I see no changes, all I see is racist faces Misplaced hate makes disgrace to races We under, I wonder what it takes to make this One better place, let’s erase the wasted Tupac Shakur, Changes (1998)
Fifty years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision, Tupac’s words seem prophetic. Despite decades of tireless work by activists and advocates of social justice, the mixture of ethnocentrism, racism, violence and oppression on which the U.S. was partially founded seems immovable. Yes, more overt forms of racism can seem to ebb, but more implicit forms of bias and civilized oppression often replace them, and in periods of economic downturn, overt racism and xenophobia come roaring back triggered by despotic politicians leveraging fear and hate. In an exceptionally militarized country awash in firearms (with more guns than persons) and security personnel, where income inequality is extreme and where the incarceration of 2.4 million of our own citizens (the highest in the world) disproportionately imprisons members of minority groups, high levels of criminal and state-sanctioned violence come to seem inevitable. As Tupac said, “That’s the way it is”.