I think it is irrefutable that we are not all treated the same by police officers and for that matter just about everywhere. Many of my close friends with substantially less melanin at various times have embarrassingly found that out on many of our different outings in many different domains, cycling, partying, restaurants, etc. When they tell me they are sorry for what has occurred I immediately ask why. After all, they are not responsible for those acts. It is the society that we all live in.
But I think I understand and maybe I should have accepted the apology, well at least the first time. Why? Most did not overtly set the record straight in real-time when it would have mattered and may have been sufficiently educative in informing and changing the mindset and behavior of the perpetrators. But it is not fair to ask all to be martyrs when silence is safe for those who are in a sufficiently comfortable zone.
On a 3-day cycling trip to the Hill Country in Texas, 15 or so of us went to dinner after a very long ride. The waitress brought back two bills, one for me and one for the rest of the table. No one overtly noticed. When I had the opportunity to mention it around the campfire a few noticed it but just blew it off. The waitress wanted to make a statement. She wanted me to know that she would find a way to treat me differently from the rest, irrational hate that was taught by a plutocracy to ultimately control us all.
I spent some time syncing a video from two videos with police encounters between a white man and another with the black man that was murdered in Atlanta a few days ago, anecdotal yes, but stats justify using the comparison. To discredit the theme I was visually trying to promote — sometimes a better teaching tool that’s better than words and stats — some wanted to use the discharge of a stun gun as a justification for the police murdering the 27-year-old black man. Of course, the white guy “discharged” the police baton and a potentially weaponizable police SUV. But they centralized on what the black guy did wrong and not that the outcome for one is too often death based on one’s hue.
Here is the truth about Rayshard Brooks murder-by-cop
Cameras on cell phones have so shown the ubiquity of the prejudice, that it has finally convinced not only the plurality but the majority of Americans that institutional racism is real. Even if many maintain that recessive cancer when not in full control of one’s self, they understand that “systemic” has consequences that individual lapses into prejudices do not have. One can be fatal, cause poverty, and lower quality of life while the other is more temporary and easily redeemable.
A few days ago I had a short rant on how I overcame my homophobia several decades ago. All humans have biases caused by how they were reared. One must be intentional to fix themselves which is what I did. We should all take responsibility to extricate ourselves of whatever isms we have. We can fix all the isms that combined can ultimately cause our demise.
Our society is at the point of disintegration
We are in a transition period in this country and next to the precipice of fascism or worse, the complete disintegration of this society. We will all need to necessarily be on the same team to beat back that evil. We cannot allow the constant seeding of racial animous and other ism and phobias to continue to take hold. We must take responsibility. Are we on the same team?