“Tell me where it hurts” are the brief yet comforting words our primary care, ER, or Surgical physician says to us. This is often followed up by, “I can give you something for the pain.” 

Lucy, Anarcha, and Betsey are the names of slave women operated on by James Marion Sims, widely known as the father of Modern Gynecology. They never had the good fortune of hearing these comforting words. He operated on them in experimental surgeries minus any anesthesia. Only after a successful conclusion of his research, he introduced the use of anesthesia as he started performing on white women. 

The white women were, advantaged with privilege. Whether knowingly or unknowingly the privilege they experienced was apparent to those outside of the protective knapsack of this privilege. They didn’t ask for it; they weren’t even aware of it. However, that does not remove the pain suffered by those that preceded them on the operation table.

In his 2008 landmark speech on race, then-presidential candidate Barak Obama made this profound treatise. 

“Most working- and middle-class white Americans don’t feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience — as far as they’re concerned, no one handed them anything. They built it from scratch. They’ve worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pensions dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and they feel their dreams slipping away. And in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense. So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear an African-American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they’re told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time. Like the anger within the black community, these resentments aren’t always expressed in polite company. But they have helped shape the political landscape for at least a generation.”

This toxic atmosphere begs for the following questions to be answered on all sides of the ethnic divide. Have you ever thought about putting down your protest sign, taking off that protest hat, turning off your favorite news network, and unfolding your praying hands, getting up off your knees to actually travel across the expanse of this divide to ask your neighbor, “Where does it hurt” and how can I help relieve the pain? Scripture reminds us in this fashion: 

“If I entertain evil in my heart, the Lord will not hear me.” 

Psalm 66:18 The Voice

Understanding that pain is real and is part of the human condition. We must not become reduced to seeing everyone different than us as the enemy.

History can never be erased, but it can be repeated, rhymed, and revisited, especially by those who never learned it in the first place. That is why a whole and comprehensive history must be taught in our schools, enriching the real significance in our youngest learners’ lives by embracing and sharing in the lives of equally significant young learners that may be facing a different American experience. 

So, try them on, and take a step or two; your feet may slide or slip because the size is too big for you. The temptation to quit may holler in your soul because it challenges your comfort. That is where the sequelitis of the conversation meanders into something that can end in a real and unmistakable change of hearts and minds. 

What the above describes is Empathy. It’s not always pretty or chronological but nevertheless persistent. Empathy does not mean compromise on one’s personal or group beliefs. It simply means understanding what it is to walk in another person’s shoes. 

By shaving away outliers at the fringes of rhetorical imagination we will find that we have so many things in common and we are not as different as we are told we are. However, we often succumb to incantations of divisiveness. This is where the loudest voices on the fringes gain their strength. This is noted in scripture’s words saying,

“Any place where you find jealousy and selfish ambition, you will discover chaos and evil thriving under its rule.” James 3:16-17 “VOICE”

In the end, the breath of our humanity weighs in the balance, and when it is snuffed out like a candle. the ugly residue of the base animal emotions of fight, flight, freeze and fawn are all that remain. When we look at the darkest moments of our history, we can find the commonality of dehumanization at its root.

That is where the concept of Three-Fifths Magazine was birthed, by speaking truth to power and restoring the humanity that was never fully restored to populations that were written out of the American story by the Three-Fifths Compromise and every member of BIPOC America that suffered similar dehumanization. We have invested the last two and a half years writing these populations back into their rightful place in this story. This, we will continue as a Voice of Clarity purposed to dismantle systemic racism and ask the proverbial questions of “Where does it hurt?” and “How can I help relieve the pain?”

Finally, before imaginations go adrift into the land of “whataboutism,” According to Janice Gassam Asare, Ph.D and her article Is Diversity Equity And Inclusion Officially Dead? “Anti-racism should be the nucleus of any DEI efforts; a failure to prioritize racial equity in DEI work means that inequities will continue to persist. The result of the divestment from DEI will have deleterious effects on racial diversity in the workplace. Deprioritizing DEI means that racial disparities will widen.” 

Yes, many Americans have real concerns about pain and hurt, but it must be made clear, to have a thorough understanding of, and healing of the original national transgressions of chattel slavery, indigenous genocide and their extrapolations to the present, must be prioritized in any conversation of national healing.

By Kevin Robinson Founder/Editor, Publisher of Three-Fifths Magazine