Monday, March 6, 2017

“I Am Not Your Negro"

 “Nothing can be changed until it is faced.” ~JB

Please watch the documentary, “I Am Not Your Negro.” James Baldwin states that the…”story of the Negro in America is the story of America. It is not a pretty story.”

Some of us white people feel guilt and shame about how privileged we are and how much suffering we and our ancestors have inflicted upon those with darker skin. Then - and now. Are we helpless to change even when we try?  Some describe the “white” race as only a social construct anyway, but we Americans continue to refine our national stigmata.

Such narcissism and creative license. Few people are purely white and the global majority is a fine blending of skin colors. Now, immigrants of all colors enter America subject to a new style of slavery.  We can continue to be apathetic and ignorant, or face our (white) terror of losing power.

James Baldwin asked us white people to ask ourselves why we have needed and still need to have black bodies serve us? Perhaps land grants given to early settlers prompted the need for workers but why OWN people?  Buying and selling people to each other has been an horrific blight on our nation.

We white people can attempt to ally ourselves with our African American brothers and sisters but even then, we liberal and progressive elite often make clumsy mistakes. Our “assistance” sometimes looks like white men trying to rescue damsels in distress because they think the damsels cannot help themselves.  How condescending and patronizing.

This documentary illustrates white perpetration of violence and the murder of African Americans.  I wish this was only about our past, a history of which we are ashamed and grievous.  But, this is NOT only about our past.  It is about our present day even if in more subtle, cloaked forms.

The overly white justice system and white police still kill black and brown boys and men in large numbers.  When they are not murdered by us, we lock them up for petty crimes, throwing away the key, so that even if a person of color gets a traffic ticket that they cannot pay, they can end up imprisoned because they cannot earn enough money to pay large penalties. Locking up huge numbers of black and brown boys and men continues slavery today.

African American children are educated in a school to prison pipeline system and too many kids end up also incarcerated, or dead in the streets, just like their predecessors.

No racism in this nation?  We are all racists, having grown up in this culture, this America where white overpowers black every moment of every day in the work place, in schools, in the government, everywhere. 

Listen to James Baldwin speak about his fear and prediction that only a revolution may change this continual white terrorism of the soul, bodies, minds, and spirits of our black and brown citizens. “We must not sit down and do nothing.”

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