To be black in America is loaded. It is “loaded” with history, with race, with deprivation, with rejection, with dehumanization, with disrespect, with stereotypes, with poverty, with abuse, with lack, with aggression, and with sordid imagery. For anyone to suggest that we as a society have moved past our perceptions about people of color and even women is just wrong. Have we made progress? Sure we have. We have made enormous progress; but many people had to agitate, engage, and even die for the most basic of human rights at the most basic levels of our society to be granted. Perhaps, it is time we have to do this again. We have rested on the laurels of struggles past, versus stepping up to deal with struggles present. Racial bias is real. Racial profiling is real. Racial inequity is real. Racial injustice is real. Don’t take my word for it read the science on racial “profiling.” Read the science around the study of “unconscious bias” at Harvard University. Study history and how black men have been treated by the courts. Study history and see how juries have treated black victims, and black defendants. Study modern day sentencing guidelines and how black men (and women) are disproportionately and more harshly convicted for the same or lesser crimes as their white counterparts. The proof is all right there. If you dare to look for it, and admit that there is a race problem still in America. For my fellow Americans, who are Caucasian, I do not fault you for not knowing what it is like to be a black man or woman in America. How can you? What I fault is a system of institutional and generational white privilege and white run jurisprudence in America that contends that a black boy’s life is so “value-less” that his admitted assailant is not even arrested the night he lay on the grass dead. I fault an attitude that supports the use of racial profiling against black males and others who are perceived as “different” or as would be thieves, murderers, or thugs. I fault a judicial system in Florida that sentences a black woman, Marissa Alexander to 20 years for shooting her gun “off” at an abusive boyfriend who beat her, and yet allows a Hispanic male, George Zimmerman to walk free for the murder of an unarmed black teenager. I fault unwillingness on our part as Americans to actually talk about race. Not point fingers. Not lay blame but to actually talk to people who don’t look like us, and to actually believe them when they tell you how hard it can be to be black in this nation still, despite having a black U.S. president, and having made many strides since the Civil Rights era of the 1960s.
Posted on: Mon, 15 Jul 2013 04:08:05 +0000
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