Image description: Zack and Slater are wearing colorful shirts, smiling, and patting themselves on the back. The caption reads “I have often listened to groups of students tell me that racism really no longer shapes the contours of our lives.”
Image description: A still image from the 90’s TV sitcom Saved By The Bell. Zack is in the locker room holding a microphone to his mouth. He is carrying recording equipment, and he is addressing a girl with a hand on her hip, a look of disbelief on her face (interpretation of scene my own). The caption reads, “White people benefit from the privileges accrued from racist exploitation, past and present, and are therefore accountable for changing and transforming white supremacy and racism.”
I checked; this was posted earlier this month. If this was posted five years ago, I could forgive it. As it is, it’s gaslighting nonsense heading towards proto-genocide.
Please note the picture of the tweeter; this is someone who benefits from both colorism within the Black community, and diversity quotas.
[ID: a cropped image. The text reads, “Thinking about how the innocent children referred to as ‘The Central Park 5’ were all younger than Kyle Rittenhouse when they took the stand and how their cries meant nothing.” End ID]
And the same man who took out a full page ad in the New York times demanding the Central Park 5 go to the chair, touted Rittenhouse as a hero
Trump was a Fascist before it was cool.
It is a horrific injustice that the Central Park 5 were not given the benefit of law or human rights. It is not an injustice that Kyle Rittenhouse was.
The issue isn’t that Rittenhouse’s trial was fair. The issue is that there is absolutely zero reason to hail someone whose only interesting accomplishment was taking human life as your new media darling.
That’s relevant to the Trump portions of this post, but I was responding (or intending to respond) to the original post.
The miscarriage of justice and absolute obvious shit policing and lawyering in that case drives me nuts.
Oh yeah, the five juvenile delinquents that you happened to grab were all involved in the sexual assault and attempted murderer, and no one else, and only one of them left semen behind or footprints, and the fact that none of their stories matched up didn’t ring any alarm bells that maybe these were just dumb kids and the real, probably habitual, rapist/murderer was still out there?
But that huge issue aside, if you believed that the Central Park 5 were guilty? They were on trial for a gang rape and an incredibly brutal attack that was clearly intended to be fatal by the perpetrator. The victim had massive brain damage and no memory of the attack, and was unable to provide any information. The victim was a graduate of Wesley College and Yale, and a vice president at Salomon Brothers.
The teens had admittedly been part of a group of youths who had been attacking people in the area for hours.
Let’s not kid ourselves, Tumblr would cry for the blood of any group of youths of their least favorite race accused of brutally raping and beating a woman of their most favorite race, same as Trump did back then.
Rittenhouse killed two people during a riot, all men of his own race who were older than him, one of whom was a mentally ill homeless man with a domestic violence history, and the other a convicted child molester with five victims on record and a charge for domestic violence in process.
Like, even if you think Rittenhouse wasn’t acting in justified self-defense, a riot getting a intense and some pedophile and a homeless guy getting shot in intraracial conflict is barely news, let alone worth getting worked up about. It just doesn’t rouse the ire intraracial violence and a raped elite college grad and investment banker does.
I checked; this was posted earlier this month. If this was posted five years ago, I could forgive it. As it is, it’s gaslighting nonsense heading towards proto-genocide.
Please note the picture of the tweeter; this is someone who benefits from both colorism within the Black community, and diversity quotas.
Be fair, hon - do you know that this person specifically benefits from diversity quotas? As in does she have a job she got that way or something? I think you’d agree with me that it’s at best unclear how random [ethnicity] people who didn’t personally benefit from a diversity quota benefit from their existence.
Sure as heck looks like that’s her whole businessmodel.
Race is the labyrinth of despair – it is where the American Empire hides the bodies from which it literally and figuratively has extracted its entire existence into being. Race is a construct for punishment and power.
For much of America, race no longer exists, and so the labyrinth has become invisible. Gone are the days that it needed the pretext of race to justify slavery and Jim Crow. Instead, the absence of race is itself racist seduction, a fantasy through which white America discharges itself of its inherited privilege. Unaware and immune to the past and present atrocities, most people can continue about their business as if race doesn’t matter.
For racialized Americans the corridors of race are real and familiar. We can retrace the steps and speak of them. Make no mistake – the labyrinth is not a comfortable place; it is a place where one is apart from oneself. It is an identity burdened on us: Black, Latino, Indigenous, Asian, Arab, etc. All the while, America continues along, seduced by the myth of a post-racial society. This is precisely why we must maintain and increase the level of dialogue on the subject of race, no matter how much the rest of America tries to stifle the conversation.
The only way forward is backward; we must make America face the labyrinth.
