit, control, and exclude, and racism became the machinery that made that exploitation seem acceptable.

The cruelty came first. The excuses followed.

People often want racism to have a rational explanation because human beings prefer the world to feel orderly. But prejudice rarely works that way. Fear becomes myth. Myth becomes policy. Policy becomes tradition. Tradition becomes “the way things are.”

That is why Black excellence has never magically ended racism. Black doctors, veterans, pastors, teachers, business owners, and families still faced discrimination because the issue was never simply behavior. Respectability was never a guaranteed shield when the system itself was designed to limit access to power, opportunity, and equality.

And here we are in 2026, still fighting over voting rights, still debating whose history deserves to be taught, still watching immigrants demonized, diversity initiatives attacked, and marginalized communities portrayed as threats instead of fellow Americans.

The costumes change. The script remains hauntingly familiar.

What is happening in this country is wrong. To demean groups of people for political power and control feels profoundly un-American, yet it has been woven into the fabric of our history from the beginning. Slavery was legal. Segregation was legal. White-only schools, neighborhoods, drinking fountains, and voting restrictions were all defended under the banner of “tradition,” “states’ rights,” or “law and order.”

We cannot heal what we refuse to name.

White straight men historically built and controlled most of America’s political, economic, and institutional power structures. That is not an insult. It is a historical reality. “Many white women also benefited from systems that privileged whiteness, even while experiencing sexism themselves. Throughout history, some chose to challenge those systems, while others defended or accepted them because proximity to power can feel safer than confronting it. Patriarchy survives not only through domination, but also through silence, normalization, and participation.”  That truth makes people uncomfortable. But discomfort is not oppression.

The question we should be asking is not: “Why are Black people angry about racism?”

The question is: “Why was cruelty toward Black people normalized in the first place?”

That reframing matters because it shifts the burden away from those enduring discrimination and places it where it belongs: on the systems and beliefs that created and protected inequality.

Black Americans have spent generations fighting for this country to live up to its own promises: freedom, equal protection, voting rights, fair housing, equal education, and basic human dignity.

Not special treatment.
Not superiority.
Humanity.

The people who marched across that bridge in 1965 were not asking for domination over anyone else. They were demanding full citizenship in a country that claimed liberty and justice for all while denying both to millions.

Equality is giving everyone shoes.
Equity is making sure everyone gets
shoes in their size.

America has long been comfortable with symbolic equality while resisting actual equity. After centuries of exclusion, simply opening the door is not enough if some people are still starting miles behind the starting line.

I was four years old during Bloody Sunday.

Now I am 65, and I refuse to spend the rest of my life pretending not to see what is happening around us. The marchers on that bridge believed future generations would not have to keep fighting these same battles.

Yet here we are. Still marching.