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Some People Still Read (So I Want to Sneak This in While I Can) [1]

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Date: 2025-06-26

Why We Still Need to Talk About Race—Even When No One Wants to Listen

We live in an age of opinions shouted louder than facts. The nation’s discourse is a carousel of soundbites: podcasts that trade in outrage, talk radio that thrives on volume over substance, cable news that flashes breaking headlines every five minutes. Podcasts and talk radio aren’t inherently bad—but they’re not built for careful listening. Most are built for persuasion, not learning. They feed us certainty, not doubt. They fill the air with more opinion than evidence, more feeling than fact.

And then there’s social media—where “LOL” and “SMH” are entire arguments, and most conversations end in an emoji or an insult. Reading—real reading—has become rare. We scroll, we scan, we comment, we move on. If it can’t be captured in a meme, a tweet, or a hot take, it often goes unheard. The TL;DR culture (“too long; didn’t read”) has become not just an excuse, but a badge of honor. Who has time for nuance when you can have a take?

This makes it harder than ever to talk about what really matters. Race, justice, history—these are complex topics that can’t be squeezed into a soundbite or resolved in a five-minute debate segment. Yet, that’s how most people get their “facts” these days: by absorbing whatever fits into a headline, a thread, or a call-in show.

Still, I keep writing. Because, miraculously, some people still read. You, for example. If you’ve made it past the first paragraph, you’re already doing more than most.

We need readers now more than ever, because the work of confronting racial injustice can’t be microwaved or delivered in 90-second clips. It needs context. It needs history. It needs argument, evidence, and empathy.

Think about the immigration debate. It’s dominated by catchphrases and headlines, but the reality is far more troubling. Behind the uproar, ICE raids, and televised border walls, there’s a history of exclusion that isn’t new—it’s just been rebranded. Today’s deportations are yesterday’s forced removals, redrawn for a new audience. Ethnic cleansing rarely starts with violence; it starts with paperwork, policy, and the slow, bureaucratic erasure of who counts as “us.”

Even our census categories show the hidden architecture of exclusion. The U.S. government has always played with labels—“white alone,” “Black or African American,” “other”—to determine who receives protection and who is left outside. These categories are more than demographics; they’re tools for deciding who matters.

This is not unique to America. History is full of regimes that drew lines around belonging. Nazi Germany turned identity cards into instruments of death. Colonial states erased Indigenous people with the stroke of a pen. Today, in the U.S., mass deportations and border crackdowns echo the same logic: decide who belongs, then write the rest out of the story.

And these patterns don’t just affect newcomers or “outsiders.” Black Americans have been living inside this machinery of exclusion for generations. From redlining to school segregation, from the criminal legal system to health care disparities, the design has always been to concentrate privilege and export the problem.

The facts are stark: Black families own just a fraction of the wealth of white families. Black students are punished more harshly, attend underfunded schools, and face barriers at every level of the education system. Black mothers die at alarming rates, Black neighborhoods are overpoliced and underprotected, and Black voters are still fighting for access to the ballot. None of this is accidental. It’s designed. It’s sustained by the very culture that would rather debate on air than read the evidence.

And here’s why we have to keep talking about race, even—especially—when it feels like no one wants to listen: Ignoring these facts doesn’t make them go away. Pretending not to see injustice does not make it any less real for the people living it every day. The temptation to look away, to minimize, or to “move on” is strong—especially when the stories are hard, when the disparities seem overwhelming, when the solutions are not easy. But silence and avoidance are not neutral; they are acts of complicity.

When we stop talking about race, we make room for denial and distortion to fill the gap. We enable policies that reinforce the status quo. We allow those with the loudest microphones to control the narrative, often erasing or rewriting the realities that are too uncomfortable to face. Race is not a trend, and injustice is not a phase. The legacies of exclusion, erasure, and disparity do not dissolve just because we change the subject.

If we believe in a future where justice and equality are possible, we have to keep naming what stands in the way. We have to keep connecting the dots between immigration policy and Black disparity, between census categories and the architecture of exclusion, between today’s debates and yesterday’s injustices. These conversations aren’t easy—but they are necessary. Because the alternative is ignorance. And ignorance is never harmless.

That’s why I write. That’s why I keep telling these stories. That’s why I keep sneaking these essays into the world, for as long as there are people willing to read. Because silence serves the powerful, but speech can serve the truth. And as long as we keep talking about race, there’s hope that the facts will eventually be too loud to ignore.

And yet, as long as people are willing to read—really read—there is hope. As long as there are those who seek more than a headline, who want more than another hot take, I’ll keep trying to sneak these truths into the public square. Because this work isn’t about blame, or about stoking outrage for its own sake. It’s about clarity. It’s about making the connections between yesterday’s policies and today’s pain. It’s about refusing to let distraction or misdirection erase the disparities that shape Black life.

Some will say this is “race-baiting.” Some will call it divisive. Some will change the station, or scroll past. But for those who stay—for those who still believe that reading matters, that truth requires time and care—this is for you.

You’re the reason I keep writing. Because as long as even a few of us are willing to look deeper, to question what we’re told, and to face what’s uncomfortable, there’s still a chance for something better. There’s still a reason to tell the truth.

So while I can—while the door is open, while the page is here—I want to sneak this in. Thank you for reading.

W. Smith III writes about race, history, justice, and the stories we inherit. His essays and forthcoming books examine the intersections of memory, culture, and the fight for equity in America.

This essay originally appeared on Medium. Republished here with permission of the author.

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