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.
Mulatto is apparently Spanish for young mule.
A filthy bitch. There is no “white supremacy “ or “white privilege” so STFU.
I grew up in one of the most lily-white cities in one of the most lily-white states in the 70s and 80s.
I knew few black people. Funny enough, the few I did know were either in mixed-race marriages, or the product of mixed-race marriages (or liaisons). My cousin was one of the few in the group of offspring I knew - though her parents never married (don't even know if she ever knew her dad).
I don't recall any of them having a hard time of life. IIRC, none were taken out and killed.
My cousin grew up in Portland, and has a chip on her shoulder about race and all things whites did to hurt blacks, but she married a middle-class white guy.
Had she grown up in my state (Idaho), she'd likely have a much better attitude about things.
The reality of it is, a black person visiting a majority white area will more than likely live to tell about it, and more than likely never even be bothered.
Can you say the same if races were reversed?
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
If black lives matter, why do so many of you kill one another and why are so many of you aborted?
Yes. Just like the genocide ongoing here in the USA that is black on black crimes and murders.
Ignore those as well. But let one white cop kill (even deservedly so) some thug and all hell breaks loose.
Baltimore’s Rioters Monday Afternoon special five finger discount.
Al and Jesse would agree on the "fully staffed", but differ on the "does not pay well".
A Few Lines Later...
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.
Wow, talk about not letting race define you in your childhood.
A filthy bitch. There is no “white supremacy “ or “white privilege” so STFU.
___________________
I take a different POV. See post 76.
Hey Julia ? Don’t call me “ Dear “ I ain’t yos mama.
One of the best responses to all of this even though it’s on a similar subject.
http://articles.philly.com/1991-05-15/news/25798743_1_bilingual-education-older-immigrants-chicken
They come here so they can be “oppressed” and hop on the victim gravy train. Unlike all of the rest of history, they don’t run the other way from their so-called “oppressors”. (See white flight.)
And no, they’re not better off when they’re in the majority. See South Africa, Haiti, Detroit. Different histories, different geographies, different climates, etc, but one thing in common-majority black and black-ruled.
As do the decent black folks with whom I am acquainted; I feel for them because they get unfairly tarred with that broad brush.
Not only envy, but cross the ocean to get a piece of it, all the while bemoaning the very people who created what they want.
Same thing if the situation was reversed and a white person walking g in the hood.
The blacks would say “ the white cracker don’t belong in the hood “.
Remember when we were told a few decades ago that we are not to look at skin color, that even the word black is inflammatory ?
Just who are reinforcing the stereo types, and the segeragation of colors here ? Yes, YOU DEAR JULIA.
She should have a dispassionate look at the DOJ’s own crime statistics, especially the rape statistics, and then talk. But that won’t happen-the numbers won’t mean what they say, etc.
Funny...it’s ok to person of color....
Not OK to say colored person.
Go figure.
I call them ferals.
I honestly think they have the idea that it’s not fair that
behaving according to their cultural standards is considered a crime
under “the white man’s law”.
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