In May of 2020, Black Lives Matter/George Floyd protests swept across America and even spilled over into other countries. The purpose of the protests was to condemn and end systemic racism against African Americans. Activists would probably still be marching in the streets, but a surge in coronavirus cases has forced everyone back into semi-quarantine. However, the issue is still dominating news feeds on social media.
This is probably for the best, because the movement hasn’t settled on a specific set of actionable demands how it wants to end systemic racism. A few suggestions have been floated, but I haven’t seen any strong actions taken to bring them into law.
Since the major protests stopped, most of the changes we’ve seen have been superficial and cultural in nature. They may make people feel better, and some of them may be necessary, but they don’t fundamentally change the way America works. For example, dozens of statues connected to slavery have been removed from public spaces. A few people have been fired from their jobs because they said, “All lives Matter.” One woman was shot for saying “All lives matter.” The Washington Red Skins promised to change the name of their football team, and many companies and government agencies are hiring “diversity trainers” to give seminars to their employees to show that they did something to combat racism.
Arguably, the end goal of the SJW movement is for white people to apologize and make amends for their inherent degeneracy every day, in every room, in every situation. I predict that if America continues down this path, it will make racism worse for several reasons and will ultimately result in more race riots until we address the true cause of systemic inequality in America.
I once met an ex-white supremacist, and I asked him to give me his old recruitment speech because I wanted to understand how those people thought. He hesitated but agreed and then began reciting statistics about crime rates and how minorities take jobs and lower property values, etc., etc. All of his arguments revolved around economics, which makes sense because the primary target of white supremacy recruitment is poor, disenfranchised white people. Basically, he was saying, “‘You’re’ poor and out of luck because minorities took your opportunities.”
Ironically, he was making many of the same arguments social justice warriors preach to blacks for why they should hate whites. Poor people hate that they’re poor, and they need a solution. Then someone comes along and says, “All you have to do is hate someone with a different skin color.” That’s a one-point solution to a one-point problem that’s easy for poor people to wrap their head around.
His recruitment speech didn’t convince me to become a white supremacist for the same reason social justice warriors’ propaganda shouldn’t convince anyone to become a black supremacist. The fundamental problem with the economy isn’t that other-colored people are taking all the jobs. The problem is that rich people underpay and overcharge poor people.
Even if every single white person in America lined up, took 50 lashes from a whip, and promised to hate themselves for the rest of their lives, it wouldn’t put a single piece of bread on a black person’s table. That’s never going to happen anyway. In a best case scenario, you might convince every upper middle class white person who lives in an predominantly white neighborhood that they’re the root of all evil, but that message will never resonate with all the unskilled white laborers who can’t afford to put food on their family’s table.
Telling them they’re the enemy is either going to turn them into one or motivate them to check out of the conversation. Furthermore, telling all black people that they’re victims in a perpetual race war will inevitably stoke their anger to the point where some of them will feel the need fight back with violence. This approach can only increase racial tensions from both ends of the spectrum.
However, if you ended poverty, then legitimate white supremacists wouldn’t have any talking points left to recruit new members with. Black people wouldn’t feel victimized and alienated, and every other person of color who isn’t represented in the phrase, “Blacks Lives Matter” will have equal access to a meaningful, fulfilling life.
Until you end poverty for everyone, all your virtue signaling will ultimately just distract from the true source of racial tension and thus enable it.
I prefer watching educational videos on YouTube more than watching television, but it’s tedious digging for good content, and I’ve already seen most of the good stuff while searching for videos to put in my blogs. In case anyone else is looking for entertaining educational videos on YouTube, I made a series of posts with all the ones I’ve used on The Wise Sloth, organized by topic, with links to the posts they appear in. You’re bound to be enlightentained, and if you need help exploring the 600+ essays on The Wise Sloth, these video lists offer a quick overview that practically summarize my philosophies.
This list comes mostly from my essays on American pop culture and focuses on the mini-cultural civil wars happening in America, including trending conflicts between women vs. men, conservatives vs. liberals, African Americans vs. whites, and elders vs. the youth.
Somehow, over the past 15 years, radical feminism became mainstream feminism. Now, gender studies professors in every state are teaching girls they live in a patriarchy designed by men to oppress women. All women are victims, and all men are evil. Masculinity is toxic, and sex is rape. Every week I see new tweets, blog posts, articles, and Youtube videos of women seething with fear and disgust at the entire male population.
