Racism was a little like that. Sometimes the initial symptoms were small: microaggressions here, simmering resentment there. If you dealt with it head-on, maybe you could keep it contained. If you didn’t deal with it, though, it came back with a vengeance: just like that little bacterium. Came back worse. Entrenched. So entrenched, in fact, the longer you let it go, the harder it was to control, and soon everything started to break down.
