We are more than the boxes we build.
When I was a little girl, I genuinely believed racism would eventually disappear.
Maybe that was childhood innocence.
Maybe it was hope.
Or maybe, because I was already growing up inside enough ugliness, I needed to believe humanity would eventually get tired of hurting itself.
My stepfather was an alcoholic. He was profoundly abusive in nearly every way a person can be abusive.
My voice in that house was small.
Suppressed, really.
There were things I saw, heard, endured, and understood long before I possessed the courage—or even the language—to confront them.
One of those things was racism.
And it disturbed me deeply.
Not simply because of the words he used, although they were vile.
It was everything carried inside them.
Contempt.
Humiliation.
Bullying.
Superiority.
Anger.
An ugliness that seemed to rise from somewhere deep within him rather than from anything the people he condemned had actually done.
And there was something else that confused me even more.
One of the men my stepfather called one of his best friends was a Black man named Everett.
He could sit beside Everett.
Laugh with him.
Talk with him.
Care about him.
Call him his friend.
And then when Everett wasn’t there, speak about Black people in ways that made something inside my little-girl heart recoil.
Even then, I sensed the contradiction.
Everett was apparently permitted to be Everett.
Everyone else could still become a category.
I remember wanting desperately to hold a mirror in front of my stepfather and say something I never had the courage to say:
Those words aren’t defining them. They’re defining something within you.
I didn’t understand psychology.
I didn’t understand projection.
I didn’t know anything about conditioning, inherited beliefs, trauma, prejudice, power, insecurity, or the complicated machinery inside another human being.
I simply knew right from wrong.
And this was wrong.
The Finger Points Outward. The Reflection Often Points Inward.
Perhaps that childhood experience explains why this subject still touches such a tender place in me today.
At 59 years old, I look around and sometimes find myself wondering:
How are we still here?
Generations of people have fought against racial hatred and discrimination.
They marched.
They endured humiliation.
They challenged laws and social structures.
They sacrificed relationships, livelihoods, safety, freedom—and sometimes their very lives—so human beings who came after them might inherit a world that understood one extraordinarily basic truth:
The color of someone’s skin does not determine the value of their humanity.
As a child, I truly thought we would eventually survive that storm.
I believed somewhere along the course of my lifetime we would have suffered enough, learned enough, sacrificed enough, and loved enough to finally put some of these weapons down.
I thought we would emerge better versions of ourselves.
And yet here we are.
Different decade.
Better technology.
Phones that can recognize our faces.
Computers that can practically write our grocery lists for us.
And humanity is still struggling with:
Maybe don’t decide who somebody is by their pigmentation.
Come on, people.
We are far too old as a species to still be sorting one another like laundry.
But underneath my frustration is something much larger.
Grief.
Because I hate seeing people hurt.
I hate seeing people humiliated.
I hate watching someone be made smaller so another person can feel larger.
And I hate watching an entire human life squeezed into a box that was never large enough to contain it.
Maybe We’re Asking the Wrong Question
We spend an enormous amount of time asking:
Does racism still exist?
Of course racial prejudice still exists.
But perhaps that isn’t the question that moves us forward.
Maybe the harder—and more useful—question is:
Why does it continue to surface?
Because if we genuinely want something gone, naming it cannot be the final step.
We have to understand what keeps producing it.
What fear fed it?
What resentment nurtured it?
What belief was inherited and never questioned?
What wound hardened?
What insecurity needed superiority?
What anger needed somewhere to land?
What story about those people was written long before an actual individual ever entered the room?
What accountability became so uncomfortable that pointing outward felt easier than looking inward?
Sometimes racism grows from hatred.
Sometimes ignorance.
Sometimes fear.
Sometimes learned prejudice.
Sometimes power.
Sometimes resentment.
Sometimes the comfort of belonging to a group that has already decided who the enemy is.
Human behavior is rarely simple enough to fit into one explanation.
And understanding those roots does not excuse racist behavior.
Understanding is not absolution.
It is investigation.
Because condemnation can identify the weed.
Reflection has to find the root.
But Racism Isn’t the Only Card in the Deck
This is where I realized the conversation becomes much larger than race.
Human beings have quite the collection of shields.
Race.
Gender.
Politics.
Religion.
Trauma.
Family history.
Status.
Victimhood.
A diagnosis.
Past mistreatment.
Age.
Authority.
Good intentions.
Even love.
All of those things can be legitimate and deeply important pieces of someone’s story.
But sometimes they become something else.
Sometimes they become the thing we grab when the mirror becomes uncomfortable.
The shield changes.
The human tendency underneath it often does not.
We can explain our behavior before we examine it.
