In closing out Black History Month 2017, it is with a saddened heart that I must write today’s essay on the truest and deepest impact of racism and racist activity in America, not the semi-gloss surface paint impact that we are often most comfortable with.
Yeah, sure, it’s a topic we all ought to be tired of talking about, but it’s also a topic that is never going to leave us, no matter how much we ignore it and make proclamations about “leaving it with those who are bound to it.”
In the age of Trumpism, with people swearing up and down that racism and racial segregation did not exist before President Obama simply because they encountered too many Black people who were willing to appease their white sensitivies by pretending racism was inconsequential before Obama, it is especially significant going into 2019. That year is the year, exactly 400 years after Jamestown, Virginia, and 400 years to the moment in time that the incarcerated or volunteer slave (indentured) laborers became permanently kidnapped and legally enforced Black African slaves in America.
James Baldwin, an American writer (I Am Not Your Negro), lived in Paris, France for many years before returning to America to help fight the stupidity of ongoing racism.
He tells us that he didn’t just leave because of the expected racism by whites, but because of the multitudes of Black people ‘bound to it’ who also refused to make the necessary truthful arguments to counter it. In Baldwin’s words “The nigger in America,” paraphrased, “is a white social construct. The white man created the nigger, and it is the social burden of the white man to live with his own self-created monster, not mine.”
How right he was and God bless America. A big fat ol’ red/white/blue-black American salute to him for being brave enough to fearlessly spell it out.
The forensic definition of racism has been circumstantially placed under a generic surgical knife called “prejudices.”
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Many have tried to lump racism under the context of “All Prejudices,” but somehow or another, one or two bad experiences with a prejudiced person says and speaks nothing of the volumes that can be written about the actual experience of living detrimentally with white skin color racism on a nearly daily basis. Unfortunately, this color-coded racism comes through not only from whites, but also from Blacks who are superficially bound to prove their loyalty to whites by becoming skin color racists themselves.
Too dark. Too light. Too nappy-headed. Too stringy-headed. Too proper-talking. Too proper-acting. Not “down home” enough.
The worst thing about racism is how many Black people absorb it into their own psyches, then try to use it as a point and counterpoint for many different genres of typical and atypical denoted and connoted racism, all targeted specifically at certain Black people; and the darker the Black person, the worse the so-called jokes.
The Facebook Social Media Factor
As a journalist and writer, I have to wade and filter my way through scads of stories on social media on a daily basis.
I don’t do it to find other news headlines to copy and piggyback a rewrite on, but to seek and search for a REAL social truth that I can write a commentary or essay about.
Some of my writings have been exploratory–meant to evoke and provoke people to think or do whatever they can do to counter a latent evil in Black society; and some were meant to shock and dismay while helping others think about dismantling racist systems in their own personal communities.
Most disconcerting of all is the many videos, live and pre-recorded; and the many news events and postings and online displays I have seen and heard about. I cannot even make a command decision to part ways with the news, real or fake, and go back to a formal study of sharpening and honing my skill level as I was born to do, without facing the psychology of racism at work in its most variegated overt and covert forms.
I am forced to live daily with the fact that white people’s “greatest essayists” are very few Black folks; but whenever they do mention Black writers, it isn’t because they respect the craft in them, it is because these same are the obligatory “just to prove we’re not all about white writers” names.
Names like Maya Angelou and Ta’Nehisi Coates (and sometimes Toni Morrison) are nearly always the obligatories when they have to fill in the blank space in their head with a ‘Black’ writer or essayist, just like when Hollywood had to dig up two Blacks to hand lollipop Oscars/Academy awards to, they pulled up Halle Berry and Denzel Washignton out of their black hats just to appease Black people.
To be sure, Halle and Denzel were very deserving artists, but the truth is … Halle and Denzel had done better acting work than “Monster’s Ball and “Training Day” when their names showed up at the end of a racist fishing hook.
With them, whatever pops up first will do, because there are literally hundreds of other Black writers and artists whose names they have likely never heard of and never will.
But … Don’t get it twisted.
We love the writings of American poet Maya Angelou and American essayist Ta’Nehisi Coates, and the work of American actors Halle Berry (now replaced in the white world with Viola Davis) and Denzel Washington (now replaced in the white world with Mahershala Ali), but there were and are still hundreds of other excellent afrocentric artists that we suspect they barely pay attention to unless they have to just in case a white constituent happens to bring it up at a dinner or tea party.
Racism vs Prejudices
Even as I watch an Amazon.com FIREstick lesson on Essays, I am forced to understand the insider workings of Amazon owner Jeff Bezos and the inherent racist activity going on behind the scenes of both Amazon and Facebook with Mark Zuckerberg on the high tech employment levels.
