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.
I hear BS.
Exactly. Perhaps the writer can describe what the community she speaks for has done to earn our respect.
After decades of the Great Society and the advent of the welfare state I'd really like to hear it.
A certificate means you signed the registration form and maybe occupied a chair once or twice.
This reads like parody
Julia? Does she have eyes, nose and mouth or is she a Democrat creation as seen on the web.
Uncivilized, the definition, defining word there is savages.
OK, we won’t call them thugs, we will revert back to savages.
I read the whole piece - and I really do have sympathy for Julia Blount . She’s a true victim of the black underclass culture. She’s being judged based on THEIR horrible choices - not her choices. None of the thugs in Baltimore - none of the rioters there or drug dealers OR scammers are ‘her’. But she carries their choices in the tint on her skin...
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What about me? Typical White Person here? I too am a “true victim of the black underclass culture.” I too am being judged based on THEIR horrible choices - not my choices.
When the Imposter in Chief blames Republicans for conditions in Baltimore, when everything is whitie’s fault; when just like Ferguson, I will be left with the tab to clean up and rebuild the burned out slums, then where’s MY sympathy?
Obviously Julia has drunk the liberal Kool-Aid and deserves no sympathy. Me? I deny and reject her BS arguments which parrots the liberal left, but I guess that’s my “white privilege” at work here.
Welfare in ALL of its forms needs to be eliminated. We have had too many generations of people who simply won’t or can’t take care of themselves. Why? Because we PAY them to be poor. If you pay for something, you get more of it.
All of this happened out of good intentions. We are (or used to be, anyway) a rich country. Why should we just let people starve? Isn’t that inhumane? No, it isn’t.
Once you take away the consequences for sloth and other sins, you remove the incentive for people to avoid them. Why work at all if the issue of basic survival is “handled” by the taxpayers and the money is available on demand?
People don’t like to hear this, but in a truly free society, people have to live with the choices they make. And, like it says in the Bible, the wages of sin is death - or at least can be.
But, I am convinced that a society that does not go out of its way to take care of people and bail them out will end up with far fewer people who need to be taken care of. The hard part is getting people to just suck it up and let people fail and live (or not) with the consequences of the choices they make. Do that and you’ll see more people making the right choices.
I too am being judged based on THEIR horrible choices - not my choices.
to the tune of
TWENTY TWO MILLION MILLION DOLLARS.
The neocommunists have the country right where they want it. Hopelessly divided.
I can respect what they are feeling right now.
I CANNOT respect what they are DOING.
When you (the author) are smart enough to acknowledge the difference, we can talk.
Until then, STFU.
Blacks need to listen.To end the treatment that they are receiving, they need to change their behavior.They need to stop expecting the unearned and undeserved, and getting something for nothing.It is a matter of cause and effect and justice.To be treated well, you need to earn and deserve to be treated well.To earn and deserve to be treated well, you need to learn to make the right choices and do the right things, and live that lifestyle all the time.
everyone has his cross - unless you are referring to a cross belonging to group of people not heretofore cited.
If one wishes to be politically correct though awkward then one should write -
Everyone has his or her cross.
White privilege and white supremacy? You asked me to listen, Julia. You have just slapped an ugly label on me, yet you know me not. And with that...I have heard enough.
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Ugly label? I don’t think so.
I wear my “White privilege and white supremacy” as a badge of honor. I WORKED for it. I EARNED it. I followed the rules, got an education, got married and raised my family. I contributed to the success that was America. My fore-fathers worked and even sacrificed their lives in great World Wars so that America would be a Shining City on a Hill (R. Reagan).
If Julia and her ilk are so envious of my “White privilege and white supremacy” then let her convince me her hip-hop ghetto trash culture is any better.
Tax slavery which occupys much of your time at work to support those who lift not a finger to support the government.
what about the rest of the time when there is a disproportionate number of black on white crimes?
should those just be ignored?
I see a resume for a job in the racism industry.
I hear hopelessness
I hear oppression
I hear pain
I hear internalized oppression
I hear despair
I hear anger
I hear poverty
...all of which came about due to your own people’s BEHAVIOR! Correct the behavior, lose the problems.
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