My grandfather told me that things were different, that things were better. He told me this when I was in the second grade. I’d come home from school after learning about the Jim Crow laws of the South, which had been done away with well before I was born.

You see, my grandfather, Robert Brent, was born in Mississippi in 1919. The story goes that he was still a child when his father ran afoul of some local white men and was forced to flee north to Michigan with his whole family. In his early years, my grandfather experienced the segregated South, the terror of open racism, northern ghettos, poverty, and the police oppression of Blacks. As a young man, he joined the military when it was still segregated and African Americans were treated as third-rate citizens. He lived through the sit-ins and marches, the dogs, the fire hoses, and the assassinations of Malcolm, Martin, and Medgar.

By the time I was in second grade, in 1987, my grandfather had reached a level of comfort and illusory freedom that his generation once feared would never come. Looking at my life through the lens of his personal history, it was clear to me that all he saw were roses.  Without question, things had improved, but true social equality was still an ephemeral, distant dream.  This truth was attested to when my parents fell victim to the crack epidemic. Millions had been affected by it.  The crack epidemic was engineered by our own government–a government that was all too eager to sacrifice the Black community in order to fund an illegal war for the furtherance of a global power grab.

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I was 11 years old the first time I was slammed on the hood of a police car before even being asked my name, simply because I “fit the description”.  At age 18, I lost my life to the prison industrial complex. Not because I killed anyone, but because, according to the state of Illinois, I’m accountable for the conduct of others even though evidence showed that I had tried to stop the incident.

This is where social inequality exists between Blacks and whites in my lifetime. There are health disparities, a tech gap, wage disparities and differing sentences for the same or less severe crimes. There is a high rate of wrongful convictions, and Blacks are arrested at a much higher rate. Communities are over-policed while our schools remain underfunded and classrooms over-populated. Black unemployment is consistently higher than the national average. There are injustices towards Black people: the Central Park Five, Rodney King, Amadou Diallo, Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Laquan McDonald, Michael Brown, George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor, just to name a few.

Things are different. The blatant bigotry and systematic racism of my grandfather’s era has given way to a latent and more insidious strain.   I would argue that this new strain is more harmful because hidden things are easier to ignore.