I am beyond frustrated with the willfully ignorant. Those who don’t want to understand the reasons for protests highlighting grave injustices always say the same things: “all lives matter” or “blue lives matter” or “black on black crime is bad so why do we need to care about black lives now?” They choose to be ignorant. There is no self-reflection happening. They already know they are morally superior, so when they see these things happening in society they justify it all away. “He was going for a weapon” or “It was self-defense.”

No. No, it wasn’t. It was murder.

The fact that they can’t see that because it makes them uncomfortable or it shatters their self-worth is pathetic.

There is no need for me to dig deep and figure out where this comes from. I don’t need to know that they were born in a small town with little to no diversity. I don’t need to know that they have never traveled outside of their country let alone much past a hundred-mile radius of that small hometown. I don’t need to know that they don’t have any non-white, non-Judeo-Christian, non-heteronormative friends. It is painfully obvious in their responses when they say, “all lives matter” or any of the other similar refrains from scared white people.

They are racist.

It is frustrating to read people’s social media and email regurgitating the talking points of a propaganda machine. Those people are hearing what they want to hear: you should be scared, you should be aggrieved, you should be prepared because the black and brown people are coming to take your jobs/women/guns/etc. The willfully ignorant lap it up like a bad dog eating their own poop. It is far removed from reality, but they don’t care. It is the reality they prefer to live in no matter who gets hurt so long as it isn’t them and theirs.

They are racist when they tell NBA players to “shut up and dribble” and when they tell college athletes they shouldn’t peaceably march for Black Lives Matter.

They. Are. Racist.

I know they don’t think they’re racist. They think the way they think because they were taught this was right and proper. Everyone around them in their tiny little bubble thinks the same way. Well, the bubble is about to be popped.

It isn’t hard to figure out why these people feel emboldened to say the quiet part out loud. They have a role model and enablers ready and willing to tell them all of those things they believe but knew deep down inside they shouldn’t say were now okay to spring forth like a broken sewage gate. Because Donald Trump is a racist who says racist things on the regular, they’ve decided it’s fine and dandy to express themselves in the exact same way.

I would have thought by now when racist people express racist thoughts and feelings in the age of cell phone video cameras and they subsequently lose their jobs, their friends, and their families, they’d learn their lesson. Apparently not. In fact, you might instead get rewarded for it.

If you point guns at protestors walking down your street, you will a.) make the news, b.) get charged with a felony and c.) get invited to the Republican National Convention to spread more fear and racism. If you don’t find this repugnant, I don’t want to know what would.

Racism isn’t going to go away if Joe Biden wins the Presidency and neither will police brutality.

However, it would be a step in the right direction.

At least we’d have someone in the Oval Office who gave a damn about systemic racism and police brutality. I’d like to think being empathetic to their cries might move someone to take action to stop it instead of stoking the flames of civil unrest.

Maybe I’d be a little less frustrated all the time.