The Shadows We Inherit

I wrote the bones of this essay about ten years ago for a philosophy class. It was my sophomore year of college, and we were asked to compare Plato’s allegory of the cave from The Republic to something happening in the modern world.

At the time, I was trying to wrestle through racism, not as a distant idea or just a topic for a paper, but as something that had always carried personal weight for me. I am adopted. Most of my siblings are adopted. My family has never fit neatly inside one little box. We were a mixed-up family in the best sense of the word, and because of that, race was not just a subject in a textbook. It was attached to names, faces, stories, and people I loved.

I have always been drawn to the story of civil rights, not just the marches and speeches, but the deeper ache underneath it all.

Why does humanity do this?

Why do we build systems that tell one group they are less than another? Why do we decide that skin color, culture, background, or belief gives us permission to degrade somebody else? Why do we need someone beneath us in order to feel secure above them?

Those questions were already heavy when I first wrote this.

Colin Kaepernick was kneeling during the national anthem. Alton Sterling had been killed in Baton Rouge. Philando Castile had been killed in Minnesota. Protests, outrage, grief, and argument were filling the country. It felt like America was being forced to look at something many people had spent generations trying not to see.

Since then, the list has only grown heavier.

George Floyd was killed. Ahmaud Arbery was murdered. Charlottesville happened. Breonna Taylor was killed. Stephen Perkins was shot and killed in Decatur, Alabama, not far from where I was living at the time.

I attended the peaceful protest outside city hall the day after Stephen Perkins died. I remember standing there and listening.

What struck me most was not the anger of the protesters. It was the divide in the crowd.

On one side, there were grieving and fearful people who were angry that something like this could still happen in 2023. They were not just reacting to a headline. They were standing there with the weight of history, the fear of the present, and the ache of wondering when enough would finally be enough.

And then there were others.

People who were there, people who would probably strongly object to ever being called racist, who could still speak about him in a way that quietly lowered the value of his life. They could stand there in the face of tragedy and whisper among themselves as if the greater concern was not that a man had died, but that people were upset about it.

They downplayed his right to safety.

They downplayed his right to be alive in his own driveway.

They spoke as if the expectation of life, dignity, and protection somehow had conditions attached to it.

That moment stayed with me.

Racism is not always as simple as someone shouting hatred in the street. Sometimes it shows up in the instinct to explain away another person’s death. Sometimes it shows up in who we give the benefit of the doubt to, and who we do not. Sometimes it shows up in how quickly we defend a system before we grieve a person.

It was here that Plato’s cave stopped feeling like an old philosophy assignment.

It started feeling like America.

In Plato’s Republic, he gives us the image of a cave. There are people chained inside from childhood. They cannot turn around. They cannot see the world as it really is. All they can see are shadows cast on the wall in front of them. Because those shadows are all they have ever known, they mistake them for reality.

That picture has always haunted me.

Because racism works like that.

It teaches humanity to stare at shadows and call them truth.

A child can be born into a world where prejudice is already in the air. Nobody has to sit them down and give them a formal lecture. They hear the jokes. They notice the distance. They feel who is trusted and who is feared. They learn which neighborhoods are spoken of with suspicion. They hear which names are said with honor and which names are said with contempt.

Over time, those shadows begin to feel normal.

That is one of the frightening things about racism. It is not always loud. It is not always a burning cross or a screaming mob. Sometimes it is inherited quietly. It is passed down through assumptions, glances, family stories, school systems, churches, dinner tables, and the little phrases people use without thinking.

A person can be raised inside a lie so long that the lie starts to feel like common 

sense.

That is true for the oppressed, and it is true for the oppressor.

When Israel came out of Egypt, they were physically free before they were mentally free. God had broken Pharaoh’s grip, but Egypt still had a grip on their imagination. They had walked out of bondage, but bondage had not fully walked out of them. When things got hard in the wilderness, they looked back and remembered Egypt as if it had been better than it was.

