I usually do not write when I am pissed. But if I cool down, I won’t write the necessary response to a black man, a deputy sheriff who I hope is not patrolling in any community of color.
A good friend, Coffee Party USA President Debilyn Molineaux wrote a simple Facebook post and then asked for comments. Her questions always force me to think outside of the box. Debilyn wrote,
I empathize with people who want to protect their version of America. At the same time, we need to consider if the society we want to preserve is actually supported by systemic racism. What are your thoughts?
I was extremely impressed with many of the comments from her friends. Most appeared to be white given their Facebook profiles and their grasp of America’s reality left me impressed with the caliber of her friends.
Deb Rodney wrote:
The current America was built on systematic racism. People of color (along with poor white working class people) built the infrastructure of this country. We all know about slavery. Few realize, for example, that the Chinese were expendable workers who were hung over cliffs in baskets to plant dynamite charges in rocks to build railroads and roads. Many of them died. Or do people realize that women in factories who worked 16 hour days were locked in and some died in fires. Mostly Hispanic farmworkers have suffered from pesticide poisoning and back-breaking work. We live under a system that exploits workers for profit. Because of the nature of systematic racism, discrimination leaves most people of color vulnerable and in the worst paying and often the most dangerous jobs. Systemized racism pits people against each other by giving privilege to some and leaves others on the bottom of the heap. I do not want this version of America. Racism isn’t something people do consciously. It is a deep psychological part of a profit-making system for the 1% and is used to keep us divided. It, by design, keeps the most vulnerable suffering with the illusion that American provides– and if you are poor it’s your fault. Today’s American agenda is clearly that people of color, poor people of all colors and disabled people are worthless. In today’s America, only the consumers, with discretionary incomes are valuable. This is the road that capitalism has paved and is stretching out into a suffering future that is shameful. Is this a road that anyone with compassion can protect? Or is it a road the entitled are invested in so they protect their privilege? Sadly, even the poor believe in the system that exploits them. Some liberals want band-aids and regulations and higher taxes for the rich. None of those things will change what’s rotten about America. And don’t get me started about the effects of global capitalism on the environment…
Katie Page wrote:
This country was fundamentally built on the backs of slaves. In many ways, it is still run by forced labor and low wages. The few people up high don’t win unless other lose and lose badly.
But Greg McWhirter, a black man wrote the following that immediately made my blood boil for its lack of empathy and understanding of the modus operandi of systemic racism.
Greg McWhirter As a black man…
Born and raised in the hood of Eastside Indianapolis…
I was arrested at 15…
After seeing my mother hurt in a way I could never describe I decided to make better choices…
I went on to become a Deputy Sheriff…
I watched the friends I grew up with get arrested…
Some of them I arrested myself…
some of them even lost their lives to the streets…
I was able to work hard and make the right decisions to not go down the path that so many I grew up with did…
I got my family out of the hood. The dream of young black kid in the ghetto…
I came from nothing…
Now my kids are in the some of the best schools, safe neighborhood, and a life better than mine at the same age…
It’s because I made the right choices, no racist system held me down .Edit:
If anything it’s a system that keeps the poor poor and the rich rich. A system that makes it hard to climb out. But the color of my skin had nothing to do with it.
I immediately fired back with the following response.
I am also a black man. I did not become sheriff. I became a mechanical/software engineer and built a successful software company and have a daughter in medical school. In the process many of my peers did just as well, some did better, and some did not do as well. It is always true that most could make better choices but many times one fork in the road can determine one’s outcome. It is for that matter that I NEVER pat myself on my back for being a self-made entrepreneur. I understood that it was a combination of parenting, choices, arbitrarily choosing the right fork in the road even when not absolutely sure, society at large, and the luck of not having situations where my Black-Caribbean-Latino ethnicity could have created an involuntary situation that changed my outcome.
Now if you believe that color does not have a major impact on the lack of success, the treatment by the justice system, and the upward mobility in the aggregate for people of color, then I am concerned about the empathy you, especially given that you are a Deputy Sherriff, has in any minority community you police.
Yes, much of the harm inflicted in minority communities are self-inflicted. But the causation of said dysfunction has a history. You are strong with a certain degree of luck. My cohort is strong with a certain degree of luck. We should not ever believe that somehow we have overcome if the group in the aggregate hasn’t. If the White Supremacists who are smelling some power now see you out of your element, for them you are but another black man to be terrorized.
Jorge Manuel Kuri Lmt wrote a chronology that Greg McWhirter would do well to read.
Let’s see. Slavery as an institution ran the economy for a couple of centuries. We ended apartheid what, 50 years ago? The Klan was a regular presence in government at that time too. We created a fake war on Drugs, politically created and motivated to suppress minorities and the left. And it worked, in many, many areas of our country the pipeline highschool-Prison works exceptionally well, providing slave labor that makes profit for private prisons both ways, they are paid to hold the slave labor that is working to profit them. Money with both hands. And now we have a President that is openly bigoted. I believe the answer is Yes. The US has a system based on the oppression of minorities, it’s racist and abusive. That’s why we haven’t fixed our immigration problem, we like our food cheap. If we are not abusing native Americans we are busy abusing blacks or Irish (They were treated like dogs)Chinese on the railroad build or Latinos. Could it be that we are mad because we cannot abuse Muslims in the good old fashion way, you know, a better time; the 50s, when southern trees bare a strange fruit? We are changing, we are growing up and the forces of the reactionary right are screaming bloody hell. Which, for me. Proves we have a deeply flawed system that needs, and will, change.
Too many people are too quick to judge those they’ve left behind when they are successful. But that is what it means to be a true American in the eyes of a certain sect these days. Donald Trump is the exaggerated model. Is he who we are becoming? We better change that soon lest we self-destruct.