A thread for non-Americans:

When I moved to the US in 2009 I had an abstract understanding of the legacy of slavery, but no real sense of the myriad ways in which that legacy affects the daily lives of African Americans today, even the most privileged.

It took me years to really understand the meaning of the phrase “structural racism.” It’s not racial bias; it’s the distortions and inequalities created by a history of racist policy that, if not addressed, would continue to persist even after the last racist thought disappeared.

And it was only through many conversations with African Americans that I began to appreciate just how different the country we both inhabit looks to them and to me—literally as if we were wearing AR glasses that put different overlays on the scenes around us.

What looks like a door to me can look like a barrier to them. People who look harmless to me look threatening to them. Opportunities for me are obstacles for them. News I barely notice fills them with alarm. We see spaces differently. Look around us differently. Walk differently.

I remember an African American friend, years ago, saying about someone else, “He’s just so angry… But then, he’s a sixty-year-old Black man; of course he’s angry.” And the chill of suddenly understanding everything that that implied.

Admittedly, I think a lot of white Americans were learning these things at the same time as I was. At any rate, I think it’s hard, if you're white, to grasp just how deep the racial inequalities run if you haven’t lived here and seen how they affect the lives of people you know.

And now I’m learning that I still haven’t grasped it. As pieces like these by @AdamSerwer and @DrIbram explain, the pandemic is showing how structural racism pervades the US from the political all the way down to the cellular level. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/05/americas-racial-contract-showing/611389/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/04/coronavirus-exposing-our-racial-divides/609526/

Every country has its own form of structural racism, of course, but I can't think of another besides the US in which denying the structural racism is central to the nation's foundational myth—the "land of opportunity" where all it takes to get ahead is hard work.

In some sense that's the US's political divide today: between those who still believe (or claim to) that it's an egalitarian land of opportunity where all that matters is individual effort, and those who think correcting the inequalities requires intervention.