As a kid growing up in the immediate aftermath of the Civil Rights movement, I learned early on that racism was a grievous injustice. Black people suffered for hundreds of years in a system designed to use their labor and bodies to make a few White people rich.

After the end of the Civil War, the system of enslaving people toppled. White people thought up new ways to use Black labor and Black bodies to make and maintain wealth. Jim Crow laws emerged, devised to keep wealth and power in White hands and Black people “in their place.” White people used terror to bully and intimidate.

I saw the grainy videos of fire hoses and police dogs. I saw the truncheons and ax handles. I saw the harassment at the lunch counters and the protest marches.

We were kids. But we heard the whispers at the edge of conversations about riots and assassinations. We caught glimpses of men wearing sheets and burning crosses in black and white photos. We learned about Dr. Martin Luther King and Malcolm X.

But by the time I started thinking about these sorts of things in earnest, people around me felt like we’d passed through the troubled waters. Nobody said it too loud lest we jinx the progress we’d made, but there was some optimism that the big problems of racism had been more or less conquered.

My people weren’t activists. We didn’t march. We didn’t protest. We didn’t “sit-in” or boycott.

But our folks forbade us from using certain racist words, which only bigots and “vulgar people” used. I could get in just as much trouble for using the N-word as for any swear word. I learned early on that all people were created equal and that (at least theoretically) we were required to treat everyone that way.

Over the years, being identified as a racist increasingly became shameful. The overt kinds of racism taken for granted before the Civil Rights movement had become socially unacceptable. And when we elected Barack Obama, many cultural observers said we’d finally defeated racism. “We now live in a post-racial society,” the thinking went, “where racism is so offensive that no enlightened person can hold their head up in public if they have bigoted views.”

Now, whether you bought the idea that we’d finally overcome our racist past, it certainly felt like we’d turned a corner in the fight. Being a racist was one of the worst things you could say about a person. People seemed more afraid of being called racist than actually being racist. Having charges of racism made against you could bring down the wrath of society on your head; it could end your career.

But a few years back, we witnessed the reemergence of White Nationalism and its tawdry parent, White Supremacy. Our political life shifted profoundly. Being called a racist still brings with it a cultural stain. But people whose racism had receded into the shadows began to feel emboldened to let it leak out in public once again.

The use of dog-whistles—which had become the passive-aggressive way of keeping racism alive—increased. Phrases like “inner-city crime,” “black on black violence,” and “law and order” became coded ways of disparaging Black people.

But then, we elected another president who was a virtuoso when it came to playing that dog whistle. And the people who had lived in the shadows with their racism finally felt comfortable coming back out into the open to try their newfound freedom in public. From Charlottesville to Louisville to Minneapolis, overt racism came rushing back, signifying that we hadn’t gotten nearly as far around the corner as we thought. Even the phrase “Black Lives Matter,” the truth of which should be obvious, has become incendiary to those convinced Black shouldn’t matter nearly as much as feelings of White grievance.

We’ve all noticed it. Alas, I’m not telling you anything new. We bump into it all the time in our current world.

But what I find so appalling—and therefore, so dispiriting—about the re-emergence of public racism is the loss of a sense of shame about it. For a time anyway, it appeared as though we’d found racism shameful enough that people fought hard to keep their bigotry a well-guarded secret. Anymore, though, racists wear their shame and their Confederate flags with pride.

One of the most notable developments in our recent politics is the death of shamelessness. Some people care very little about the public exposure of their cruelty and hypocrisy. Getting caught being a racist seems to matter very little to some of our neighbors. But getting called a racist can still make racists spit nails.

So, I guess there is still a capacity to feel some shame, but it’s not nearly as much as I think is called for.

Because of the declining fear of shame in our culture, interpreting the Bible accurately has become more difficult for us. The ancient Near East operated in what anthropologists and sociologists call an honor/shame-based culture.

In an honor/shame-based society, people accrue social capital through the reputation of their family name. Any action that disgraces the family is something one should avoid at all costs. In many cases, death is preferable to dishonor. Some Asian and Middle Eastern cultures still operate within this kind of world.

Although widely condemned, one of the most extreme forms of this kind of culture is honor killing, which still happens in some societies. Perhaps you’ve heard of them? It’s a murder committed against an individual by someone trying to avoid dishonor. The victims of these honor killings are usually women who’ve been charged with some sexual indiscretion. But the thinking behind the whole practice is that a person has disgraced their family’s reputation, and to wipe out that disgrace, a gesture must be made to restore honor.

In these cultures, you climb the social ladder by accruing honor among those in your culture. On the other hand, suffering humiliation will knock you down a few pegs.