Uncle Tom's Mansion

I'm so sick of people whining about institutional racism and the white man's out to get the black man and yaddah yaddah yaddah.  I'm not going to pretend racism no longer exists the way so many right wing white Tea Party nutjobs do because I'm not stupid.  I know racism is still very much alive.  Yet I'm also too intelligent to pretend that only white people are racist the way so many black people do.

Racism is not a whites only disease.  There are a great number of white people out there who aren't racist and there are a great number of black people who are.  There are also racist Latinos, racists Asians, racist Arabs....  EVERY ETHNIC GROUP ON THE PLANET HAS ITS FAIR SHARE OF RACISTS.

But society only calls out white people.  The media will crucify a white person for saying or doing anything that may be remotely considered racially offensive, but very rarely does anyone ever call out black people for doing the same thing.  And when someone does call out a black person, THEY'RE the ones who are racist.  Not the black person.

It doesn't matter what black people do wrong anymore.  It's always the white man's fault.  Blacks are forced to commit crimes because of institutional racism.  Black poverty is the white man's fault even though millions of white people are in the same poverty.  It isn't the lack of education and skills that keep black kids from having a successful career, it's the white man denying them the right to work.  Even though schools have been desegregated for decades.  Even though large portions of blacks have college degrees and successful careers.  It isn't black people's faults that predominantly black neighborhoods have such high crime rates or that black teens are so disrespectful they refuse to wear pants correctly or that so many blacks have so little consideration for their neighbors that they play loud music at all hours of the day. THEY can't help it.  The white man MAKES them behave that way.

Bullshit.  You  CHOOSE what kind of person you are and if you CHOOSE to act like trash, you ARE trash.  The white man isn't making the black man do anything the black man doesn't want to do.  All the anti discrimination laws on the books, affirmative action.  What have black people done with them?  Why don't black people want to be more active in politics or in the community?  Why don't black people want to be cops?  How can you expect your circumstances to change if you don't do anything to change them?

We never want to call black people out on their own bad behavior.  We never want to suggest that maybe things would change if more black people would just stop blaming their problems on their being black and started CORRECTING the things that cause those problems.

We feel so guilty of our past, we've lost all sense of fairness.

But we have come a long way since the 1960s and we've certainly come a long way from the days of slavery.  This continued blame everything on white people nonsense makes it sound like nothing's changed at all.  Even though white people marched during the Civil Rights movement and in Ferguson and Baltimore.  Even though whites are demanding the Confederate flag no longer be flown because even whites recognize that something racially offensive has no place in our society anymore.  To keep attacking whites isn't fair.

A handful of bad seeds can't speak for an entire people, but vilifying an entire people over a handful of bad seeds will make those people not like you very much and so racism will never die.

Stop demanding the equality you have no intention of giving to others.  That makes you a hypocrite.

The only way to end racism is for one side to be the better person and stop recognizing race as anything other than an ancillary issue.  Most white people are trying to do that and I commend them for it.  It's not ignoring the problem of racism.  It's acknowledging that giving racists attention only encourages them.  It's recognizing that someone's race isn't an issue anymore and we don't have to let it be.

The only people still hung up on race are the people using race as an excuse to either hate or to explain their own inaction.

It's time to move on if we're ever going to heal.