Inside: It’s like peeing; Serena; What the hell; Black hateration; Can you be black and racist?
I’m sorry. This is troubling. I’ve been writing this for weeks now and wasn’t sure I’d post it publicly. It was written in pieces, which is why it’s even less coherent than usual. I was just getting some stuff off my chest and I guess it just brimmed over. No, really. Sorry. Especially for the screenshot.
I’m really tired of all this race stuff. Then why am I writing about it? Because things get stuck in my brain and I get that compulsive itch to mentally organize and parse it into writing. Writing, music, art. It’s like having to pee. Except since it’s not physical you can hold it longer. I usually don’t have any regrets (or get angry feedback) when I pee, though.
Also, like peeing, you don’t just do it once and get it over with. You’re going to drink fluids again and therefore will need to evacuate eventually. Haha. Did I just say that artistic expression is a form of excretion? I think I did. Yep. I’m a romantic.
Whoa!! This is the most racist s— I’ve ever seen!
I tried to Google to see if it’s for real, whatever that would mean. You’d think that it’s got to be some kind of twisted over the top farce, right? Right?? But while I was searching to find that out I came across other sites who were just as bad. After ten minutes of research I could — but I won’t — give you links to a few handfuls of other sites/blogs that are as racist and consider this site an ally.
I stumbled into this pit because I looked up the name of a complete piece of crap who committed a horrible crime. It’s … it’s really bad. It happened in South Africa. The perpetrators were black. Looked up one of their names and boom! A bunch of web pages leading to other pages all based on the premise that black people are subhuman. Hm.
So even if this isn’t for real, there are a bunch of real sites out there that are totally down with this. I don’t want to give you their links and names and I don’t want you to go to this site. I took a screenshot and if you click the image below you’ll see what was on its front page today.
Also along this line, there’s a site that’s devoted to white children killed by non-white people. The premise, of course, is white innocence being destroyed by dark savages. How “Birth of a Nation”. I mean, those deaths are obviously tragic and appalling and heartbreaking and I’d be perfectly fine for anyone who kills children to be sentenced to life in the electric chair. That’s one thing. It’s another to use those deaths to paint non-white people as evil or whatever based on one’s prejudice.
“I believe black people are pieces of crap. Oh, look at all the articles I’ve collected of black people being stupid, ergo black people are pieces of crap.”
Dichotomous
I’m torn. I’m torn because the more research I do online about various race things it’s inevitable that I find some really racist crap online. So on one hand all this racism troubles me and wounds me if I let it. If my guard is down.
On the other hand, I’m troubled by some of the rhetoric I hear from facets of the black community. They can’t speak one sentence about any socio-political subject without “because racism”. Slight hyperbole but only slight. How do you deal with collective issues if you can’t introspect without shifting to an external locus of control.
There will always be racists. In any culture with a majority and a minority there will always be unfair-ness. We have to fight it, educate, stand up for the rights of those who are on the short end of the stick, but we can’t ignore or delay our own condition in favor of tearing our wounds open and expecting solace from the very factions or powers that we hold responsible.
Your violator isn’t going to heal you.
Two Ideas
The funny thing about all of these racists I’m talking about below is that they seem to want to prove that black people are not good people. Questions on Ask.com and Yahoo Answers and the like seem to be from people who are trying to get proof to bolster their arguments about blacks being a drain on society.
Questions like: What have black people contributed to the world? And don’t say music.
People trying to find info to counter arguments that black people use to defend or humanize themselves.
The funny thing is that while these racist a-holes are talking about how, let’s just say it, inferior black people are, America is on a rapid decline in terms of world ranking in many ways.
Education, for example. Financially.
Don’t even get me started on the slavery thing. You’ll hear:
- White people were slaves, too.
- Black people owned slaves, too.
- It was the Africans who sold other Africans so it’s all their fault.
- We fought a war over you so shut up and move on.
To which I say, black people owned slaves the same way that Jewish people killed Germans in the early 1940s. You know it had to happen, but if that’s your focus when you think about WWII you’re kind of missing the point. And you’re kind of an asshole.
And please understand. I acknowledge that there are aspects of African American culture that are not good. But you’ll notice that the factors associated with those bad aspects are the same factors that bring out and showcase bad aspects of any other group of human beings.
Poverty. Lack of education and, yeh, a lack of respect for education. Generational cycles of abuse and dysfunction. That’s the thing about us human beings. Dysfunction is passed on for generations, whether it’s alcoholism, drug abuse, physical, verbal, emotional, sexual abuse or whatever.
People see the bad stuff and think, “Oh, what a shame.”
And that’s if they’re compassionate and not racist a-holes. We — including upper middle class me — see blighted communities as “over there”. That’s “those people”. But the ills we see are just a microcosm of the whole.