Defend it before we question it.
Point before we reflect.
And somewhere underneath all of that noise sits one deceptively simple question:
What part of this belongs to me?
Oof.
Nobody particularly enjoys that question.
We’d much rather arrive with exhibits A through Q documenting everybody else’s contribution to the disaster.
Preferably laminated.
Possibly color-coded.
Unfortunately, self-awareness is rude like that.
It keeps asking us to look at our own side of the table.
Sometimes our pain explains our behavior without excusing it.
Sometimes our history deserves compassion while our present choices still require accountability.
Sometimes we really were treated unfairly—and still responded unfairly ourselves.
Sometimes someone else genuinely did something wrong—and we brought something unhealthy into the situation too.
Both things can be true.
That is the middle.
And there is almost always more truth hiding in the middle than there is shouting from either end.
The Middle Is Where the Story Lives
The beginning tells us what happened.
The end tells us where everyone landed.
But the middle?
The middle carries everything.
The history.
The wounds.
The assumptions.
The fears.
The conditioning.
The things someone was taught.
The things someone survived.
The choices they made because of those experiences.
The choices they made despite those experiences.
The accountability embraced.
The accountability avoided.
The things every person carried into the room that nobody else could see.
That is where I want to look.
Not because I want to excuse harmful behavior.
And not because I want to stand in judgment over the person displaying it.
Quite the opposite.
I want to understand why the weapon was picked up.
Because the person holding the weapon is still a person.
And if our response to dehumanization is simply another form of dehumanization, we haven’t healed very much.
We have only changed hands on the weapon.
We can say:
This behavior is unacceptable.
And simultaneously ask:
What happened inside this human being that made this behavior possible?
Those questions can coexist.
Accountability and compassion are not enemies.
Neither are truth and understanding.
The Box Is Too Small
To judge someone primarily by the color of their skin is profoundly reductive.
It takes the enormous complexity of a human life and compresses it into one visible characteristic.
And in doing so, we miss the possibility of who that person actually is.
But we do this with more than race.
We look at Mom and sometimes see only Mom.
But before she was ever our mother, she was somebody’s little girl.
Dad was somebody’s little boy.
Your neighbor isn’t merely the person who lives three houses down.
Your coworker isn’t merely the human who insists on reheating fish in the office microwave—which, admittedly, may require a separate discussion about personal accountability.
Every human being standing before us is more.
Someone’s child.
Someone’s sister.
Someone’s brother.
Someone’s best friend.
Someone’s safe place.
Someone’s disappointment.
Someone’s heartbreak.
Someone’s hero.
Someone carrying memories we have never heard.
Grief we have never witnessed.
Mistakes we know nothing about.
Victories nobody applauded.
Questions they’ve never spoken aloud.
And chapters of their story we weren’t there to read.
Their skin color cannot possibly tell us all of that.
Neither can their gender.
Their political affiliation.
Their religion.
Their social status.
Their diagnosis.
Their past.
Their worst day.
Their greatest mistake.
The moment we reduce someone to a category, we stop encountering the person and begin interacting with our idea of them instead.
The box was never big enough.
Judgment May Be One of Our Most Socially Acceptable Cruelties
Perhaps one of the behaviors we should be examining very carefully in 2026 is judgment itself.
Not discernment.
We need discernment.
Not accountability.
We desperately need accountability.
I’m talking about that quick, convenient form of judgment that decides who someone is before becoming curious about why they are.
And goodness, humans are efficient at it.
One photograph.
One sentence.
One disagreement.
One political affiliation.
One mistake.
One interaction.
One skin color.
Boom.
Case closed.
Human being solved.
Except human beings aren’t crossword puzzles.
And if we have enough time to judge somebody, perhaps we have enough time to try to understand them.
If we have enough energy to point outward, perhaps we have enough energy to look inward first.
Where did my reaction come from?
What am I assuming?
What am I projecting?
What did I bring into this?
Is this actually about the person standing before me?
Or did I arrive carrying something that existed long before they did?
Is this truth?
Or is this hurt, fear, resentment, conditioning, pride, insecurity, or history wearing truth’s nametag?
Those aren’t comfortable questions.
But growth rarely begins with comfort.
Put the Card Down for a Minute
So maybe when we’re tempted to reach into the proverbial deck—
the race card,
the gender card,
the political card,
the victim card,
the status card,
or whatever card happens to be conveniently sitting on top—
we put the deck down for a minute.
Just for a minute.
Look again.
Look at the person.
Look at the circumstances.
Look at the evidence.
Look at the behavior.
And then—and here’s everybody’s favorite part—
look at yourself.
Maybe the card genuinely belongs in the conversation.