I feel ridiculous stating the obvious, but since feminists are doing such a successful job of making it trendy to hate men, I feel obligated to stand up for us. If you hate men, you’re ignoring at least 13 obvious facts about life:
1: You can’t demonize half the world’s population.
Negatively stereotyping every member of any group for the actions of its outliers is the definition of bigotry. The bigger the group, the more illogical it is to generalize the whole. Misandrists lump half the world’s population into one negative caricature! It’s so obviously insane, I don’t know how to elaborate on it.
2: You’ve met good men, a lot of them.
I can think of more than ten males who have physically, emotionally, or professionally bullied me. You probably can too, but we can also list women who have hurt us and men who have loved and helped us. Every day, you walk past dozens of men on the street, work next to men, give orders to male customer service workers, and listen to male reporters, politicians, celebrities, and educators. You interact with men every day without flinching because you know they’re not a threat. Chances are, there’s at least one man you call on holidays to say, “I love you.” If you can find exceptions to the statement, “All men are evil,” then you shouldn’t say it.
3: You know women who will vouch for the men in their lives.
Most women are looking for a man to fall in love with, and most will find one. If you think all men are evil, then either you, or most women, have a factually incorrect perception of reality. If most of the women in the world disagree with you, then you should question your objectivity. Chances are, the problem isn’t that everyone else is closed-minded; you are.
4: At least half of all men are beta.
If you think all men are monsters involved in a global conspiracy to oppress women, you must have never been to a Star Wars convention, comic convention, LARPing event, chess club, choir club, Weird Al Yankovic concert, or dating website. Most men younger than thirty, have a panic attack just thinking about talking to women. Those men get friend-zoned, exploited, pushed around, and discarded by women who know beta males will put up with it just for the privilege of being near a woman. You’re ignoring evidence that contradicts your conclusion if you believe there aren’t at least 1 billion gold diggers around the world, manipulating beta males and spending their money. Every year, millions of incel, forever-alone, beta men kill themselves after losing all hope of ever being able to control their fate, find love, or succeed in a career.
If this is who you believe is oppressing you, you’re projecting.
5: At least half of all men are wage slaves earning less than the cost of living.
If you listen to feminist propaganda about how ruthlessly men have designed and gamed the system to give them every advantage in life over women, you’d think all men live in an easy wonderland, where they sleep on beds of gold and lay around all day while women in chains feed them grapes. In the real world, grapes, and every other fruit and vegetable you buy at the grocery store, are picked mostly by male wage slaves who work long hours for less than a living wage. They get minimal breaks, no employee benefits, and their bodies are in constant pain. This is just the agriculture industry. In every sector of the economy, men do the most physically painful jobs that make life easier for everyone else.
That face you make when you work at a job you hate all day, every day, don’t get benefits, and earn less than a living wage. Then hordes of feminists accuse you of oppressing 4 billion people.
6: There’s a line of men who would eat a mile of your shit for the privilege of licking your ass hole.
I served in the U.S. Air Force for seven years. I heard women complain how they have to work twice as hard to make it in a man’s military, but on a daily basis, I saw men lining up to do women’s work for them, help them after work, and hold them less accountable for bad behavior. I knew a woman who would put ice on her nipples every morning to make them pop through her shirt to ensure men would desire and serve her. Any woman, regardless of body type, can find men who want to worship and serve them. Even feminists who hate men still have fanboys orbiting them and telling them everything they want to hear. Everywhere you look, there’s evidence men worship women. The only way to not see it is to lock yourself in a confined space where only angry women are allowed to enter.
7: Women have some systemic privileges over men.
It’s a well-documented fact that the American legal system gives women lower sentences for the same crimes as men and gives women preferential treatment in divorce and custody cases. Women can send a man to prison for rape, even if he has evidence sex was consensual, but it’s almost impossible for a man to send a woman to prison for raping him.
Physical fitness requirements for women in the military are lower than for men. Women aren’t required to register for the draft. Women have more options for domestic violence support, student loans, small business loans, fellowships, and jobs at companies with affirmative action policies. You have to ignore billions of dollars of government spending to hold onto the belief that the system has abandoned women and given men every advantage in life.
