There’s a 3,000-year-old story in the Hebrew Bible that has always fascinated me.
The Hebrews escaped slavery in Egypt and were on their trek through the desert to soon create a free, new home in Israel.
Moses instructed 12 scouts (often referred to in English as “spies,” but the Hebrew word comes from “leg”) to travel throughout the would-be future homeland and report back to Moses upon their return. Their job was to gather information to help prepare the new nation for their plans to enter what was to be Israel.
But when the scouts arrived, they saw disturbing things.
“The land swallows its inhabitants,” they later told Moses and the anxious Hebrews.
All but two scouts spoke negatively of the land promised to them. They scared the daylights out of most of Moses’s some-million followers.
“Let’s go back to Egypt,” the formerly enslaved Hebrews cried out in response. “We don’t want to be swallowed up.”
Though the Bible doesn’t indicate that the scouts were lazy, an ancient 2,000-year-old Jewish text teaches that their mistake was that they were, in fact, lazy.
It’s hard to imagine how these 12 people who boldly accepted their mission to scope out the new land and risk their lives traveling to a new nation, not knowing what or who they would encounter or whether they’d be captured, could be called lazy.
Weren’t they the opposite of lazy?
When the scouts got to the land, they saw an unusually high number of funerals and burials. People were literally being buried in every city — dozens and dozens of funerals a day.
It wasn’t COVID or the Great Influenza epidemic of 1918. The scouts just couldn’t understand why there were so many deaths.
They hastily concluded that “the land swallows its inhabitants,” despite Moses already telling his new nation that they were promised the land the scouts now feared.
What the ancient text meant when it called the scouts lazy wasn’t that they were physically lazy. Far from it.
What they suffered from was laziness of their hearts and minds.
Had the scouts taken the time to dig deeper and ask questions of their leader and expert, Moses, they might have found some explanations beyond their limited, knee-jerk perspective.
They might have learned that there was nothing to fear and no reason to return to Egyptian slavery. They might have discovered a different explanation for what they saw.
But they were too lazy to dig deeper.
It’s the same with race in America.
Most of us are easily equipped to know that when someone burns a cross, calls someone the N-word or makes some other overtly racist comment, it’s pure bigotry. We all know that the KKK is up to no good.
But when things aren’t as obvious to the naked eye, like voter laws that aren’t written with the N-word. Where affordable housing or health care policies aren’t laced with racist comments. Or where drug-related criminal sentences don’t mention race. On the surface, where so many things seem race-neutral. We’re quick to reject the idea that racism might be built in.
We can’t understand it at a glance, so we report back and exclaim, “No racism!”
“The land swallows its inhabitants,” we conclude.
To understand the web of complicated American systems and structures and how they operate in racist ways, or to digest how much of America’s wealth was created on the backs of enslaved Africans, however, requires studying, researching and learning. It means asking experts and analyzing on a deeper level.
Critical race theory (CRT), which isn’t taught to five-year-olds despite media hysteria on the topic, dives into how much race plays an integral, sad piece in many American systems and policies. It’s based on legal research. Analyzing. Statistics and data. Deep explanations.
CRT, at its core, interrogates the role of race in society. It’s not a statement that every person is a bigot. Or that white people are devils.
So, if we’re going to understand and consider how race has been weaved into the very fabric of our systems over generations, we’ll need to end our mental laziness.
We Americans generally aren’t physically lazy. We have some of the hardest-working people on the planet.
But our intellectual laziness is causing tremendous harm to our Black brothers and sisters, and it’s preventing our nation from doing the healing work it so desperately needs.
We can’t continue to deny systemic and embedded racism just because Siri and Alexa can’t explain it in two sentences.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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From The Good Men Project on Medium
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Photo credit: Ian Harber on Unsplash