Sometimes it absolutely will.
Racism should be named when racism occurs.
Sexism should be named when sexism occurs.
Abuse should be named when abuse occurs.
Discrimination should be named when discrimination occurs.
Truth should never be softened merely to make everyone comfortable.
But neither should enormously serious words become shortcuts around thoughtful examination.
Because when everything becomes racism, sexism, abuse, hatred, trauma, oppression, narcissism, or whatever language happens to carry the most cultural weight at the moment, we risk diluting our ability to recognize those things clearly when they are genuinely present.
Truth deserves greater care than that.
So does the person involved.
What Do We Want to Take Away?
There is always something available to take away from an encounter.
We can take outrage.
We can take resentment.
We can take vindication.
We can take another reason to divide ourselves.
We can take a fresh finger to point.
Or—
we can take understanding.
And I choose understanding.
Not because understanding means accepting everything.
It doesn’t.
Not because compassion eliminates boundaries.
It doesn’t.
Not because everyone’s behavior should be excused by whatever happened to them.
Absolutely not.
I choose understanding because wisdom seems like the better gain.
If something ugly happens before me, I want more than the satisfaction of identifying the villain.
I want to understand what the moment can teach me about being human.
What created this?
What sustained it?
What could interrupt it?
And perhaps most importantly:
What can I change within myself so I don’t add more of it to the world?
Because everything begins somewhere inside us.
So does judgment.
So does prejudice.
So does projection.
But so do compassion, humility, curiosity, accountability, and change.
Maybe This Is How We Begin
I once believed humanity would simply outgrow racism.
I don’t believe that anymore.
Human beings don’t automatically outgrow much of anything.
We have to choose growth.
Again.
And again.
And again.
One assumption questioned.
One inherited belief challenged.
One projection recognized.
One apology offered.
One uncomfortable mirror faced.
One person given the dignity of being known individually.
One moment when we decide understanding is worth more than being right.
One time we catch ourselves reaching into that deck and say:
You know what? Put the card down.
Maybe this isn’t about their race.
Maybe this isn’t about their gender.
Maybe this isn’t about their politics.
Maybe this isn’t even completely about them.
Maybe there is something here for me to examine too.
And occasionally humanity could probably benefit from the highly sophisticated spiritual discipline of:
Just cut it out, man.
Stop putting people into boxes.
Stop deciding entire human beings from fragments.
Stop using our wounds as permission to wound.
Stop confusing projection with truth.
And stop demanding from everyone else the self-reflection we are unwilling to practice ourselves.
If you have time to judge someone, you have time to try to understand them.
And if you’re going to invest the energy anyway?
Spend it becoming wiser.
Understand why the weapon was picked up.
Hold accountable what was done with it.
Then help one another learn how to put it down.
Because maybe the way forward was never going to be discovering which people deserve our judgment.
Maybe it was learning how deeply to understand one another while still standing firmly beside truth.
See the person.
Examine the behavior.
Consider the context.
Own your part.
Follow the evidence.
Choose compassion.
Seek truth.
Grow.
And when you discover you’ve been carrying a box another human being never belonged inside?
Put it down.
No ceremony necessary.
No eighteen-part Facebook argument.
Just:
“Well, crap. I got that wrong.”
And become a better version of yourself because you did.
The box was always too small.
The human being never was.
Gentle Guide Forward
So take the box apart.
Put the card down.
Look at the person in front of you long enough to remember they are more than the label that first came to mind.
And before deciding what someone else needs to change, make sure you have checked your own reflection first.
That does not mean excusing harmful behavior.
It means refusing to become harmful while responding to it.
Hold people accountable with truth.
Meet them with grace.
Leave room for growth.
And when you discover that you have judged too quickly, assumed too much, projected something that belonged to you, or shoved someone into a box they never fit inside—
own it.
Correct it.
Apologize if needed.
Grow.
No self-flogging required.
No three-day shame retreat.
Just a good old-fashioned:
“Well… that one was mine.”
Then do better.
Because grace is not the absence of accountability.
Grace is what gives accountability somewhere useful to go.
And if we want a kinder, wiser, less divided world, we do not wait for everyone else to build it first.
We begin with ourselves.
One judgment interrupted.
One assumption questioned.
One person understood more deeply.
One better choice at a time.
Until next time, keep your heart soft, your mirror handy, and your boxes empty.
And for the love of humanity—
just cut it out, man.
Keep walking in the Light.
— Tina N. Campbell
Scribed in Light
“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”
— Viktor E. Frankl
“Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love.”
— Ephesians 4:2
“Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?”
— Matthew 7:3
Scribed In Light 
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