বাইরের আমি, ভেতরের আমি

In the home you are allowed to tell that racist joke you would never say in public. In the home, you don’t really mean it. In public it makes you look like a bad person, and you are not a bad person. In the home you are allowed to forbid your daughter from dating her black boyfriend. “It’s not personal,” you say, because you are one of those people for whom politics is not personal; the boyfriend, now dumped, is one of those people for whom it is. On the bus, you clutch your purse a little tighter when the black kids sit next to you. You are not racist. You’re just being safe. From the home, you see the black child riding his bike outside. You call the police. Maybe he has a gun? Or is it a toy? Your private thoughts, your imagination, carefully devised and tended through the centuries-long project of institutionalised racism, become a policeman’s public action, of personal consequence to the now dead child, his living family. You didn’t mean for him to die. You just can’t be too careful when it comes to those black people, those Muslims, those Mexicans. When your co-worker says this, you smile tight-lipped. Your co-worker’s racism is not your problem, is not personal. You just want to go home.

                                                                                           ---Yaa Gyasi, The Guardian