This should be a relatively short post as I am trying to remember everything I said in an earlier thread this summer. Let's see if my memory serves me well:
Some of us have had the benefit of the doubt, and others have had to prove we are worthy of the same opportunities.
For example, Black men have been harassed, denigrated, and even killed for the most mundane of things that white people claimed offense toward their so-called hierarchy of supremacy. Emmett Till was killed outside Money, MS for whistling at a white woman, and more recently, Ahmaud Arbery was murdered for jogging in a white neighborhood and stopping to look at new construction.
Pick the good guy - it wasn't the guy who shot up the movie theater only to escape his punishment by alleging mental illness. Even first responders have a hand in systemic racism - it's not just the police, judges, prosecuting attorneys, and handpicked juries who can be swayed to a certain verdict of guilt or innocence. For crimes like these, America seems to put up a $6M price for snuffing out the wrong ones in exchange for 1)silence and 2)the chance to do it again as taxpayers ultimately foot the bill.
We all know about the injustices in the American legal system by two words:
JUST US. In all honesty, what is wrong with following the Constitution and the Bill of Rights ensuring that all men are created equal?
When you can invoke all sorts of privilege to get out of the pokey including a relationship with the President of the United States solely because of the color of a rich man's skin and the dollars thrown in the way of freedom, one walks while the other is tortured nightly abuse to the point he kills himself. At 16, Kalief Browder should have been given a diversion course if not had the trumped up charges against him dropped.
White privilege doesn't exist? I beg to disagree about the two women who tried to better their children's futures.
Every time Black people rise up, the police and politicians throw everything but the kitchen sink to suppress Black suffering yet show remarkable restraint toward Kevin or Karen throwing a hissy fit. See the Saltine Siege from January 6 as evidence of the free pass.
White terrorists gets Burger King.
Black men who are too drunk to go home get executed at Wendy's instead of a ride home.
Again, Kevin flips out over having to wear a mask while George Floyd's last 8:46 were spent gasping for air and calling for his late mother as the cop kneeling on his neck grins about it.
Last but not least, the fella who raises a mirror to America loses his job yet the actual danger whines about not having an unsweetened iced tea or a haircut with little to no regard for following the law or respecting his fellow man...but I bet he calls himself a Christian.
Brother James Baldwin said it best. To further study and understand in small part - overcoming systemic discrimination does not happen with the snap of a finger nor as my conservative friends sometimes think that everything is better due to one small advancement or two, read the following texts:
Martin Luther King, Jr.'s A Letter From Birmingham Jail
W.E.B. Dubois' Souls of Black Folk
Isabel Wilkinson's Caste and The Warmth of Other Suns
Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow
Robin DiAngelo's White Fragility
Nikhole Hannah-Jones' The 1619 Project
Angela Davis' Policing the Black Man
Khalil Gibran Muhammad's The Condemnation of Blackness
Charles Blow's The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto
...and so many more tomes.
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