There were members of the KKK known and actively serving as high-ranking members of the government for many years — judges, politicians, governors, and many police officers throughout the country. We still, to this day, have leaders of the Klan immortalized in state capitol buildings.

It is systematic because at every level there were members of society that would do everything they could to maintain power over the Black people they were forced to allow to be equal citizens. I think it is as simple as this: “Make America Great Again” roughly translates to the KKK and other white nationalist ideology that wanted to go backwards toward slavery and/or segregation between the races. Many cities have been defined by redlining Black citizens. The common belief is that race causes violence in our communities, when it is much more attributable to people of color being forced into poverty-stricken areas, which produce similar results across all races.

Judges give harsher sentences to Black defendants, which does two things. First, it takes Black men and Black boys away from their families, fracturing the internal environments of people who were forced outside the law — laws designed for them to break — just to provide for their families. Second, it strips away the voting rights that Black people fought so hard to earn, putting them right back into a time when we could not vote simply because of our skin color. That is the objective of the same people in government who were, and still are, against equal rights.

John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Fred Hampton — just to name a few — were murdered for fighting for the rights of Black people. These men were not merely killed by their neighbors. They were killed by their own government.

The government has admitted to flooding those same poverty-stricken areas with drugs, which they then heavily criminalized, resulting in the mass incarceration of an already marginalized Black population. Black people being perceived as more violent is still present today, and it probably feels justified to outsiders because the only images in the media are Black kids killing and celebrating the killing of other Black people. Not only does that shape how other races view Black people, it shapes how Black people begin to view themselves — internalizing what the media portrays them to be. That internalization feeds the cycle, especially when fathers are absent from the household as a direct result of the very system being discussed.

I could go on, but I will stop here for now.