We are living in a pandemic inside a pandemic. One is viral and the other is distinctly human. We are beginning to understand the former, but we seem further than ever from understanding the latter. Coronavirus, the novel corona, is terrifyingly impersonal; racism, America’s original disease, is profoundly personal. Will we ever figure it out? Both pandemics ask of each of us: What does survival look like for me? The answer is different depending on your color.

I am a 55-year-old white male, a social justice lawyer, a husband and son and father. All aspects of my biography are challenged by racism. In this, I am not alone. There is no peace without justice. And since before its founding, America has been driven by injustice. But because our forebears were not brought here as slaves, white Americans can be blind to racial injustice.