Posted on 08/18/2020 10:56:21 AM PDT by MarvinStinson
I’d finished a evening walk when I saw the white woman washing her Lexus. She probably didn’t know she was about to throw her whiteness at me. I paused to wave. I didn’t want to startle her with my large, black presence. She made eye contact but didn’t wave back. I motioned to ask whether she’d take a few steps back into her driveway so I could pass while preserving social distance. My alternative was to step into traffic. She rolled her eyes and walked into her driveway, making a little room.
What I experienced was a white person being ticked off by my black presence, and exercising her privilege to make her annoyance known. How else could I experience it? We relentlessly teach people of color that their non-whiteness is the most salient, determinative thing about them, and lived experience frequently confirms this.
The woman’s snide, disgruntled manner ruined my night : it made my blackness feel like a problem and left me to absorb and metabolize her (white) irritation. I desperately needed the peace my walk gave me, but peace is fragile these days. Months (decades, really) of witnessing black and brown death, denigration, and pain have me enervated and depleted. As she stood in her driveway, I walked on with my heart racing and tears in my eyes.
People of color have a golden rule: we must be twice as good to get half as far as our white counterparts. This is a way of recognizing how systemic racism impacts our lives.
I’m calling for white folks to adopt a version of this : be twice as kind to the Black and brown people you encounter. Because you may harbor unconscious bias that gets in the way of being kind, particularly with black and brown people.
(Excerpt) Read more at time.com ...
Trepczynski is Executive Director of the Center for Social Justice at UC Berkeley School of Law. Her book about race, gender, and the body will be published by Simon & Schuster in 2021. You can follow her on Instagram and on her blog.
This is satire, correct?
This person is sick, they are mentally ill. Where is the evidence that the woman wouldn’t have rolled her eyes at some one of any other color?
A black Polack?
They need to distinguish between African-Americans who been taught to be victims, against an older generation of African Americans who were taught to be self-reliant, and foreign-born Africans, who are usually from an elite. If you look at people on college campus, if they appear to be African-American, your expectation is automatically lowered. But if you see an African, you think, how did you get here, you must be an elite? That isn’t color.
“People of Color” would be better served to learn that nobody owes them a damned thing. Honestly everyone needs to learn that. It’s one of the first steps towards becoming an adult.
Exactly
Er.. no, thank you.
barf.
Twice at good at...
Math?
English?
Science?
Spelling?
Then what?
A classic case of, “When you are a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”
I smell bullshit.
Kindness is perceived as weakness here. It is not rewarded.
What this really demonstrates is the author’s ignorance, narcissism, and reactionary, ideological possession. A chance encounter with a person who may have been rude is automatically added into the “USA systemic racism” file. Are there really NO other possibilities?
Writer is mentally ill.
Just my opinion.
Twice as good as they think they need to be, but not twice as good as anyone else obviously.
This is so incredibly vile.
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