One would be inclined to think there is no such thing as a Black person who is high-tech geeky, like the fool on Facebook who said there is no such thing as a Black Russian; and this is why we end up with Black organizations in America … because of the lack of overarching acceptance anywhere else.
I am forced, as they review American ingenuity without the Black people who founded this nation under duress and ultimately through industrious hard work, to remember that the failure to include Black people as more than tokens harks back to us spending decades not knowing that it was a bevy of Black and Brainy beauties who put a white man into outer space orbit at NASA, and that it was, in fact, the genius stroke of one Black “computer” who brought his white butt home safely in the end of the beginning.
I am forced to watch Black history from Egypt, Syria, and Ethiopia, and other parts of The Dark Continent of Africa as told by white faces with drawings and depictions of white Romans and Greeks, be it American history, world history or Bible history.
Yes, I am forced to remember that Donald Trump, their resident in the white house, can take as many photo opps as he wants to surrounded by Black people -educators and legislators- and it still does nothing to change the fact of the overriding theme of racism, both of the past and in the form in which it still prevails now.
Besides, the HBCU-ites in the now-famed Kellyanne Conway “carpet burn knees” photo were not so visually congenial to a one (and probably only) Black president. It was as if they had some statement to make that helps no one but themselves in their dire need to be seen and not heard in the Oval Office.
For these Black folks, it’s about those all-exclusive photo opps, never about the racism, fascism, or the misogyny that got Trump elected on their watch.
And none of them even bothered to touch the white house resident pet (-not Bo or Sunny Obama-) sitting on the Oval Office couch with her legs curled under her, holding a ‘disallowed’ cell phone in their midst. They just turned and smiled for the cameras like it’s all good when they know damned well it’s not.
Kellyanne Conway let them know in no uncertain terms that she did not respect them enough to stand up straight and act like a professional while they were there; she was just “couch girl” in the middle of a room full of prominent Blacks. Her disrespect of those upstanding educated and sophisticated Black people in that supremacist moment that was not just prejudicial, but thoroughly sad.
There is a difference between what is momentarily prejudicial and what is pure de psychologically detrimental and racist.
I am also forced to think in terms of a white female’s charming and heartwarming Americana-ish story of a nephew wanting a BB gun for Christmas.
I had to think about what it was like for Tamir Rice’s mother to have to bury her baby over the same American endearment to toys and gunplay. I am forced to think about why, as a mother of four young Black men, that I refused to allow my sons to have even small transparent water pistols in a pool over the same fears as Rice’s mom. Did she second-guess herself on buying that toy gun?
Yet this … in a nation where gun play by whites with real bullets is considered their Second Amendment right.
I was forced to consider the crock of tears that flow when whites become victims of their own bullshit nuances about guns and gun-play, as directly opposed to the venomous hatred that spews from the mouths of whites AND Blacks when it comes to a young man like Tamir Rice. For it was not Rice or even an older John Crawford in a toy gun section of a Wal-Mart “fooling around” that got them killed, but it was the fact that they were doing what white people do WHILE BLACK that caused them to lose their lives. The message behind it is clear and distinctive.
I am forced to daily live with and consider the fact that MOST of the time in America, very few people of any race are actually harshly or equitably punished for committing crimes when the VICTIM is Black.
Racism: Not Just A Moment in Time
All of this typical and atypical infused racism is not just a wafting moment when someone did or said something hurtful and prejudicial in the breezeway of life to someone white or white-looking.
It is not about those who think that all human prejudices and bigotries are a coverall excuse for sidetracking racism; this racism is exclusively about RACE…the skin color prejudice that built America’s guts from the rooter to the tooter. It is about a daily non-stop 24/7 constitutional kind of lifestyle that takes lives, ruins homes and neighborhoods, kills families and spirits and steals dreams and destroys opportunities whenever a white person is introduced. It is about Black people who feel compelled to explain their ethos in a room full of whites, and a life where most of us cannot even SLEEP at night without the expectation that harm will come to one of our own as we rest.
Most white folks I’ve encountered never seem to know that racist activity is not a social mandate, implied nor real, every time they see a Black person in the same room with them.
Most recently, I walked into a full day training class on incremental development in my neighborhood (i.e., ‘gentrification with Black folks permission’) about the same time as two other Black women that I had never seen before in my life. On approach, the room moderator assumed that the three of us were together.
It wasn’t like she had not seen me before and it wasn’t like she didn’t know me and know that I had always come to these meetings alone, or that I registered ALONE as a single attendee. I was not a complete stranger to her as were the other two ladies from out of town, but she assumed that the three of us were together when she had to have known we were not. After insisting adamantly that we “sit together” up front, I finally had to turn to her and say “I don’t know these two ladies, but I suppose proper introductions are in order.”
