You Tread on My Dreams

“Allow me to be unambiguous: I am no one’s BIPOC mannequin. I am a person foremost and not a skin color, and I will not be cheapened nor reduced. I am not marginalized, and I need no special treatment. I refuse your categories.”

For those of us living in the West, it all feels rather hot right now—the current tenor of race relations is, I imagine, quite similar to the temperature at the time of the 1963 March on Washington, when approximately 250,000 people gathered around the Lincoln Memorial to protest racial inequality, in the searing summer heat. “I have a dream,” Martin Luther King Jr. said in his seminal speech, “that one day…little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.”

Few things are as captivating as a dream, and the dream of racial diversity is one of the defining recent hallmarks of the West. My vision for racial diversity, when best practiced, involves people of various ethnicities taking part in a united cultural vision. In this view, all people are created equal, regardless of skin color, and through offering genuine value to those around them, individuals can prosper, as can the entire society.

Yet despite the many victories won in the civil rights era—such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which banned discrimination on the “basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin” in the United States—a mere glance at the modern-day culture wars casts doubt on whether true racial equality was ever achieved, in the United States or in the West more generally.

Media coverage is filled with stories of racial disharmony. Social interactions are laden with racial anxiety. Even decades-old institutions are shifting their guiding principles to correspond with the new frenzy surrounding race. The prevailing new perspective on race has become downright religious in the devotion it inspires. Doctrines of “equity” and “inclusivity” have now had an overwhelming effect on Western life.