A career of conscience: Mark McCormick honored with Kansas Press Association Hall of Fame nod

Critical race theory’s only error is its name. It isn’t a theory at all. It represents the lived Black experience. And I haven’t mentioned red-lining, environmental racism (Flint, Michigan), police terror, mass incarceration or how the government typically rammed interstate highways through Black communities.

Race remains an organizing principle in America. Any racial reckoning requires an understanding of this fundamental fact. From the Three-fifths Compromise, to the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dred Scott ruling that enslaved people had “no rights the white man was bound to respect,” to today.

After a fully fueled KC-135 military tanker crashed into what was then a segregated Wichita neighborhood, my sister Chan chose not to believe our 5-year-old cousin, Tracy Randolph, had died in the fiery 1965 disaster.

Chandra McCormick, weeks from her 12th birthday, watched soap operas with our great-grandmother, Jessie Pearl Holloway, whom we called Big Mama. Chan borrowed a common storyline from the shows and told herself Tracy had just lost her memory. When her amnesia lifted, Tracy would come home.

Despite Barry Sanders averaging 30 yards a carry in his first three games as a receiver at our Wichita high school, head coach Dale Burkholder said the athletic director warned him not to start Barry at running back.

But for Burkholder’s advocacy — defiantly starting Barry at running back and then producing a highlight reel and shopping it to universities — Barry might have found his own dreams deferred.

Why celebrate Brown as a triumph when so much of the country reflexively rejects virtually any attempt at addressing these old wrongs? We still don’t know if we’ll ever become the country we claim to be. Brown offers the perfect mirror.

The decision helped much of the country understand that even if physical facilities and other factors were equal, segregation still harmed Black children. It found this kind of separation unconstitutional.

Brown remains, for many, hallowed but hollow.

Rep. Ford Carr and supporters in the gallery for his disciplinary hearing must have felt as though Kehlani and Dreamville penned the lyrics of their haunting 2023 R&B hit “Shadows,” about them. The hearing unfolded with painful familiarity and hypocrisy.

Tropes, hundreds of years old. Ancient double standards. Selective outrage.

Those there supporting Carr had decades of the Black experience in the workplace under their belts and, like him, have had to walk around with their defensive dukes up. Jobs are minefields, where your ability to clothe and feed loved ones often is arbitrarily threatened.