I promptly introduced myself to them and they to me, we shook hands and exchanged pleasantries, and I quickly took my seat at a back table as they sauntered to the front of the room to take an empty table with two chairs.
Some of you may find that a petty matter, all things considered … but then all that does is prove how much you know about what REAL racism looks, smells, tastes, feels and sounds like. If you don’t understand that kind of heightened sensitivity, then you don’t really know what racism is. That attitude diminishes the racism experienced by American people of afrocentric origin, and it downplays the inborn and inherent emotional “sixth sense” that we have about these insults and attacks that usually turn out to be the absolute truth.
In that creepy white privilege merespace of American èclat -no matter what we do or don’t do- those who claim they have experienced so-called prejudices cannot begin to understand the experience of living underneath the boot of racism on a moment by moment basis. They cannot begin to know what we know about how it comes, regardless, or of saying to themselves “Please don’t put me in that color-coded mental shoebox file that you exist in.”
White people can always take for granted that they are accepted in their own skin when they walk into a room filled with people of mixed origins, but Black people can never take that for granted, not even with people who can’t speak two words of American English without stumbling over a prepositional phrase or verb or a pronunciation here and there.
Later on…
that same evening, I attended a dinner with the same group of people. I was pretty much unscathed from the earlier debacle, it was typical of them to do such things.
Yet, I observed the white male sitting next to me on the corner of the table fidgeting around with short bursts of discomforting energy, like he was expecting something to happen that I knew not the nature of.
Maybe he was just “like that,” all nervous energy, but it took the creepy@ white female seated next to him to do the very thinkable as I attempted to talk about my own experience with a bad marriage, which was the current chosen table topic of the moment.
I could not even relay my own story without her intervening words, “I’ll bet your marriage wasn’t even LEGAL.”
OH … Yes, she did.
I just reared back in my seat at the comment without flinching, looked dead into her “I just couldn’t resist getting my little bitch-ass thug-ass racist jab in” eyes, and said “It was about as legal as that legal ass divorce I went through in a court of law with a racist ass judge who apparently doesn’t care much for Black women either.”
At that point, I was done talking to her about anything at all.
It appears that these race snakes exist for no other reason than to smear all of their mental monkeypoo all over any Black person they can get their hands on in a moment. Her kind is the reason Black organizations must exist, because it isn’t even possible to feel absolutely 100-percent fully human in a room full of whites. This is what they do, as if they have no home training on extending social graces and mores to other ethnicities when in public. And the clique part comes in when we know we can’t trust all Black people in a room, either.
Far too many of our own kith and kind think and act just as bad as racist whites on more occasions than we care to discuss.
About Those Black Folks ‘Acting White’ …
I bear ultimate witness to a secondary sort of joint racism in America, also.
I call it “intra-” or “intra-ultraracism” when Black folks are predisposed to act like they have something to prove to whites about how “different” they are than the rest of us.
It’s never anything new, it’s just that every time a cycle comes around, some younger Black person who has a hard lesson to learn about real racism in America finds a crowd of whites that they can entertain by taking #BlackLives for a joking matter. Those Blacks think it not robbery to use typical white stereotypes as leverage for their fifteen golden minutes [or seconds] of bastardized social and/or social media “this goes viral any minute” fame.
It appears there is no other way for them to get the attention they crave, so they slither down and in between what we refer to as an attention-whoring moment, which is something mentally deeper — as if they just fell off a plantation buggy in the middle of last night and don’t have a clue what the real world looks like in the 21st Century, let alone the light of day.
It makes one wonder how many recreational drugs they had to use just to put themselves in a white paranoid and volatile state of mind just so they could function. If we could spiral down into their minds like the shrunken down capsule riders in the movie “Fantastic Voyage” spiraled into a human body to stop a murdering blood clot, we would probably find a lot of murderous sludge deep down inside of these Black race card-pulling jokers.
Though many of us might not stop the terrorist blood clot, and would likely hope it kills him dead, we also know that the (i.e., “Terrence”) jokey-joke Black types simply get off on disparaging Black people much to the approval and delight of their krakka-ridden derivative cohorts. They have these latent brain farts that allow them to believe they are being funny when they really are not.
These types of Bozo-joke Negroes explain why the lives of Tamir Rice, Sean Bell, Aiyanna Jones, Sandra Bland, Relisha McBride, Oscar Grant, Amadou Diallo, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, and even Trayvon Martin, et al, et al, et all … are easily dismissed and unpunished in courts of law across the nation.
