You Damn Skippy I’m A Victim Of Racism

A man is sitting in his home chilling in his garden without a care in the world. Suddenly some people burst into his home, jack him up, and kidnap him, his wife, his son, and his daughter. The entire family is snatched up from their home blind folded, thrown in the trunk of some vehicle, and whisked away from their home. After months in captivity the man finds himself in chains standing in front of a crowd of people he doesn’t recognize and is sold to the highest bidder. His wife and children are sold to people else where. The man is beaten and humiliated for not understanding. The pride of the man is ripped away from his character. He is no longer entitled to his religion, his family, his language, his history, or anything else he holds dear that identifies him as who he is. The man has children that are not his. His children belongs to the people that enslaved him or stole him from his home.

The man’s children’s children’s children are freed and are told to fend for themselves. His descendants are terrorized by the descendants of the people that stole him away from his home. The man’s children are brutally attacked and degraded simply because they are so obviously different from the people who control the wealth. Some of the children are hung from trees in sadistic rituals designed to instill terror in the remaining children. The children are given substandard educations, denied the right to vote, legally defined as less than people and are the subject of studies that prove their inferiority beyond a reasonable doubt. The children have to fight for the right to vote, the right to be considered fully human, the right to have civil rights, the right to an equal education, the right to earn a living, the right to just be. Some of the man’s children reach positions of success beyond the man’s wildest dreams. But so many of his children are kept in a state of subjugation in a loose conspiracy of employers, educators, law enforcers, legislators, court representatives, and the like who refuse to recognize the children as equals entitled to the same benefit of the doubt that the children of the abductors are given. And now people want to ridicule these children for feeling like victims in this elaborate system so carefully engineered that some children of the stolen man defend it with their last breath before they would defend their brothers and sisters.

As one of the stolen man’s children, you damn straight I feel like I’m a victim.

Everyday on television I see my brothers and sisters enthusiastically abused and beaten by police officers who could not give any less of a damn about the welfare of black people. Indeed, the welfare of the black community at large takes second place to their zeal for kicking some black man in the ass and exposing the public to massive and punishing lawsuits.

But then again, I watch news reports of judges who are incredibly insensitive to black people and our plight as they use their position to support the brutal and criminal behavior of law enforcement. Judges use their position to deny any attempt to correct racial disparity in schools and the work place by claiming it is improper to recognize racial disparity for what it is. After years of white privilege any attempt to reserve a small fraction of any resource for racial diversity is suddenly racist against the people who have the advantage in every positive measure of society. I’m still scratching my head on that one.

I am not embarrassed to say that I feel like a victim because I am a victim.

Day in and day out I watch this country respond to issues sensitive to white interest while black interest are deemed too difficult to solve because of logistics. It’s too difficult to get water, food, medicine, or any thing remotely considered as relief to thousands of people stranded in a single location after Katrina hits New Orleans. But let somebody’s dog die from eating tainted Chinese food and people have no problem getting the Center for Disease Control to do a nationwide episode of CSI: Pet Investigations. West Nile kills thirty people across the nation in a year’s time and you’d swear the seventh scroll of the apocalypse was just opened. But one city can have as many as four hundred murders and the only solution people can think of is to allow more private prisons to suck from the teat of the public treasury so we can incarcerate more black people.

Yes I feel like a victim and I am not going to be made ashamed to admit it. A lot of black people have every right to feel like victims. After the sordid history of black people and their relationship with the ruling social class in America I’m surprised anyone would even suggest otherwise. But the real question is why don’t more people feel like the perpetrators they are?