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.
Julia, you are taking anecdotal evidence and drawing false conclusions that do not have any evidence or data to back it. If one black guy rushes a cop in his car in Missouri and dies, it has absolutely no relation to how cops treat black people. It has 100% to do with how cops treat guys who rush cops and ignore police orders. We don't know all that happened in Baltimore, but the guy was a menace to others and to himself and probably did something that led to an unfortunate situation. Had he not been arrested 18 times and acted like a fool, he'd probably be alive.
You don’t respect a rabid dog. You shoot it.
There is no excuse for blacks to do what they did in Baltimore, besides maybe stupidity.
Another drama queen. Respect is mutual, honey. You show it, you get it.
Dear Black American Men,
Stop killing one other, stop stealing from one another, and stop abandoning your bastard children.
That would solve 90% of Black America’s problems.
And have you written about what white or Christian or Catholic or Jewish or the 100 million un/underemployed are “feelin” now under the Obama Muslim Brotherhood Islamonazi usurper government ?
I’m sorry but everyone has their cross to bear and no group or members of a group are exempt. If you want to talk about the legacy of slavery, we’ll also have to speak of the 600,000 soldiers’ lives snuffed out in a war over its termination. If you want to talk about racial privilege, then we have to get to affirmative action. If you want to talk about economic deprivation, we can talk about the enormous taxes many of us pay to support a very substantial number of the people who live in Baltimore through welfare, food stamps, free medical care, etc. some of which is deserved and needed, some of which is not. If you want to talk about hurt, talk to the families of Vietnam vets who were killed or severely wounded and who were stomped on by the left — 88 percent of our casualties were white (this not in the slightest to disparage the many black men who fought very well in the war but the percentage of black casualties was actually LESS of their percentage of the population than that of Caucasian and Hispanic background soldiers). In conclusion, if you want to waste your life whining, you would have plenty of company if the rest of us decide to blame everyone else for our problems, wallow in it, and never make any progress as adult men and women citizens of the only country on earth that tries to give the best and most affordable health care, human rights, and path to advancement if you will work for it.
I hear someone that thinks that all blacks should believe and act the same way.
Dear Julia:
Please let me tell you what I hear:
I hear Marxist boilerplate;
I hear threats;
I hear black bigotry and racism;
I hear incitement to riot;
I hear Leftist stupidity;
And I’m ignoring you.
What do they want? I’m sure they don’t know themselves.
These people will always be unhappy. They are a minority group in the US. Would they be any better off if they lived in a country where they are in the majority? Perhaps we’ll never know.
There are thousands of people who risk their lives trying to come to America each year (most illegally). If America is such a horrible place...why do these people come?
Anyone who is unhappy in America should be free to emigrate to any other country. If these people want to return to Africa, where they will have a chance to be in the majority, then I think the US government should support them.
I would support a resettlement program for anyone who is unhappy in the US, and wants to return to the country of their ethnic roots. And this is just not for blacks - it can be for anyone.
I would support the government paying for the people not only for the cost of moving to the country of their choice, but also to subsidize them while living there. These people, receiving a subsidy from the US, would probable live at a higher standard then most others in their new country. With the money supplied by the US, they would also help the local economy in ways that “foreign aid” never could.
I just want to be able to walk the streets without being targeted.
Wait, what?!
Depends on your white racist definition of “civilized”, now doesn’t it?
/leftspeak
Juila ? SHUT THE HELL UP AND LOOK IN THE MIRROR !
THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS WHITE PRIVIAGE !
I grew up in Baltimore don’t tell me that I don’t see what’s going on.
BLACK PRIVIAGE IS THE ABILITY TO KEEP BLAMING WHITEY FOR YOUR OWN DAMN FAULTS , TO BE ABLE TO COMMIT CRIMES AND GET AWAY WITH IT AMD GET OFF SCOTT FREE !
“I hear hopelessness
I hear oppression
I hear pain
I hear internalized oppression
I hear despair
I hear anger
I hear poverty”
I see laziness, I see druggies and drunks, I see lawless thugs (murderers, rapists, thieves) I see folks on welfare, section 8, free phones, free school lunches, racists, I see folks dependent on gov’t. who have refused to elevate themselves, I see folks who are a complete drain on society.
The same can be said of the young black women who's business was burned and was crying in the street. And of the older black vet being interviewed - saying he was 'an American'... a good black man who had served his country with pride and honor.
The black community is filled with these types too. Honorable good people who have been steam rolled by the black underclass culture.
So, Julia Blount you do have my apology for my earlier snarky comment about graduating from Princeton... Sometimes I need to read first and comment later.
“White Privilege” is the cry of those who refuse to adopt the cultural values and behaviors that lead to the prosperity and success they envy.
Same thing as has happened to the Jews throughout history.
The same can be said of the young black women who's business was burned and was crying in the street. And of the older black vet being interviewed - saying he was 'an American'... a good black man who had served his country with pride and honor.
The black community is filled with these types too. Honorable good people who have been steam rolled by the black underclass culture.
So, Julia Blount you do have my apology for my earlier snarky comment about graduating from Princeton... Sometimes I need to read first and comment later.
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