I've been doing a fair amount of reading on the subject from many different angles. It's interesting how much we (and here I mean
everyone, of all cultures and skin tones) kind of take for granted that we "know". For example, everyone kind of thinks they "know" about MLK and Malcolm X, but
how much do they "know", really? And how much (what percentage of the entirety of the big picture) did these two legendary men themselves "know",
really.
And then what about other extremely substantial (but not widely legendary) people like James Baldwin and Maya Angelou (who doesn't even get a mention on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_civil_rights_leaders)? How many others are out there that I should make the time to read some of their ideas (like a list of civil rights activists, sorted by descending "importance" (relative to today) of ideas)? And for each, how to best educate myself? And this is leaving aside all of the other important thinkers from other domains who aren't directly associated with the civil rights movement, but whose ideas very much are relevant to the issue? And here again, same problem: who to educate myself on, in what order, and how?
To me, racism seems like an extremely complicated problem. It also seems to me that most people consider it to be rather simple.
Speaking of complexity and education, I wonder if we could dig a bit deeper into this:
>> Is this observable mistreatment that people are receiving every day, or is it more of a constant sense of not belonging, like being an outsider of some kind?
> Is this observable mistreatment that people are receiving every day
> Yes.
To my way of thinking, this style of thinking is way too imprecise, if one's goal is to truly understand the situation. I have a sense that this next question is very difficult to receive without taking offense (due to its heartlessly statistical nature), but hopefully by noting that first it will minimize that problem, at least enough to judge it worthy of a serious reply.
In your estimation, what percentage of people of color receive observable [1] mistreatment every day? Or perhaps a simpler way of putting it is: of all POC, what percentage receive at least one observable mistreatment, per day? (And then it would also be interesting to roll these daily statistics up to an average per year and observe changes over time, as well as break it out into different dimensions and categories, etc.)
Due to the complexity of humanity, there are an infinite number of different ways to consider any given problem. Racism is but one problem of many (albeit it an especially important one), and the above is but one perspective from which to consider it. I make no assertion about the relative importance of this perspective, but I strongly assert that it has importance in an absolute sense.
[1] By observable mistreatment, I mean that a diverse group of third parties would be able to recognize the event (perhaps after having the nuance pointed out to them first), and reasonably agree that it plausibly qualifies as mistreatment.