The anatomy of racism

By Anannya Senapati

It wears a suit, a badge, a robe.
It stands in courtrooms,
Sits in offices,
Votes on laws that crush quietly.

Racism is not just the shout
In the street at midnight.
It is the quiet denial,
The steady hand signing papers
That redraw the lines of "us" and "them."

It is the tired refrain:
"We’ve come so far,"
As if progress were a finish line.
As if centuries of chains
Can be erased with decades of denial.

It lives in the way bodies are policed—
Watched, followed, taken,
Lives squeezed into statistics,
Deaths turned into hashtags.
A system that grinds and grinds,
Until even the screams go unheard.

And yet, it is not only systemic.
It is personal.
It’s in the gaze that lingers too long,
In the voice that lowers when names are pronounced,
In the assumption that darker skin
Needs an explanation,
An excuse for existing.

It is not always loud.
Sometimes it whispers,
Disguised as concern,
As tradition, as humor.
But its poison is just as deadly.

What do we do with this knowledge?
Do we confront it,
Rip the mask from its face,
Or do we avert our eyes,
Comfortable in the privilege of ignorance?

To fight it is to be uncomfortable,
To stumble, to fail, to learn.
It is to dismantle the foundations
And rebuild, brick by brick.
It is work. Hard, unrelenting work.

But this is what it means to be human:
To see the cracks in the world
And not turn away.
To let the discomfort burn,
So that something better can rise
From the ashes of what we’ve allowed.