Ben Carson and Donald Trump, Republican candidates for president

This country has an evil, evil past. Built on the oppression of millions, — native people, black people, Asian people, Latina/o people, Hispanic people, women people, Irish people, Jewish people, poor white people, the list goes on — suffering is scorched into our soil. Through the massacre and enslavement of our fellow human beings, the United States, and the white wealthy men in charge of it, became the richest in the world.

We’ve come a long way in the last century, and the sacrifices of those who fought for justice in a justice-less world are to be greatly honored, but the advancements we’ve made say far more about the depravity of the place we began than the goodness of the place we’re at now.

There is little to be proud of when “progress” means you no longer erect signs saying “White Only,” or have presidents calling black Americans, “ape-like naked savages, who… prey on creatures not much wilder or lower than themselves.”

There is especially little to be proud of when a presidential front-runner calls the continued battle for justice “disgusting” and “disgraceful.”

I am white, and I am ashamed. Ashamed to be a part of a country that, every second of every day, perpetuates white supremacy and the oppression of my fellow citizens. Ashamed to live in a place where black bodies still lie dead on the street, with no justice brought to their grieving families, where hundreds of thousands of black and brown men are thrown behind bars at a crippling rate, where children who happen to have darker skin are punished far more than their peers who happen to be lighter, where our schools are segregated and unequally funded based on the made-up construction of race, where police training teaches officers to fear the citizens they are supposed to protect, where four times as many babies with skin not pale are born into poverty than the pale ones, where black men with no criminal record are treated the same by prospective employers as white convicts, where laws are passed to stop Americans with darker skin from voting, where women are constantly portrayed as stereotypes in the media, where college students have racial epithets hurled at them just for existing —

Ashamed to live in a land where all of this is ignored, where racism is claimed and taught to our children as a thing of the past —

Where a candidate for our highest office demeans and denigrates the continuous struggle black Americans are forced to fight as, “like, crazy.”

Trump understands nothing, not our history, not what this land has seen, not where these people and this nation have come from. He verbally spouts the evil baked into our soil, the wickedness of our ancestors that lives and breathes, oppresses and abuses, all around us, every moment, all the time, relentless, always.

This delusional, dangerous man is attacking young people for standing up for justice, thinking their demands to create awareness and inclusion programs on campus, to have black men and women teach at the schools where black young people are so discriminated against, to have more funding for the mental health of persecuted students, to have more resources for social justice on campus, are “crazy.”

He understands nothing, and neither does Carson, who’s demeaned our fellow Americans’ deep and tragic fight for justice as a matter of “politically correct [policing].”

Demanding fair treatment, relief from verbal and physical abuse, the spread of knowledge, empathy, and understanding to white kids, equal representation within schools — all this is no matter of political correctness. It is a matter of moral, spiritual, human correctness. It is a matter of righteousness, an emergency that cries for change — one of the greatest struggles of our time.

And Carson belittles it as being “politically correct.” He does the people unspeakably great disrespect to claim that their necessary, honest, heart-breaking, angry call for justice is a matter of saying the right thing not to step on anyone’s toes.

How on earth is a demand for an end, finally, to the centuries of abuse and cruelty that black people have suffered at the hands of the U.S. government and its people, possibly reduced to a spat about saying something “offensive?” Why do we not feel, deeply, the offensiveness that comes with saying these things about this group of people who have exactly one thing, and one thing only, in common — how the world treats them? Why do we not stop verbalizing this evil voluntarily, whether said in jest or seriousness?

Why is the push to stop racism so disturbingly redefined as impeding upon what other people can say? How on earth is the movement for freedom and justice restructured as oppressing anyone else?

Stop asking me to not say racist things! It’s really bothering me! Stop asking for liberty and justice, people who have had their freedom under an onslaught for centuries!

It’s mind-boggling. It’s a heinous mischaracterization of what’s going on in this country. The fight on Missouri University Campus, the fight for BlackLivesMatter all across the country, is about freedom.

It is a continuation of the long-heard cry for the white people in this country to examine their prejudice, to work to deeply understand what it is to be black in America, to fight to remove the root of racism that is embedded in our minds and hearts, to begin the long, creeping journey towards mending these endless years of tragedy, towards rectifying the shame that is ours to profit from being white in a country where it is so criminal to be black.

It is a call for the blade to finally be removed, for the stitches to be sewn, and for the long wait to begin for the ravaged wound to heal.

Yet still our politicians disparage and infantilize the movement. Still they toss it off as “political correctness,” still they dare to call it “disgusting” and “disgraceful,” when it is their statements that are disgusting and disgraceful.

if we continue to allow them to permeate our politics, if we continue to deny our fellow humans in their march for justice, we doom ourselves to a nation of hatred and abuse. Racism is seared into the soul of this country. It isn’t going to go away with time. We must make a massive conscious effort to bleed out the infection. We must attack our leaders for spewing racist bile and hatred, for attacking immigrants and Hispanics and, in the case of Trump, attacking Americans who simply have more melanin in their skin than him.

We must unite and fight together, on the Missouri campus and everywhere else, to set ourselves free from this legacy of oppression.

We must liberate the soul of this nation because, if we do not — it is us all who will perish.