If you’ve managed to miss the last 500 years of history, racism of the white supremacy variety exists and it has devastating, shattering, and demoralizing consequences for racialized communities. The modern concept of race is indeed an American one, born of slavery and colonization. The implications of race in the structures of our society are very real; they were explicit in the foundation of this country, they are the language of the operating system and so they are observable in the output. We can discuss racial inequality in tangible and empirical language. I won’t waste time arguing or proving the point. Here are a few reputable studies that do the job: on job market discrimination,on targeting Blacks in the “War on Drugs”,on educational inequality,on racism and healthcare.
So why the denial? Aside from the obvious answer, “white America benefits from it,” the most significant power in the arsenal of white privilege is the ability to evade race itself, to be an individual. It isn’t that white America doesn’t know that race exists, of course it does, primarily through Black history month, music videos, and small subsets of friends and coworkers. But white America has the special privilege of being optimistic about race. White privilege doesn’t immunize people from difficult lives: they can be poor, exploited, abused, or murdered – any number of difficulties can befall them. But race and its immense burden eludes them. White America sees the footage of the Civil Rights Movement, the legislation of the 1960s, the establishment of affirmative action, the rise of successful people of color, they misinterpret these to mean the end of racism. These convictions contribute to their sanguinity on issues of race.
Those who do not believe in the oppressive force of race in society are likely to dismiss personal anecdotes of racial disadvantage as anomalous. Too often, we hear this dismissal in the form of the refrain “but things are getting better” or the vexed “I didn’t have it easy!” In an economic system that fosters extreme income inequality, it is difficult for working-class white people to accept that there are structures in place from which they exclusively benefit. This notion often makes them outright resentful.
Shifting public perception and social norms have left less room for openly vitriolic hate speech. Today, most decent people (many of whom may be racist and not know it) awkwardly avoid racist language, replacing epithets with euphemisms, genuinely believing that racism is no longer a major issue. What they do not see is that racism is embedded in the political, economic, judicial and social structures of American society. It cannot be totally undone by changes of heart; understanding and tolerance can go but so far. Even the most well-meaning anti-racist, if he or she denies this reality, paralyzes any opportunity for change.
The problem of racism is both structural and cultural. The solution will be both. Racism must be confronted with relentless fervor. White America has only been asked to do that a number of times in its history, usually in the aftermath of historic turning points such as the 13th Amendment, the Watts Riots, and Ferguson to name a few, but never perpetually.
So we must continue to bring race to the fore. If it makes white people uncomfortable, so be it. Racialized people unfortunately understand this discomfort all too well. We must diagnose, expose, and unravel racism in all the structures of society. We must bring America down the labyrinth, to face the beast.
The picture above is of US Soldiers captured during the Battle of the Bulge, WWII.
The following is from a soldier serving stateside:
“In April 1944 Corp. Rupert Trimmingham wrote Yank magazine. “Here is a question that each Negro soldier is asking,” he began. “What is the Negro soldier fighting for? On whose team are we playing?” He recounted the difficulties he and eight other black soldiers had while traveling through the South—“Where Old Jim Crow rules”—for a new assignment. “We could not purchase a cup of coffee,” Trimmingham noted. Finally the lunchroom manager at a Texas railroad depot said the black GIs could go on around back to the kitchen for a sandwich and coffee. As they did, “about two dozen German prisoners of war, with two American guards, came to the station. They entered the lunchroom, sat at the tables, had their meals served, talked, smoked, in fact had quite a swell time. I stood on the outside looking on, and I could not help but ask myself these questions: Are these men sworn enemies of this country? Are they not taught to hate and destroy…all democratic governments? Are we not American soldiers, sworn to fight for and die if need be for our country? Then why are they treated better than we are? Why are we pushed around like cattle? If we are fighting for the same thing, if we are going to die for our country, then why does the Government allow such things to go on? Some of the boys are saying that you will not print this letter. I’m saying that you will.”“
1) The logic isn’t that race doesn’t matter, the logic is that individuals can be racist, and systems can be racist and all they require are complicit operators.
2) Unfortunately, the entirety of American history is a race issue. The concept of race in its modern form was born here. It began with the extermination and subjugation of the indigenous people (celebrated in Cowboy and Indian movies) and the violence against the African populations stolen in the Atlantic Slave Trade and plantation life.
3) Policing did not begin with Civil Rights, slavery existed in the North, and racial discrimination was the law of much our country until 1964-65 when it was forcibly removed by the Federal Government. For example:
And so policing (especially on the local level) existed to maintain the status quo, that status quo was slavery, later that status quo became Jim Crow, and today that status quo is racist and class-based oppression.
In the contemporary American context, police officers can be of many ethnic or cultural backgrounds. The POC police officer need not be racist for their actions and the system to be racist, they need only be complicit with racist orders– and by being complicit they become part of the racist structure.
On July 9, 1640, John Punch became the first black person to be “legally” enslaved for life within the then American colonies.
We know his name. We know his name and we know the date and the judge that did it. We also know that two white dudes got a 1 year sentence for the same “crime.” (running away from someone who had bought a claim on their labor for a specific period of time).