That is what oppression does. It does not just control the body. It tries to control the memory. It teaches people to distrust freedom. It teaches them to fear the future. It convinces them that survival under bondage is safer than uncertainty in the wilderness.

That is why freedom is never only legal. It must also become internal.

A chain can be removed from the wrist while still remaining wrapped around the 

mind.

This is part of what makes the story of racism in America so painful. The end of slavery did not instantly create freedom. A document can declare a person free, while a society continues to build schools, laws, neighborhoods, and customs that say otherwise. From slavery to segregation, from Jim Crow to educational inequality, America kept finding ways to preserve the shadow even after claiming to love the light.

And yet, light has a way of breaking in.

One of the great turning points in the fight against racism was education. Not education in the shallow sense of memorizing dates and passing tests, but education as exposure to truth. When schools began to integrate, it did more than change classrooms. It forced children who had been taught to fear one another to sit beside one another. It allowed white children to see that Black children were not the caricatures they had inherited. It allowed Black children to step into spaces that had been denied to them.

It was not clean. It was not easy. It was not without cruelty. But it mattered.

Because proximity has a way of challenging prejudice.

It is harder to hate someone honestly when you have heard them laugh. It is harder to believe a lie about a group once you have learned the names of the individuals inside that group. It is harder to keep calling someone “other” when they are sitting beside you, learning the same lesson, reading the same book, walking the same hallway, dreaming the same kinds of dreams.

Racism survives in distance.

It feeds on ignorance.

It thrives where people are allowed to imagine one another instead of know one another.

That is why education matters so much. Not just education in schools, but education in homes, churches, friendships, books, conversations, and honest reflection. We have to be willing to ask where our assumptions came from. We have to be willing to drag inherited ideas into the light and examine them. We have to be willing to admit that not every belief we were handed was holy, true, or worth keeping.

Some things we inherit are treasures.

Some things we inherit are shadows.

Wisdom is learning the difference.

I think this is where a lot of us struggle. We want racism to be something that only belongs to the obviously hateful. We want it to be limited to people in history books, old photographs, or grainy footage from another era. But racism is not always wearing a hood. Sometimes it is hiding in preferences. Sometimes it is hiding in silence. Sometimes it is hiding in the way we explain away injustice because dealing with it would cost us something.

And sometimes, it is hiding in us.

That does not mean every person is consciously malicious. It means we are all shaped by the worlds that raised us. We all have shadows we must confront. We all have assumptions we must bring before God and truth and ask, “Is this light, or is this just the cave I came from?”

The answer to racism is not pretending differences do not exist. That has never been the answer. Colorblindness sounds noble until it becomes another way of refusing to see someone fully. Our differences are not the problem. The problem is when we take those differences and build ladders of value with them.

Different does not mean lesser.

Different does not mean dangerous.

Different does not mean divided.

The beauty of humanity is that we are not all the same. A strong society is not built by flattening every culture, every story, every background, and every voice into one dull sameness. A strong society is built when we learn to honor the dignity of every person without needing them to become a copy of us first.

That is the world I still believe in.

Not because I am naive.

Not because I think education alone can heal every wound overnight.

Not because I think humanity naturally drifts toward justice if left alone.

I believe it because I have seen what happens when light enters the cave.

I have seen people change. I have seen inherited prejudice begin to crack. I have seen love challenge assumptions that argument never could. I have seen people who were raised to fear difference come to embrace it. I have seen what happens when someone finally realizes that the shadows on the wall were never the whole truth.

And that is still the work before us.

We must keep pulling shadows into the light. We must keep teaching our children better than we were taught. We must keep refusing to let old lies dress themselves up as tradition. We must keep building tables where people can sit together long enough to discover that the person they were taught to fear was never their enemy.

Racism is learned.

That means it can be confronted.

It can be challenged.

But most importantly, it can be unlearned.

But only if we are honest enough to admit that some of the shadows we inherited were never reality at all.

They were just shadows.

And it is time to step into the light.