8: Women spend more money than men.
Even if women get paid less than men for the same work, women still spend more money than men. If women were as oppressed as feminists say they are, then 4/5th of the stores in malls would sell power tools, work boots, and flannel shirts. In reality, 2/3rds of the stores in malls sell women’s clothing made in Asian sweatshops by male and female slaves.
In every first world country, women spend more money than men. Every marketer knows women are the engine of the global economy. If women make so much less than men, the only way it’s mathematically possible for them to buy as much as they do, is by spending their man’s money. It’s ungrateful and abusive to accuse men of being complicit in a global conspiracy to rob women, while most women spend men’s money daily.
9: Women die with more money than men.
Despite the unendurable stress of being oppressed, women live longer. So regardless of the wage gap, married men spend most of the lives sharing ownership of all their assets with their wives, and in the end, women get it all. That’s not oppression. That’s winning. If the system is designed to set anyone up to fail, it’s men.
10: Men work at spas, where most customers are women.
There are hundreds of thousands of day spas, massage clinics, pedicure clinics, manicure clinics, waxing clinics, esthetician clinics, and other business dedicated to pampering women. Most of the people who work in these leisure industries are women, but there are men who spend every day massaging, manicuring, pedicuring, grooming, and pampering women of all colors, who are often spending their man’s money. If you don’t understand why people don’t take radical feminist seriously, try protesting against male oppression in the lobby of a luxury day spa and see how foolish you feel afterward.
11: Men built and maintain the infrastructure that keeps you from living in a cave.
Radical feminism teaches a revisionist version of history in the world was built on the backs of women. It doesn’t include how many men died building railroads, bridges, skyscrapers, sewers, dams, or roads. It doesn’t mention the countless hours men labored in fields, factories, mines, boats, and forests. It doesn’t honor the firemen, trashmen, cooks, movers, industrial cleaners, or mechanics who have worked until their hands bled and kept working. Maybe if women did more of the backbreaking work men take for granted, they would realize how green the grass is on their side of the fence.
12: Never forget your soldiers and what they sacrificed for you.
Nobody in a foxhole ever said men have it easier than women. You don’t need to go to war to understand that. If you can watch any war movie, and still look a veteran in the eye and tell them they never had to sacrifice anything, and the world would be better off without them, then the problem is you’re pathologically self-centered.
13: Everyone is good and evil.
Everyone loves and hates someone. Everyone has helped and hurt someone. Everyone wants to do what’s right, but nobody knows how to be perfect. We all make mistakes, because everyone is born, lives, and dies ignorant. No individual is completely good or evil, let alone any group. If you only acknowledge the worst things done by the worst people in any group, you could justify being bigoted against anyone, but that’s insane.
14: The root of the world’s problems is predatory capitalism.
If it seems like women and minorities are oppressed, it’s not because white men designed the world to oppress them. It’s because rich people designed the world to oppress the poor. If it seems like most rich people are white men, it’s because you’re only looking at white men. In every country, the majority of people are poor, and the majority of rich people have the same skin color as the majority of the population. And behind every rich man, is at least one woman spending his money while he works.
You’re not being oppressed by the white boy who takes your order at McDonald’s. He’s being oppressed by his employer, who is also oppressing you by selling gullible customers addictive, overpriced poison burgers. Aborting all the white babies in the world won’t change the normalcy of predatory business practices, and neither will lynching the rich. The only thing that will accomplish the goals of feminism is economic reform. As long as feminists continue directing conversations and energy towards hating men, business owners of every race will continue to exploit everyone unopposed.
The world is a confusing place, and there’s so much disinformation and misinformation pushed in our faces every day it’s hard to tell reality from fiction. Here’s a little trick that will help you see through a lot of the illusions. Social issues always involve multiple people, usually from multiple groups. These different people from different groups get differentiated with labels like gay, straight, American, Korean, president, citizen, soldier, officer, enlisted, supervisor, immigrant, owner, renter, customer, capitalist, communist, etc. These labels have their uses, but sometimes they confuse the real issue more than they clarify it. If you ever run into an issue you don’t understand, try replacing all the labels with the term “human being.”
