Of all the discussions I have had on Ferguson with non-black people, I have said this many times: we cannot take off the target of our racism...our skin. Many close friends have eluded to the black excuses and blaming whitey but they dont seem to understand or accept this simple truth. If you dont read the entire editorial, read just this segment here and think before you comment. Thanks for bringing this up Larissa Youngblood! ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Can we just put aside all we think we know about black communities (most of which could fit in a thimble, truth be told) and imagine what it must feel like to walk through life as the embodiment of other people’s fear, as a monster that haunts their dreams the way Freddie Kreuger does in the movies? To be the physical representation of what marks a neighborhood as bad, a school as bad, not because of anything you have actually done, but simply because of the color of your skin? Surely that is not an inconsequential weight to bear. To go through life, every day, having to think about how to behave so as not to scare white people, or so as not to trigger our contempt—thinking about how to dress, and how to walk and how to talk and how to respond to a cop (not because you’re wanting to be polite, but because you’d like to see your mother again)—is work; and it’s harder than any job that any white person has ever had in this country. To be seen as a font of cultural contagion is tantamount to being a modern day leper. And then perhaps we might spend a few minutes considering what this does to the young black child, and how it differs from the way that white children grow up. Think about how you would respond to the world if that world told you every day how awful you were, how horrible your community was, and how pathological your family. That’s what we’re telling black people daily.
Posted on: Mon, 01 Dec 2014 22:04:40 +0000