On an early morning drive through Washington, DC, I passed the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and was met with a banner that read, “Never Stop Asking Why.” This simple statement got my mental wheels turning. May we continue to ask why:
Why were so many millions of people murdered senselessly? Why is there so much hate in people’s hearts? Why do so many people think they are superior to others based on race, religion, culture, nationality, sexual orientation, gender? Why did so many stand by and watch? Why, after what happened to the Jewish people, does genocide continue across the globe?
“Never Stop Asking Why” is an important concept not just about the Holocaust, but about other issues of justice as well. Well into the 21st century, it is easy to turn a blind eye to our nation’s dark history of lynching. To combat such complacency, Bryan Stevenson and the Equal Justice Initiative opened the National Memorial for Peace and Justice—a monument to the thousands of Black Americans who were lynched by White Americans for more than a century after the fall of slavery. The work of EJI challenges us to ask why:
Why did a nation that on paper espoused freedom and equality as founding principles allow some to lord over others through terror and violence rather than equal protection under the law? Why were so few perpetrators of lynchings prosecuted for first degree murder? Why have reparations not been paid to the families of victims? Why did White people treat lynchings like public carnivals, complete with picnic lunches and photographs of smiling faces under the charred bodies hanging from the trees above? Why did anyone think any of this was ok?
It is easy to dismiss the Holocaust or the pervasive practice of lynching in the United States of America as past atrocities—the sins of past generations. It is easy to delude ourselves into thinking such things could never happen again. It is all too easy to absolve ourselves of the blood of the past by telling ourselves that we are not like the people who did that.
And yet, we as people, as a nation, as a global community, continue to commit daily atrocities. We continue to stand by silently as injustice abounds. We continue to be complicit in the subjugation, oppression, and exclusion of so many of our brothers and sisters as full members of the human community. Why?
Why do we blame immigrants and asylum seekers for their plight? Why do we separate young children from their parents when they arrive at our borders? Why do we hate and fear people with religious beliefs different from ours? Why do people think they have any right to sit in righteous judgment of others about anything? Why do men think they have any right to decide what happens to a woman’s body? Why do White men think they have the de facto right to seats in a university classroom or a corporate boardroom, and why in the world do they really believe that those with brown skin and the lack of a 400 year head start are on an equal playing field with them?
Because I have spent the last two and a half decades working to end homelessness, my thoughts turn there. This is not because I believe homelessness is the only issue our society faces, but because it is the culmination of so many ways we fail our fellow citizens. It is the symptom of so many broken systems—affordable housing, health and behavioral health, child welfare, criminal justice...the entire social safety net. And it is an issue of racial justice, with people of color comprising the majority of those who become homeless in America. Why?
Why do we think housing is something that must be earned? Why do we allow children to be homeless at all, much less allowing them to make up 1 in 4 people experiencing homelessness in America? Why do we fail to make the obvious connections between structural racism and homelessness? Why do we blame individuals and families for their own poverty? Why do we make a distinction between the “deserving poor” and the “undeserving poor”? Why does homelessness exist at all in the richest nation in the history of the world?
Never stop asking why: This charge should drive us every day. It should strengthen our commitments. It should ground our understanding in the realities of the past and of the present. It should push us never to become complacent or self-righteous and to wake us if we have fallen asleep.
Never stop asking why:
Why do we not believe that it is our fundamental responsibility to take care of our fellow human beings during the short time we have on this planet?
Or, if we believe it, why do we fail to act on that belief?