For instance, if you’re having a hard time answering the question, “Why should straight people should the right to marry and homosexuals shouldn’t,” replace the labels with the words, “human being.” Then ask yourself, “Why should human beings have the right to marry and human beings shouldn’t?” When you do that, you see the justifications we use to deny one group of human beings the same rights are absurd. We’re all human beings. Bringing labels into the equation just confuses the issue and creates an environment where one group of human beings can oppress another group.
Let’s apply this concept to political borders. Suppose your child asks you this question: “Why aren’t Mexicans allowed to move freely into the United States, and why are the Mexicans who sneak north across the border paid slave wages and not given any employee benefits while people born in the United States are guaranteed a higher minimum wage and certain benefits and protections from their employers?”
When you replace the labels with the words, “human being,” the question becomes: “Why aren’t human beings allowed to move freely into the United States, and why are the human beings who sneak north across the border paid slave wages and not given any human being benefits while human beings born in the United States are guaranteed a higher minimum wage and certain benefits and protections from their human beings?”
When you do that, the question sounds absurd… because it is. But that’s hard to see when you fog reality with arbitrary labels. The truth is our passports are lies that perpetuate a false and inhumane reality. They’re not designed to help us get around the world. They’re designed to limit our freedom to travel, which limits our freedom to choose where to live, which limits our freedom to choose which laws we live under, which rights we have and probably most importantly, who we work for and who we pay taxes to. Borders don’t keep bad people out, they keep taxpayers in.
Any country that truly believes in freedom would open its borders unconditionally, but no country in the world has done that because it would free the human beings from the stranglehold that rich human beings have on poor human beings. Eliminating borders would give human beings the ultimate power to veto their corrupt leaders by simply leaving.
If that were possible, then rich and powerful human beings wouldn’t be able to create trade restrictions and sanctions that exploit human beings from poorer nations. The corrupt leaders from those poorer nations wouldn’t be able to exploit their own people or rule them with brutal force. People wouldn’t sit around saying to themselves, “Oh, the world sucks but what can we do about it?” They would simply leave and go live under the laws of a more just nation, and no leader wants that.
If we are all truly human beings, what right does one human being have to tell you where you can live? In truth, they have no right. All they have is the authority you give them over you. Unfortunately, so many people believe the lie of political borders and help enforce it that they make the lie real, and in doing so we eliminate our own freedom to travel, to choose which laws we would live under and which dictator’s regime we fund with our taxes. That’s the reality we’ve created for our children to grow up in.
“Black Lives Matter is an activist movement, originating in the African-American community, that campaigns against violence toward black people. BLM regularly organizes protests around the deaths of black people in killings by law enforcement officers, and broader issues of racial profiling, police brutality, and racial inequality in the United States criminal justice system.” Wikipedia
Like Wikipedia’s definition, most media coverage of the Black Lives Matter movement focuses on the issue of cops killing black men and vice versa, which could mislead foreign observers to conclude police brutality is the crux of the issue. More accurately, it’s the straw that broke the camel’s back. Black Lives Matter is a new banner for an old movement, and if you want to understand the movement today, you have to know its historical roots.
The African-American community has been justifiably simmering with resentment and anger since the 1600s. Being a second-class citizen will do that to you. Even after the emancipation of slavery in 1863, Jim Crow laws continued justifying blacks’ antipathy towards the American government (and the white people who ran/supported it) until those laws were abolished in the 1950s. Then it still took until the 1990s for discrimination to be completely criminalized.
This puts American race relations in an awkward position today. There are white Millennials who never lived during a time when discrimination was legal. Simultaneously, there are elderly blacks who still remember being forced to drink from segregated water fountains.
So to white children, the struggle for equality can look like ancient history, but in the black community, the wounds of the past are still fresh, and new ones are being created every day. Even though we now live in a time when African-Americans can become celebrities, billionaires or even the president of the United States (twice), at least 27% of African-Americans still live in poverty, more than any other race in America. Blacks are also at least 3 times more likely to go be shot by police and at least 5 times more likely to go to prison than any other race. Obviously, something is still wrong.
The murders of Michael Brown, Eric Garner and Trayvon Martin, which inspired the Black Lives Matter movement, blew the problem to the forefront of the national dialogue by dumping fuel onto a 400-year-old tire fire of resentment and anger that has been a part of African-American culture so long, it has become a cornerstone of their cultural identity, which you can see erupting throughout black culture.
