Posted on 04/28/2012 12:04:26 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Many people desperately want to believe America is post-racial. Surely a black family living in the White House is proof that we've overcome our embarrassing racial history and become a beacon of tolerance and respect where character, not skin color, informs the judgments we make.
That sounds like a wonderful concept.
It's just not reality.
In reality, a barrage of shockingly racist tweets bashed Washington Capitals forward Joel Ward Wednesday night after he scored the game-winning goal in overtime of Game 7 against the Boston Bruins.
Enraged Bruins fans, many of them teens, took to Twitter and branded Ward the N-word, along with stupid, dumb, arrogant, smelly, useless and a waste of life in their verbal assault of the black athlete who ended their beloved team's season. In reality, 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was gunned down by rogue neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman in late February. Martin's crime was walking through his father's gated community in Florida wearing a hoodie and carrying a bottle of iced tea and a bag of Skittles. And, also being black.
Those who deny that race heavily influenced Zimmerman's actions are simply unwilling to confront the facts. Zimmerman openly concluded that Martin looked suspicious, and he came to that conclusion largely because of black stereotypes that are rooted in our nation's history and perpetuated by how we're portrayed by the media - and how we choose to portray ourselves.
That history, those stereotypes and those portrayals amounted to Zimmerman looking at a black male wearing a sweatshirt and seeing danger.
There are many more examples of racism in our supposedly post-racial society. Some of them make headlines, but most do not.
As the daughter of an Italian mother and a black father, I've regularly been accused by friends and family on both sides of the racial divide of being "too black" or "so white." I've also been privy to the racist slip-ups that occur when people think I'm not listening.
About 20 years ago, it was my white uncle: "You know, looking at black people, you can really see how man evolved from ape," he concluded while watching a golf game at a holiday gathering. Last year, it was a white editor at another newspaper: "We should put the headline in Ebonics!" she said with a snicker, when discussing a story about a black man.
At an 8th-grade dance, it was someone I had considered a friend. And it was blatant. A trivial argument about dance moves escalated into a full-blown disagreement in which, in front of all of our friends, he chose to hurt me by unleashing the most potent word in his arsenal of insults: "nigger."
I don't remember what words came before or after it in his sentence. I just remember standing frozen, my skin flushed, looking at black holes where his eyes should have been while a mental framework I'd spent my life constructing simply collapsed.
In that moment, a post-racial world I desperately wanted to believe was real - a world where my race had ceased to matter and I could be viewed as, well, just me - proved to be little more than an alluring fallacy, a pleasant dream.
In that moment, I realized that no matter what else I was, no matter how hard I tried to dispel negative racial stereotypes, the common denominator of my existence could always be reduced to that word, and the idea it embodied: ugliness, worthlessness, a thing.
I knew then, as I know now, that racism has not disappeared. It has merely settled under the surface, waiting for a moment of anger, or a moment of power, or a moment when we think no one is listening, to reveal itself.
The evidence of a still-racial society is everywhere, if we choose to look. It ranges from grossly offensive tweets to seemingly random violence. Sometimes it's just a 12-year-old girl crying in a bathroom stall.
Still, I hope for the post-racial society I thought was real before that 8th-grade dance. I believe it can exist. I think that someday, it will. But not if we pretend it already does.
What’s wrong with this person? Slaves were brought here before America was an independent country. We fought a war partly to free them. What have we done wrong?
I’m sure that Zimmerman being a “White Hispanic” could understand the hurt of being called names. Maybe if Black teens had not been burglarizing the neighborhood lately...there would have been no suspicion.
George Zimmerman’s Black Ancestry is Revealed
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2876811/posts
The world’s most famous “white Hispanic” is part black
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2876819/posts
George Zimmerman: the black, Hispanic, Peruvian, kind-hearted non-white, not-racist poster boy
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2876692/posts
George Zimmerman Has ‘Black Roots’
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2876518/posts
Why are we always the racists when the media always has to note the first black this, the first hispanic that? They are the ones who have to drag race into every issue.
If one word is so powerful that it angers the user AND the hearer, then that word has power. But words should not have power; they must not control us. Why this one word?
Consider its source; it comes from the Spanish word for black - negro. In Spanish, the e is prounced as a long a. Add in a Southern accent and it becomes the hated word.
Other words (”sic”, “wop”, “kike”, etc.) all once had the same power and we have robbed them of their power by mocking their use. So should it be with any word that tries to control our emotions.
The only ones that are racists are the racists themselves.
I wonder who she thinks is pretending we have a post racial society?
Well, it appears that living in a dreamworld constructed around how you want the world to be and not how it actually is, is a recipe for pain and confusion at a minimum, or violence and death at worst.
That chunky German animal loving woman climbing over a barrier in a zoo, diving into the moat and swimming over to a Polar bear springs to mind. The lovable, friendly creature of her fantasy no doubt saw her as being more akin to a particularly plump seal and took a chomp out of her back.
This woman reels off a litany of racial insensitivities from her earliest memories, apparently, but there’s quite the imbalance as to just whom is represented among the offenders. I’ve had biracial friends and acquaintances, and can say with some certainty that she received just as much if not more abuse at the hands of black people.
She’s between worlds, being biracial, being part both but belonging to neither, when it gets right down to brass tacks. She purports to have longed for a postracial society, to have dreamed of it, despite an apparent lifetime filled with indications to the contrary.
The young lady appears to have been just as deluded as that German fan of cuddly Polar Bears. Sometimes, barriers are best left unjumped, and moats unswum. They’re there for a reason.
Chomp.
Your answer is in your statement.
Think about it.
Please correct me if I am wrong.... but I don't think that Martin's father lived in the Zimmerman's gated community, doesn't he live just outside it? And Martin was not just casually cutting through (like taking a shortcut), Martin was walking around behind houses, suspiciously looking around, was he not?
These people still refuse to acknowledge the facts.
Trayvon Martin at that time was on a ten day suspension from Carol City High School in Miami Gardens, which is a long way from Sanford in central Florida.
It’ll be interesting to see what happens the day there aren’t any politicians for such whiners to pull on and they finally have to face everyone who is sick and tired of their whining.
I’ve often wondered how different America would have been had #1) slavery not been brought to these shores, and #2) the founding fathers had dealt with abolishing it at the time the constitution and other founding documents were written.
I wasn’t racist until I was told by lots of black people that my skin color made me evil, worthy only of being killed.
I wasn’t racist until I started reading about black-on-white multiple beatings based on the actions, in another state, by other people.
Is there evidence at all that Martin made it to a store and actually bought ice tea and skittles? It may have only been an excuse he gave his father so that he could leave the house for awhile. Unless there is actual evidence that Martin in fact did go to the store and was on the way back to where he was staying, it’s an outright lie to report and to write that it actually happened.
Wow, this girl sees the boogieman everywhere.
There is some indication that the whole iced tea and Skittles thing was constructed by the lawyer, Crump, purely on the basis of litter found and catalogued at the scene by police, and nothing else.
Yep. Obama and Holder too.
Actually,the author of this article is the racist that she deplores in others. Racism is a two way street. Yet she obviously cant see it when it is glaring on her side.
An example is her ignoring the fact that young black males are part of a verified criminal profile and that there had been numerous break ins in Zimmermans neighborhood before he saw Trayvon acting suspiciously.
She instead beats the dead horse of “racial profiling” to falsely slander Zimmerman as a racist.
Why am I not surprised at this racist, knee jerk, reaction of a “liberal” to the facts? It is their signature.
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