I gave into the temptation today to respond to a comment I disagreed with on Facebook. Some guy said that the Black Lives Matter movement had no credibility as far as he was concerned. I answered that if you are a white person in America then you are racist because our society is inherently racist.

I said that, and I believe it, but then I also said that the important thing is to work to change our society. But now I’m questioning the use (both by me and by others) of the word “change.” An image popped into my head tonight of America as a garment woven together with all different colors of thread. The thread colors are the various essential elements of American society, and one of those elements is racism.

If we want racism to no longer be a problem in America, we can’t just change the garment. Changing the garment would be altering it—maybe cutting the sleeves off or having a design embroidered on it. But those racism threads would still be there. The alterations might make them appear differently or make them harder to see, but those alterations wouldn’t make them disappear. To get rid of the racism in the garment, we’d have to unravel the entire thing and then stitch it back together, leaving out the racism threads.

So, maybe it’s time we stopped talking about changing America to solve the problem of racism and started talking about unraveling it instead. We can make a stronger, more beautiful garment this time. We can change later if we so desire, but it’ll be fundamentally free of racism no matter what we do to it.