Black comedians habitually fill standup routines and movies with derogatory jokes about white people. Black people call each other “nigger” to spite white people by taking ownership of the term, and despite their intolerance of racial slurs, they’ve invented a whole slew of Caucasian ones they use openly. Black Christian preachers still lecture congregations about how evil the white man is. There are black-only magazines, holidays, music labels, television stations, clubs and clothing lines that blacks use to distance themselves from whites. White racism is such a strong force in the African-American community, members are often punished for acting too white. To the extent a black man is likely to be hassled by the cops if they’re caught in an all-white neighborhood after dark, a white man caught in an all-black neighborhood after dark is likely to be killed.
With so much bad blood bottled up, anyone paying attention to the history and institutionalization of black backlash wouldn’t have been surprised when, on July 8th 2016, a Black Lives Matter protester shot 14 police officers, killing 5, and admitted he was “targeting white people, specifically white officers.” The shooting didn’t come out of nowhere, and realistically, we can expect more of the same until black America’s grievances are settled.
Many white American Millennials are surprised black people have so much animosity towards them because they’ve spent their entire lives apologizing to them, treating them with respect, giving them special privileges and walking on eggshells around all minorities. They’ve grown up celebrating black celebrities, making black friends, living with black roommates, obeying black bosses and voting for black politicians. Yet, for all their efforts, they’ve been told that no matter what they do or think, it’s impossible for white people to not be racist. So they’ll always be presumed guilty of subconscious racist microaggressions. Furthermore, white guilt is a form of racism, and it’s impossible for black people to be racist.
If the white population is sitting around subconsciously conspiring to oppress black people, then why do least 26.6% of Mexican Americans live in poverty, which is within 1% of African-Americans? Other estimates put the percentages of African-Americans and Mexican Americans living in poverty at 38% and 35% respectively, but that still means there are more Mexican Americans living in poverty than African-Americans.
If nothing else, this indicates blacks aren’t exactly being singled out. It also raises the question, if anyone should care about blacks lives, then isn’t it equally important for blacks to care about Hispanic lives? Even if blacks are slightly more oppressed, ignoring the plight of Hispanics, and calling dibs on the first place in line to get saved, is just as callous as ignoring the suffering of poor Asian Americans, and putting them third in line just because a higher percentage of Mexican Americans live in poverty.
Poverty isn’t just for minorities either. While at least 3.6 million black children live in poverty, so do at least 4.2 million white children, and their pain is as real and important as anyone else’s. The fact that a bunch of other random people just happened to be born with the same skin color doesn’t negate their plight.
Most impoverished white children will never recover physically or emotionally enough from the trauma of growing up poor to escape poverty. Like their black counterparts, they’re only theoretically eligible to become president someday, but for all practical purposes, they’re doomed at birth to work like slaves their entire lives for barely enough to survive, living perpetually paycheck to paycheck, in constant fear of their car breaking down and wiping out their entire life savings. Their employers and the customers they serve, treat them like second-class citizens, and all the hard living they endure, inevitably takes its toll on their bodies, killing them prematurely.
If black people feel like nobody is listening to their cries, imagine how ignored poor white people feel. Not only does nobody care, but the whole world is explosively passionate about their indifference, especially blacks, who should care because it raises the question, how can white people be the source of oppression when whites are being oppressed by the millions?
Black people should be equally concerned with the fact that police kill twice as many whites as blacks. If there’s a conspiracy to shoot black people, what purpose does the enormous pile of white bodies serve? Police killings shouldn’t be a divisive issue because black and white victims are two sides of the same coin. Black and white Americans should be complaining about their piles together.
As important as it is for Black Lives Matter to raise awareness of how far blacks are from achieving the American Dream, the movement also needs to raise awareness in the black community of the long-ignored truth that white people don’t live in Whitopia. Rich people do. Everyone else, regardless of color, are varying degrees of wage slaves living in varying degrees of ghettos.
Take a long moment and think about this: Almost half the children in America live near the poverty line, and the percentage is always growing, which proves America has a systemic problem, but it’s not race-related. Every poor person in America is under the same boot. Only acknowledging one race’s plight is myopic and can only make solving the systemic problem less likely.
This is almost beating a dead horse because Black Lives Matters organizers have already acknowledged all lives matter and clarified it’s nevertheless time for America to get off the pot and do something about their complaints.