These were all Black men and women and children killed for acting human while Black; but for any reason claimed, the grave crime of their blackness can easily excuse things like a truckload of racist whites doing things like waving confederate flags and pulling up on a Black child’s birthday party waving guns and shouting racial slurs and threats.
One must think about the many whites who walked away from hate crimes of this nature and even worse, the ones who walked because of the “forgivey” Black people who don’t take their own lives and rights seriously.
In one particular RARE case, though, in Douglas County, Georgia, American jurisprudence actually prevailed on such a hate crime when a Black sheriff and white judge uniformly did not not think the shit was funny AT ALL, BECAUSE IT WASN’T.
I cannot even begin to imagine the fear and terror in the hearts of this overnight famous Black family at a child’s birthday party. They had no clue whether or not one of those drug-infused whites was going to kill them just for having a birthday party while Black, as Dylann Roof killed Black churchgoers for praying while Black. Even worse, what was the likelihood that these bastard whites would walk away from the crime and thus be encouraged to do it again. It wouldn’t have been the first time. OJ Simpson be damned when hundreds ye thousands of Blacks have been killed by whites who walked away from the crime like it wasn’t shit.
However, this RARE time, justice prevailed when the judge and jury and Black sheriff let them know that racism and hate crimes would NOT be tolerated under ANY circumstances, not even under the influence, in Douglas County, Georgia. “That’s not meeeeeee…” the female screamed and wailed in court. Well, obviously it was you and him. They got you on videotape fair and square.
The white couple was sentenced to adequately appropriate hate crimes prison terms, unlike the Black man who was given a life sentence for stealing a coat; and then banished from ever living in Douglas County again after their sentences were done. Kudos to the judge, the jury, and the sheriff in that case, but hell…
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{SIDEBAR: To my recollection, it would have been legally essential if a bunch of race-mongering judges in Maricopa County, Arizona, had been judiciously and properly trained to think smart instead of white when I was harassed, assaulted, violated, and robbed by a white heroin addict named Sammie Jo Olson, and her milquetoast husband Rob, and also by their drug addict whorish friends while living in Mesa, but … some of them just don’t have the good sense God gave them to do the right thing instead of the white thing. These types work overtime to steal, kill and destroy under the guise of being evangelical Christians, but then they also remind you of why Islam and atheism are growing and proliferating in the world. With Christians like them, who needs Satan? Of course, they attempted to prevail over my First Amendment God-given right to report on their race crimes with a court-contained “gag” order, but I fear God more than I do them. I have all of the written and telephonic evidence that I need to show the world what their kind is really capable of behind those impervious masks of pretentious duty to ‘white jesus and country’ in the commission of their crimes.}
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The Final Straw
The final straw on this matter came this morning when I read the online essay notes of a Black man who went into a short but deep discussion about another Black man that he encountered on Facebook who felt a need to prove himself to whites by attacking him, a Black man married and thoroughly in love with his Black spouse and Black children, with every racial stereotype in the Jim Crow playbook, and he was cheered onward by the whites following him online.
I had seen that, too. Blacks more skin-color racist than whites, who acted just as bad if not worse. They are worse because they aren’t as easily discerned in a crowd.
The Black man stated that the alleged “brotha” [later] apologized to him, but that doesn’t detract from the fact that we have to live with DAILY racism, too much of which comes from other Black people who have internalized ultra-intraracismand own it.
I have to think about the high profile Nick Cannons who self-righteously quit their million dollar baby jobs in a publicly aired display of racial arrogance simply because the white executives who employ them tell them that racism is not allowed in ANY FORM, by whites OR by Black people who think they can “talk about my people, but YOU can’t.”
If that is their showplace public policy, then Cannon should have considered himself more than blessed-especially in this hateful atmosphere of niggerization coming from the likes of Donald Trump and his token Blacks-to be in the employ of whites who don’t think ANY of it is funny or allowable, EVER.
He should have apologized for it and left it at that, as a white man would have been commanded to do or lose his job, but Cannon didn’t apologize. Instead, he quit his white privileged Black job and then went on a public Instagram rant (that I read in full) about how ‘unfair’ it was to him that he can’t mock Black people via stereotype, especially given that he IS Black.
For some reason I don’t care to explain, what’s even scarier is the many Black people who sided with Cannon, likely because they wanted their own fifteen seconds of fame attached to Cannon’s name.
They are not like “I am not your Negro“, Nick; they are more like “we are not THEIR particular type of Negro in THIS particular case.”
It’s more disquieting to deal with Black racism against one another than to deal with the white racists, because we don’t expect the white ones to behave like they have manners any more.
For them, it’s ‘par for the course’; however…as for us and our house…
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