If a white supremacist pushes a black man into the river,
And he’s drowning, because he doesn’t know how to float,
And if the other black men standing on the bank,
Don’t know how to swim either,
Who’s going to rescue him?
Only if there’s another white man, standing besides them,
Who knows how to swim, maybe he can save him,
But it’s gonna be dangerous, because he’ll get wet,
And in the ensuing struggle,
They both might drown.
That’s how difficult it is,
To overcome racism,
You’ve got to put your life in peril.
By: ElRoyPoet © 2021
Let’s talk about whether the US is fundamentally racist….
Commentary: Systemic racism becomes deeply ingrained in our institutions when polite society tolerate bad etiquette rules to be implemented by white supremacists. American culture is like a moving walkway in the airport—we’re pulled toward institutional racism and white privilege. Even if you’re standing still and not actively attacking minority groups, you’re being pulled in that direction. Until you turn around and move in the opposite direction and oppose people who say harmful things, you’re allowing christian nationalism to be taken for granted.
Conservatives have tricked themselves with reverse psychology: ‘If everybody’s a racist nobody’s a racist’. Since they are living in denial, they have chilled the Constitution’s First Amendment—freedom to assemble and petition the government: “Black lives matter, (too)” by watering it down to: “All lives matter”.
Everybody rationalizes when they don’t understand or justifies what they can’t control. Everything is perception, and people tend to respond defensively to a mixed environment. For example, affluent parents can take their child out of the public-school system and enroll the student in private education to escape racism. However, the minority kid is stuck. Unfortunately—to the privileged child the word ‘racist’ becomes a joke or an insult, because he has become desensitized to it. In other words, it’s meaningless or just a token label.
Hopefully, the Constitution will still be around when evangelicals also need its protections. However, if our representatives continue to cherry pick the Amendments they want to enforce, I doubt there will be anything left, of our civil rights!
Apartheid Explained | Nelson Mandela’s Battle
“Instead of being blind to race, color blindness makes people blind to racism, unwilling to acknowledge where its effects have shaped opportunity or to use race-conscious solutions to address it. Denial that racism still exists; denial that, even if it does exist, it’s to blame for the situation at hand; denial that the problem is as bad as people of color say it is — these denials are the easy outs that the dominant white narrative offers to people. Wellesley College professor Jennifer Chudy’s research finds that only one in five white Americans consistently expresses high levels of sympathy about anti-Black discrimination.
Color blindness has become a powerful weapon against progress for people of color, but as a denial mindset, it doesn’t do white people any favors, either. A person who avoids the realities of racism doesn’t build the crucial muscles for navigating cross-cultural tensions or recovering with grace from missteps. That person is less likely to listen deeply to unexpected ideas expressed by people from other cultures or to do the research on her own to learn about her blind spots.” Excerpt from: Why saying “I don’t see race at all” just makes racism worse.
“It would twist the minds of men, as greed and self-reverence eclipsed human conscience and allowed the conquering men to take land and human bodies that they convinced themselves they had a right to. If they were to convert this wilderness and civilize it to their liking, they decided, they would need to conquer, enslave or remove the people already on it, and transport those they deemed lesser beings in order to tame and work the land to extract the wealth that lay in the rich soil and shorelines.
To justify their plans, they took pre-existing notions of their own centrality, reinforced by their self-interested interpretation of the Bible, and created a hierarchy of who could do what, who could own what, who was on top and who was on the bottom and who was in between. There emerged a ladder of humanity, global in nature, as the upper-rung people would descend from Europe, with rungs inside that designation – the English Protestants at the very top, as their guns and resources would ultimately prevail in the bloody fight for North America. Everyone else would rank in descending order, on the basis of their proximity to those deemed most superior. The ranking would continue downward until one arrived at the very bottom: African captives transported in order to build the New World and to serve the victors for all their days, one generation after the next, for 12 generations.
There developed a caste system, based upon what people looked like – an internalized ranking, unspoken, unnamed and unacknowledged by everyday citizens even as they go about their lives adhering to it and acting upon it subconsciously, to this day. Just as the studs and joists and beams that form the infrastructure of a building are not visible to those who live in it, so it is with caste. Its very invisibility is what gives it power and longevity. And though it may move in and out of consciousness, though it may flare and reassert itself in times of upheaval and recede in times of relative calm, it is an ever-present through-line in the country’s operation.” Excerpt from America’s ‘untouchables’: the silent power of the caste system
Mentally Enslaved African-Americans, Who embrace the N-word talk.
“In the closing scene, Baldwin asserts that ‘I can’t be a pessimist because I’m alive, so I’m forced to be an optimist. But the future of the Negro in this country is precisely as bright or as dark as the future of the country. It is entirely up to the American people whether or not they are going to face and deal with and embrace this stranger whom they maligned so long. What white people have to do is try to find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have a ‘nigger’ in the first place. Because I am not a nigger, I am a man! But if you think I’m a nigger, it means you need him. And the question the white population of this country has got to ask itself—North and South, because it’s one country, and for a Negro there is no difference between the North and the South. It’s just a difference in the way they castrate you, but the fact of the castration is the American fact—If I am not the nigger here, and you the white people invented him, then you’ve got to find out why. And the future of the country depends on that, whether or not it’s able to ask [itself] that question.'” Excerpt from: I Am Not Your Negro
“In every encounter, we either give life or we drain it; there is no neutral exchange.” By: Brennan Manning
“But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy and not sacrifice.’ For I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners, to repentance.” Bible, Matthew 9:13
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