Right Side of Politicks, I cannot read these words of yours (if they are, indeed yours) and believe that they could possibly have been written by a black person who grew up in the world of the United States. Do you (or whoever writes to be claiming personhood) genuinely believe that we black folks think of ourselves as victims, or, unbelievably, that some one, thing, or other murky entity, needs to tell us what we are? WHO “tells” us that we are victims, and WHO claims that victimhood is empowering? Your statement, presented as a fact, makes your essay a lie from the beginning.
I’ll tell you. I’m a very fortunate, privileged black woman, and I have experienced prejudice, racism, and someone else deciding what my “identity” is since my own coming to reason. No one needs to tell me the obstacles and injustices I face and have faced. Certainly no other person tells me how to experience and interpret what happens to me. I can do that myself. I can do it very well because I spend a great deal of my time in “the white world,” and I know how it treats me, despite my gifts.
If someone will not hire me because of the color of my skin, or they are offended at my competence and the color of my skin, I’m not imagining it. If I hear someone complain that “there are blacks everywhere now and “you can’t go anyplace anymore,” then that is not my imagination. When I am followed around in a store, which still happens, then I am not the one concentrating on my identity or considering myself a victim. Some other person is doing that to me. There is no degree of my self-actualization that can change another person’s behavior. That is not on me. That is someone else’s racism, and they need to own it rather than blame me.
The narrative should be about systemic racism and micro (and macro) aggressions because that is what we live with. Having been “given” our freedom, and nothing else, we have had little chance to build up generational wealth to pass on. Can you deny that it was the law of the land to keep us from buying a home where we wanted if we could afford it; going to a prestigious college of our choice if we were qualified; marrying who we chose, getting either the job or the wage we deserved, participating in the political life of the nation, and most important, receiving equal justice under the law?
It is most definitely not up to “us,” “us” being people of various colors, to fight and strive. It is up to the people who have given themselves the “license” to separate people by race (a social construct and not a biological determination) by religion, by ability, by gender, or by sexual orientation to fix themselves and fix the brokenness to which they have consigned us.
I know that there are others who, somehow, believe your mixed-up point of view. You, and they, are giving aid and comfort to the very ones who have made us “victims” by absolving them of responsibility for the damage they have done, codified in law and carried out in fact. In the last decade, the last year, the last month, for heaven’s sake, substantive rights of ours have been eroded by white, Republican legislatures who gleefully aim to erase the gains we have fought, striven for, and only, temporarily, won.
If I were a praying person, I would pray for you. As a person of hope, I have hope for you. As a person of learning, I hope that you will learn the real way of the world. As a person of honesty, I hope that you will discover the truth and tell it. Finally, as a person of vision, I hope that you will soon open your eyes.
Shalom and Salaam.
