Posted on 05/01/2015 8:15:36 AM PDT by Responsibility2nd
Dear White America,
It is somewhat strange to address this to you, given that I strongly identify with many aspects of your culture and am half-white myself. Yet, today is another day you have forced me to decide what race I am — and, as always when you force me — I fall decidedly into “Person of Color.”
Every comment or post I have read today voicing some version of disdain for the people of Baltimore — “I can’t understand” or “They’re destroying their own community” or “Destruction of Property!” or “Thugs” — tells me that many of you are not listening. I am not asking you to condone or agree with violence. I just need you to listen. You don’t have to say anything if you don’t want to, but instead of forming an opinion or drawing a conclusion, please let me tell you what I hear:
I hear hopelessness
I hear oppression
I hear pain
I hear internalized oppression
I hear despair
I hear anger
I hear poverty
If you are not listening, not exposing yourself to unfamiliar perspectives, not watching videos, not engaging in conversation, then you are perpetuating white privilege and white supremacy. It is exactly your ability to not hear, to ignore the situation, that is a mark of your privilege. People of color cannot turn away. Race affects our lives every day. We must consider it all the time, not just when it is convenient.
As a person of color, even if you are privileged your whole life, as I have been, you cannot escape from the shade of your skin. Being a woman defines me; coming from a relatively affluent background defines me; my sexual orientation, my education, my family and my job define me. Other than being a woman, every single one of those distinctions gives me privilege in our society. Yet, even with all that privilege, people still treat me differently.
For most of my childhood, I refused to allow race to be my most defining feature. I actually chose for most of my childhood to refuse race as my most defining feature. But I found that a very hard position to maintain, given the way the world interacts with me and the people I love. Because I have to worry about my brother and my cousins getting stopped by the police. Because people react to my wonderful, kind, intelligent father differently, depending on whether he’s wearing a suit or sweat pants. Race has defined the way I see the world like no other characteristic has.
This can be hard to understand, if you never experienced it firsthand. So again, for just one more moment, reserve your judgments and listen. This is what you might come to realize, if you spent your days in my skin.
In childhood: People regularly ask “What are you” instead of “Who are you?” This will not end, either. In high school, one kid even asks if you are “Mulatto,” which, according to some scholars, originally meant “little mule.”
A few years later: Go on a road trip with your mom. Refuse to get out of the car at a gas station in the boondocks, because you are sure the person with the Confederate flag bumper sticker is going to realize your white mother married a black man and hurt her (and you too, being the byproduct of said union). He’s carrying a rifle on a gun rack. Now even more terrifying.
As a teenager: Be the only person of color in the majority of your Advanced Placement classes, even though there are a decent number of brown and black people at your school. For years following 9/11, get “randomly” selected for the additional screening at the airport.
In college: People assume you got into Princeton because of affirmative action. They refuse to believe it could be because you are smart.
In adulthood: Your younger brother has been stopped in his own neighborhood — the neighborhood he has lived in all his life – and asked what he could possibly be doing there.
At your workplace: For two years in a row the NYPD shows up randomly at the school you work at, which has a 100 percent minority student body. The first time the police don’t even tell the school beforehand. The cops just show up early in the morning, set up a metal detector and X-ray scanner, and fill the cafeteria with dozens of policemen. As your young students file in in the morning, the NYPD scans them like they’re going through airport security right after 9/11. They confiscate cellphones, and pat some of students down, particularly the older-looking boys. As you watch this, you feel anger welling up in your chest and almost start to cry. You think, “Why are you treating my kids like criminals?!” Children are in tears. The screenings are not due to any specific threat, but rather as part of a “random screening program” — but one that never seems to make its way to the Upper East Side. White America’s children are told they can go to college, be anything. These students are treated like suspects. And that is exactly what society will tell your children one day, unless something changes.
Today, tomorrow, every day: White people around you refuse to talk about what is happening in this country. The silence is painful to experience.
These are my experiences. They have deeply affected who I am. And I am SO PRIVILEGED. Mine has been a decidedly easy life for a person of color in America. I try to conceptualize what it is like for my students who got wanded by the NYPD, my students who have been stopped and frisked, my students whose parents work multiple jobs, my students on free and reduced-price lunch, my students whom white adults move away from because they look “scary.”
I try, when I can, to listen to them, because only by validating their feelings can we begin to find a way to overcome the challenges they face. That doesn’t mean I let them off easy when they do something wrong. But I try to understand the why.
I don’t need you to validate anyone’s actions, but I need you to validate what black America is feeling. If you cannot understand how experiences like mine or my students’ would lead to hopelessness, pain, anger, and internalized oppression, you are still not listening. So listen. Listen with your heart.
If you got this far, thank you. By reading this, you have shown you are trying. Continue the conversation, ask questions, learn as much as you can, and choose to engage. Only by listening and engaging can we move forward.
Black is Beautiful and Black Lives Matter,
Julia
Julia Blount was born and raised in Washington, D.C. An alumna of Princeton University, she is currently a middle school teacher.
Thank you, and you’re in mine.
$22,000,000,000,000.00
IOW, I don't give a rat's hindquarters what you hear!
Quoted from the OP article:
“then you are perpetuating white privilege and white supremacy.”
******************
Baloney!
I’ve seen the very same kind of brutality happen by law enforcement to white people, and women, even! With my OWN two eyes!
AND on a false warrant even! The woman was hauled from the hospital by police, after a severe beating by her boyfriend (he was trying to kill her with a chain saw), who also had severe bronchitis and was on antibiotics for it, thrown into a filthy jail cell with nothing more on her body than a hospital gown, and then denied the antibiotics she needed for the bronchitis, denied medicines for her wounds.
The warrant was a false warrant from another state containing false charges, and never filed properly in the first place. She was cleared of those charges, but not before they held her for a full week in jail, sick and injured for a crime she never committed in the first place!
