To the people of Kankakee,

We need to talk about something a lot of us already know but rarely say out loud: this community has a racism problem, and it’s not theoretical. It shows up in small, repeated ways that add up to something undeniable.

When a Black resident is accused of a crime, local coverage and the comment sections underneath it fill up fast with language that has nothing to do with the facts of the case and everything to do with race.

Words like “thug,” “animal,” and “that’s what they do” get thrown around freely, sometimes from real names, sometimes from accounts that exist only to say things people wouldn’t say to a neighbor’s face. And when similar offenses involve white residents, that same coverage and that same energy in the comments simply doesn’t show up with the same intensity, if it shows up at all.

This isn’t an accusation against any one outlet or any one commenter. It’s a pattern, and patterns are how a community tells you what it actually believes, regardless of what it says it believes. Silence is part of the pattern, too, when racist comments sit unanswered, unmoderated and unchallenged for days, that silence reads as permission.

And this isn’t only about how crime gets reported and discussed online. It’s also about what’s been happening in our physical spaces. We’ve seen a young LGBTQ woman targeted and physically assaulted at a local bar for who she is. We’ve seen race surface as a flashpoint in our schools, in ways that should alarm any parent, regardless of their child’s race.

None of these are isolated. They’re data points in the same pattern as a community where bigotry finds room to operate because too many of us treat it as someone else’s problem to name.

One person posting against this every day, alone, into silence, is activism, but it shouldn’t have to be a solitary act. If you’ve scrolled past one of these comment threads and felt a knot in your stomach but said nothing, this letter is for you, too. Silence from the majority is not neutrality. It’s a vote for the status quo.

This is not a call to cancel anyone or to pretend Kankakee is uniquely broken. Every town has this work to do. It’s a call for the people who run our local media to moderate their platforms like they matter, for our schools and institutions to take race-related incidents seriously instead of quietly managing them, and for residents, especially those of us who aren’t directly targeted by this, to stop being comfortable bystanders.

Kankakee can be a place where this gets named and addressed, or it can keep being a place where it gets explained away. That choice gets made one comment, one shared post, one conversation at a time. Choose to say something!

• Broke Dusty is a DJ and podcast host in Kankakee.