People Call Me Racist

People point to this blog and say that people like me are the reason our culture continues to suffer racial hostility. Because I, along with quite a few other people, take the time to recognize, identify, and draw attention to the obvious hypocrisies of life in western culture. It kind of ranks right up there with the black slave who point out the obvious fact that all the black people are toiling in the field while the white people sit back and relax drinking a sarsaparilla tea on the shaded plantation porch. People would point to the black slave bringing attention to the obvious but taboo subject and call him or her the instigator of racial conflict. This is a serious what the hell moment for me. As far as I’m concerned, I’m so far from being the source of our perpetual state of racial conflict as one can get.

I’m down here toiling in the field with a number of other people struggling financially and I’m the trouble. I wrote an essay yesterday pointing out the obvious fact that black people constantly find themselves in a situation that could possibly be mitigated with help from the media. However, the plight of black people is constantly ignored and/or downplayed instead of being given the full attention that it would get if the story was about white people.

People’s perspective changes when they see skin color. A white man walks in a store and nobody thinks anything of it. A black man walks in the same store and suddenly security cameras start focusing on targets like miniature Hubble telescopes. Police can run across white kids breaking windows on an abandoned house and the cop would dismiss it as teenage exuberance. The same cop that runs across black kids doing the same behavior would haul their ass to jail. The judge will throw the book at the black kids.

Case in point, take a peek at what happened in Jena, Louisiana. White kids at a school hung nooses from a tree traditionally reserved for white kids because black kids wanted to break the tradition and sit under the tree. Now as a black person, if I see a white person hang a noose from a tree I would find it seriously racist and tremendously offensive. Noose hanging, especially in the context of black kids trying to end a tradition of racial difference to white kids, is a blatant act of racist terrorism. But the superintendent of schools, Roy Breithaupt, dismissed the whole affair saying, adolescents play pranks…it wasn’t a threat against anybody. Suddenly altercations between black and white students break out. White students beat up black students and threaten them with shotguns. Black students retaliate and beat up a white student. But hold on now! We can’t have people breaking the law. Although the white kid wasn’t seriously hurt, the black kids have been expelled and face charges of attempted second degree murder and now face prison time. The discrimination is staring you right in the face. Yet I’m the one keeping racism in the forefront of American culture.

The number of black women that have been reported as missing in the national media pales in comparison to the number of white women who are reported missing or their children are missing and are designed to pull at our public heart strings. It isn’t because these missing women are famous or rappers or celebrities or living the soap opera life. More than likely it is because in the grand design of the American culture’s attention span, whether it be by government design, corporate design, or just bigoted people’s preference, we are programmed to accept the fact that black people just don’t matter.

When compared to the white community the black community doesn’t enjoy a single advantage of American society. We don’t enjoy better health, wealth, income, or anything else that’s positive. But we suffer the greatest burden of anything negative such as incarcerations, rejections, death, sickness, unemployment, and public insults and/or ridicule.

This is not a work of anti-white fiction or a product of imagination intended to incite some kind of racial uprising. It is but the latest in a long list of constant manifestations of racial subjugation that has been synonymous with American culture for hundreds of years. Instead of people sticking their heads in the sand and trying to find excuses for their unsympathetic attitude towards the black community it would be helpful if more people took ownership of their participation and/or contribution to the problem. Until more people wake up to the fact that the black community is far from being considered an equal and valued component of this western culture I feel it is necessary to point out the continuing injustices of this society.