It took her family a week to bond her out and in the mean time, the bondsman evicted her from her home as a result of the beating she got, but he wouldn’t let her take her possessions. He was her landlord and bondsman. But when she took them anyway (she moved elsewhere in the city), he re-arrested her and threw her back into jail under the pretext that he thought she was a run-risk. The fact of the mater was, she had beautiful horses and he wanted those horses.
Again, she was released and she had police witness to the second false arrest. They agreed to be witness for her on her behalf if she should decide to sue the bondsman. But they had no authority to stop the bondsman from arresting her.
However, her life was threatened and she ended up fleeing the city after being found innocent...AGAIN, and released from jail as well as all charges.
I don’t know where this ‘’white’’ privilege charge comes from, but it has little or nothing to do with reality. And I’ve seen quite a lot of it..up close and personal.
It’s simply a power move on behalf of LEO, sanctioned by TPTB for the purpose of controlling the public. They make money doing it and until that source of revenue dries up, they will continue to do it.
Dysfunctional , illogical and dependent = black power?
Your system IronJack has worked for refugees coming to the United States for hundreds of years. It's worked for people who came here (legally - and sometimes not legally) with little more than the shirts on their backs...
Programs' don't work. Democrats and their self appointed leaders are lying.
Citizens must work for their piece of the pie. Jobs are NOT gifts handed out by the wealthy. Jobs are people doing favors for each other - and money's the system of keeping track of those favors...
Feelings do not give you the right to destroy or loot or commit physical acts that are wrong.
I know that Japan and other generally homogenous nations are just wringing their hands at their lack of vibrant diversity, watching all this slow-motion train wreck. Who could doubt that they feel their lack of enrichment via riots, looting (the legal and the illegal kinds), soaring crime rates, dysfunctional government, torn social fabric thanks to competing cultures (with government and the MSM putting their thumb on the scale for one side), etc? No matter what people thought at the time, it’s a shame and a sin what the rest of the world did to South Africa. At least the whites in power offered jobs, education, and health care to the blacks. The blacks currently in power can’t/won’t offer that much to their “own” people (other South African blacks), much less the foreign blacks coming in, and much, much less the whites who created the wealth upon which those services were based.
Note to Julia: Totally agree, black is beautiful and black lives matter.
But black “culture” is destructive, has rotten values, promotes a gangstah lifestyle, and inevitably leads to arrests and/or early, violent death.
Why don’t some of the beautiful black people who do matter — probably including you, Julia — go teach some cultural values other than gangstah in those schools? YOU have to do it, not white people, because black kids have been taught to hate whitey for so very long.
Helltimore.
White flight on super charge..
BLACK PRIVILAGE: to game the system, to get over on whitey when facts need not apply.
Read up on Rosa Parks. The “spontaneous” incident she precipitated, was not so spontaneous, and was orchestrated with the help of the CPUSA. There had been an earlier, truly spontaneous event in which an unwed black mother did the same thing (refuse to give her seat up to a white person), but the movement (whatever was truly driving it) didn’t consider it a good basis upon which to spark the protest, because she was an unwed mother. But they took the event and orchestrated it to be used by a more “sympathetic” figure.
Apropos of nothing, but interesting to me-Rosa Parks, in her sunset years while living in Detroit, had her home invaded, and was beaten and robbed, by a “brotha”. That same “brotha” was later caught red-handed while attempting to rob a Catholic church. When he was arrested, he bragged to the officers that he was the man who attacked Rosa Parks. I suppose he didn’t serve much time for that crime, or was too thick/evil to learn from it.
FOX doesn’t know better, or would never admit it they do, because they are no different from the rest of Conservative Inc, which refuses to acknowledge reality.
Notice the meme from these thugs every time they are interviewed ?
Talking points handed down from the top.
1. Contridictionary statements; this is for Freddy, this not about Freddy, this is for jobs, this is against white privilage, this is against police brutality, where are the police stopping the riots ?
2. Notice the thugs don’t want the reporters there and want the media to leave ? In case there might be a real neiborhood person speaking the truth and shedding the light on what is really going on.
3. All lives matter, All black lives only matter.
Were is news reports of white people dying or being abused by black police officers ?
Were is the news of whites living in proverty in Baltimore instead of hearing the meme “ white privilege “ ?
It’s also like a child trowing a temper tantrum not getting his way.
Can we say ? With Al Sharpton involved with this ?
Riot Shakedown , for mo money, mo money, mo money...
Dear Julia,
You built that.
Love,
FMDJ
Dear Black America, let me offer a different perspective from the other side of the tracks: That minority, the black vandals, have soured inter-racial relations for the rest of us for at least two generations.
I was nearly mugged by a black man two days ago in broad daylight on a public street in the Houston medical center. Perhaps he had been whipped up by all the hostility bubbling up in other places. The point is, I cannot really trust any young black stranger on the street unless he looks pretty damned respectable (like wearing a suit and tie, and yes, that is called profiling). Now, that’s a shame. I didn’t start the troubles, but that is the consequence of it. Some of my dearest friends are black, but they are not riff-raff.
So, Black Americans, do you understand why some White Americans just might not want anything to do with you? Check back in two generations.
I hear the great riot spreading the wealth around shakedown help whitey give up their supposed “ white privilege “.
Julia believes that the millions of dollars in damage to INNOCENT people in Baltimore, who did NOTHING, to deserve what they got, was justified? That WE need to RESPECT what black america is feeling right now? INSANE IN THE MEMBRANE!
Its time, more than ever, to reduce entitlement programs 70-90%
If Julia is all about respect then we should give her the respect she deserves?
Something should be said about Black PRIVIAGE.
To be able to blame others for your own self inflicted problems.
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