It's 2026
It’s 2026, And We’re Still Here
It’s 2026.
And we still allow racism.
Not the hoods and burning crosses of the 60s — though those never really left. I mean the quiet kind. The legal kind. The kind baked into policies, into hiring, into who gets a loan and who gets a knee on their neck. The kind that smiles at you in church on Sunday and crosses the street to avoid you on Monday.
And we still let people lead from the old master mentality. Men — and some women — who think America peaked when my mothers were scrubbing floors in homes and calling it opportunity. Leaders who talk about “heritage” but mean hierarchy. Who say “law and order” but only enforce it one way. Who quote scripture to justify cages and call it righteousness.
We have not grown. Not really.
We have not grown to allow the new brown folks to live in America without a fight. They land here believing in this country more than some of us born here, and we meet them with paperwork, suspicion, and laws written in 1924. We call them “illegals” but take their labor in the fields, the kitchens, the hospitals. We want their food, their music, their culture — but not their vote, not their voice, not their full humanity.
And we are still contending with systemic racism that has and continues to occur. It didn’t end with Obama. It didn’t end with a diversity seminar. It lives in school funding tied to zip codes. It lives in textbooks. It lives in the way a resume with “Cathryn” gets a callback and one with “LaKeisha” doesn’t. It lives in who gets therapy and who gets prison. It lives in the way my sister’s hair could get burned in the 80s and the boy who did it could still be a deacon now.
We have allowed Christian colleges to teach inaccurate facts, changing out educational systems to fit doctrine instead of data. History rewritten. Science questioned. Slavery called “immigrant work programs.” Indigenous genocide called “manifest destiny.” They take government money but teach students the Earth is 6,000 years old and that empathy is weakness. And we fund it. We accredit it. We send our kids there because it “shares our values.”
Whose values? The ones that said my father were only 3/5 of a person? The ones that used Jesus to justify Jim Crow? The ones that call it “religious freedom” to deny someone else’s freedom?
I don’t talk politics or religion much anymore. Because I believe God is so big we can’t imagine how big — bigger than America, bigger than whiteness, bigger than any one party’s platform. But I know this: a God that big wouldn’t bless a nation that keeps its boot on people’s necks and calls it order.
I’ve become more spiritual than religious. I love church services online now, where no one can hand me a pamphlet and tell me my anger isn’t holy. I look to other religions. Because I believe in humanity. I believe we’re more similar than different. And I know systemic racism counts on us forgetting that.
It’s 2026. We have phones that talk, cars that drive themselves, and dial up is dead. But we still can’t figure out how to treat people like people.
We keep to ourselves. We choose carefully who we let in. Because peace is precious. But I won’t be quiet. Not while the old master mentality still writes the laws. Not while brown folks have to beg to belong in a country they’re already building. Not while colleges teach lies and call it faith.
We should be better by now.
We’re not.
And that’s the truth, whether Facebook lets me post it or not.
