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.
Whites are not responsible for the breakdown in black families.
White liberal democrats are 99% responsible for the breakdown of the black family.
I know - sometimes I read the first paragraph and think I’ve got it... it’s often a mistake. Like in this case...
I stopped ‘respectin’ after the Watts riots in the ‘60’s.
I stopped ‘respectin’ after a race riot in a small village near U-Tapao Thailand in 1973.
I stopped ‘respectin’ after the black riot on Dover AFB in 1975, and there were no arrests, and no disciplinarian actions or court martials.
Three strikes, you are out.
Bingo!
Interesting story. Yet whites are supposed to revere the ground Rosa Parks walked on, since she was such a martyr to “dah Cauz.”
I know it happens... white cops kill white criminals - black cops kill white criminals. (Black cops tend to kill more black criminals - even as a percentage of population but that's a different story...) But for the most part the white community doesn't care how it's white criminals are treated. I can't imagine thousands of white people giving a damn about some white criminal dying. Maybe we should...
We do have small groups that keep an eye on 'the least of us'... and make sure prisoners are well fed and treated with dignity.. It's a small part of white culture... but a part that matters.
Most of us think crime's a dangerous occupation... if some white guy wants to be a criminal rather than getting a job it's his risk and his problem.
I know that sounds harsh... it might be one of the reason's we have fewer criminals. Our feeling is similar to people of all other races - other than blacks...
Have you ever seen thousands of Asians in the streets protesting the death of some Asian criminal? Doesn't happen.
Most races care about the innocent - not the thugs. But this Baltimore case might get interesting. If police are in on a murder - and cover-up - we all need to take a look at the overall problem of over-policing in the black community.(Aside from the fact that most of us are tired of paying the police to stand in for absent fathers...)
I know it's a 'which came first - the chicken or the egg' - type of thing... but someone will need to look at the incentive patterns that are creating the mess and start to redo them. We can't have cops acting as judge, jury and executioner. It undermines our whole system of law and justice. On that level.. this might matter. Big time.
And like the author of the piece you're out to lay the blame on anybody but the person responsible for manitaining the family themselves. It's always someone else's fault.
I hear the waaaahmbulance coming for Julia.
Why does she feel the need to identify with or care about criminals and ne’er do wells? I do not identify with or care one bit about the white criminal/ne’er do well class. There are too many successful black people in this country for this type of whining to have any validity.
I don't give a damn about your complaints. You citiots are mostly either lazy and/or undisciplined. Baltimore created this mess. Baltimore is mostly lazy and/or undisciplined. That include white Baltimore. You people there chose your leadership that f'ed you up and votes for democraps. That's on you libs.
I grew up in a rural county that was 97% white and has a consistent 20%+ poverty rate. I wasn't impoverished growing up and was lucky in that respect, but we lived on the edge like almost everyone else. There's not a lot money in North Michigan away from the resorts. I got my grades up, played sports (which kept me out of trouble) and got into school and while I'm not rich, I get by alright. That's due to hard work and discipline. We didn't shoot each other. We didn't kill each other. My former home county has 3 homicides in five years. Now why is that? Even with the black rural areas up north, it's the same thing. Two homicides in five years in that county (not sure if they were white or black). We have plenty of poverty, but since we are better than you, we don't screw over our neighborhoods.
This is a city problem. People in the city f'ed it up due to inferior city culture. Until that is fixed, the problem will still be there.
‘Rats living too close together is always trouble.
When it said that “White liberal democrats are 99% responsible for the breakdown of the black family”, it is understood that Lyndon B. Johnson and his Great Society Program planned the overthrow and destruction of the black American family. And for the last 50 years, white liberals have had carte blanche to politically and economically enslave the blacks.
But the blame doesn’t stop with white liberal politicians. No sir. The white media and the whites in the entertainment industry getting rich off of rap music and other racist “entertainment” are also to blame.
Sure blacks are to blame for the mess they are in. But whites in the government, the media and in entertainment are driving the bus that blacks are throwing themselves under.
The white liberals you’re referring to are the “elite” or “evil” class of liberal, who know full well that they are destroying and keeping people down.
The sheeperal class have one driving motivation - self-righteousness. They actually believe, and want to believe, that by voting for the evil class, they are “helping” blacks and the poor.
You’re right. White liberal elites are the problem... well, most of it...
No amount of money will fix these attitudes and beliefs.
Sorry but I’m all out of sack cloth and ashes.
The irony...
Dear Julia,
Until black lives matter to black people first, there is nothing I can do as a white woman to change your perception of your situation.
That’s why I said 99%.
Because these programs are available to all demographics,
but seem to have affected one in particular more than the others.
Of course, the programs shouldn’t have existed in the first place, thus the 99%.
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