Whatever ails the most ghetto (for lack of a better word) The Wire-ish thuggish black inner city area is just a symptom of our society as a whole. It’s very Kahlil Gibran. Example: the housing and foreclosure crisis.
We’re all on the verge. People are getting left in the dust on this. It’s affecting minority communities especially hard, but economic forces are rocking our world. If you’re lacking education or higher education and aren’t a skilled/trade worker, you’re world is spinning.
When you see something tearing through the black community, you can rest assured that in a matter of years it’s going to be a mainstream problem or issue — divorce rates, absent fathers, unemployment and so on. And vice versa. These are facets of our society, our world.
Because these are human being problems. Not “those people” problems.
Serena
The world is a racist place, my friends. It just is. Even though I hate air travel I would like to see more of the world. The more I read and learn, though, I realize that the world really does not like black people. I bet Greece is beautiful. They really can’t stand African immigrants now that their economy is faltering. It’s always the immigrants that catch hell when economies go bad. The Nordic countries. Spain. Ireland. New Zealand? I hear Scotland has some amazing mountain biking trails. If I travel around the world (or around parts of the US) will I experience the same hospitality that my white friends will?
I actively try to resist blogging about it, believe it or not. Well, usually I have a bunch of drafts sitting around. I start thoughts and it’s kind of like writing a letter to someone and then tearing it up. It provides catharsis. Except I don’t tear them up. They’re just sitting there in my WordPress ‘Drafts’.
This wasn’t meant to see the light of day, but I read about Serena Williams’ Wimbledon victory and some of the responses to it.
In short there were a bunch of people tweeting, calling her a gorilla. That she looks like a gorilla. Or that she looks like a man in a gorilla suit. That type of thing.
It doesn’t surprise me but it hurts to hear that kind of stuff. Often in those tweets they’ll hash tag it with #notracist.
A few months ago a black NHL player scored a winning goal against Boston. Tweets popped up about it being worse because they were beaten by a nigger.
Black (African or West Indian) soccer (or football) players in Europe have recently been heckled by spectators with monkey noises or people throwing banana peels in their direction.
It’s my belief that black people still aren’t viewed as fully human.
Serena Williams is beautiful, in my opinion. Physically formidable, too. To the point of being intimidating maybe.
I was watching reruns of the 2011 Crossfit Games women’s competition. Annie Thorisdottir is beautiful, too, and physically formidable. Her abs are extreme. Not the flat, sleek look you might think of when you think of tight, lady abs. She’s rockin’ a six pack that puts any man’s torso to shame. A lot of the women were really muscular. Short, tall, bulky, more lean. You watch them in action and think, “Damn. She could kick my ass. At anything.”
The point is, I bet these same people who tweet ignorant things wouldn’t look at these Valkyrie-like athletes and think of them in terms of animals, primates, not-quite-homo-sapiens. The language from those who appreciate super athletic women would probably use terms more along the lines of “goddess” than “gorilla”.
Against the Grain
When I write about racial stuff I probably rub everyone the wrong way. I try to be reasonable but this is one of those issues where being middle of the road puts you right in the middle of two-way, road raging traffic.
I have really got to stop listening to these shows. Less of them now, but still. They’re so angry.
- The other day some black commentators called Obama a sell out and a traitor. It was just a matter of time, really. They’ve been saying it without saying it for years now.
- I heard the word “coon” today more times than a Paul Mooney comedy special, courtesy of black radio hosts and their guests.
- In the black studies world, some people can’t get through more than one sentence without mentioning slavery. Heard a news editorial with a somewhat famous black writer. They asked him about some current events issue and he made it about half way into his first sentence before he mentioned slavery. Wha?
- There’s a black female journalist on an editorial panel who is convinced that They are trying to make black men look bad. Whether it’s Kony or corruption in the DC government or City Council. Her response to any story of a black man in or causing trouble is that there’s some grand, racist conspiracy to make black men look bad.
- Heard an older black radio host talking about gentrification in DC. He often talks about his changing neighborhood. Some white people moving in next door to him parked in his driveway. On his radio show he said that they probably thought that the Dred Scott decision still applied and that he had no rights and — whoa.
- Anyone who calls into a radio show and greets with “Hotep” usually ends up yelling a la fiery sermon by the end of the conversation.
So much anger and rage. As a group, we black people are traumatized to some degree or another.
Can black people be racist?
Yes.
I’ve heard multiple conversations recently and I’ve heard it before. That black people can be prejudice but not racists because in order to be racist you have to have power over another group of people.
I don’t buy it, though. You have to change the definition of the word racist in order to make that reasoning work.
rac·ism/ˈrāˌsizəm/
| Noun: |
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