A Redditor summarized the concept eloquently, “Imagine that you’re sitting down to dinner with your family, and while everyone else gets a serving of the meal, you don’t get any. So you say “I should get my fair share.” And as a direct response to this, your dad corrects you, saying, “everyone should get their fair share.” Now, that’s a wonderful sentiment — indeed, everyone should, and that was kinda your point in the first place: that you should be a part of everyone, and you should get your fair share also. However, dad’s smart-ass comment just dismissed you and didn’t solve the problem that you still haven’t gotten any!”
The analogy would be more accurate if it read, “Imagine that you’re sitting down to dinner with your family. Your uncle gives half the people at the table less than half a portion, but he gives you the least. Then, he keeps most of the food for himself. So you say, “I should get my fair share.” When everybody else says, “What about our empty plates?” You say, “Your plates aren’t the issue. Mine is.” Your comment dismissed everyone and didn’t solve the problem that half the people at the table are starving.
If everyone in America owes it to African-Americans to acknowledge their suffering, then African-Americans owe it to all of America’s races to acknowledge theirs. As it stands, blacks are demanding everyone reach out to them with an open hand while they hold a closed fist and belligerently refuse to reciprocate what they’re asking for.
Ultimately, every race in America has the same problem. The best way to solve it might not be for everyone to get behind one race, but for every race to get behind each other. Instead of singling one race out for rescue, everyone works in tandem as a unified front.
Before the black community can accept that, someone needs to answer the million dollar question you’ve probably been screaming the whole time you’ve been reading this:
Why are African-Americans disproportionately screwed by the system, and is it racially motivated?
Obviously, before the Emancipation Proclamation, the American government, in tandem with the white population, intentionally conspired against and oppressed blacks. White Americans born between 1863 and the 1960s were guilty of gradually lesser degrees of conspired oppression. Baby Boomers were the last generation to live in a time with discriminatory laws, and a significantly low number of white Boomers’ descendants still believe in racist creeds. Any conspiracy to oppress blacks ended with the Millennial generation.
Part of the reason it looks like blacks are still being singled out is because the target was taken off their backs about 20 years ago. The white archer is gone, but the arrow is still freshly lodged in the victim’s body. The arrow is a metaphor for the ghetto. That’s what’s responsible for African-Americans’ disproportionately high rates of poverty, violent crime, incarceration and police altercations. The simplest way to explain why/how is by looking at how the same thing happened in other racial ghettos.
The Native Americans, the native Hawaiians of Oahu, and the Maori people of New Zealand were all forcibly relocated off their tribal lands to isolated geographical locations. Since they’d naturally settled in the most fertile, convenient places before white men came along, they were sent to more inconvenient, inhospitable areas. They still could have lived off the land as they always had. It would have been tougher, but they could have made a go of it. They didn’t have a chance though because capitalists (who just happened to be white) came and introduced the concepts of money and ownership.
Suddenly, everything cost as much money as possible, and the only way to make money was to own a business or work for a business. But employers paid as low of wages as they could get away with, and it costs money to start a business. Even if a Native American, Hawaiian or Maori could start their own business, it would be in an isolated economic wasteland where none of their customers had any money because there weren’t enough jobs to go around. Relocating was easier said than done, because that required money they didn’t have, and more importantly, abandoning their family, culture, and heritage.
Once all the land around their homesteads were developed into suburbs with no jobs, options became even more scarce. The higher businesses raised prices, the more the ethnic poor became hopelessly chained in place with debt. The bleakness of their circumstance became a perfect recipe for stress, hopelessness, depression, anxiety, resentment, anger, desperation, violence and drug abuse, all of which became epidemic in their communities.
Since businesses didn’t want to move into areas where people were being driven to extremes by economic oppression, jobs never came to their ghettos, which meant they would always be opportunity-less economic wastelands full of drug addicts who gave up hope and desperate young men who figured out crime pays limitlessly more than minimum wage.
That’s the story of every ghetto in the world, and that’s what happened to African-Americans the moment they were settled into theirs. Anyone of any color who lives in those geographical locations will experience the same thing, but not because any racist mastermind is actively tinkering with their lives. The concrete does all the work.
This is why attacking police officers and white people won’t change anything. It doesn’t create job opportunities or lower the cost of living. If the Black Lives Matter movement never amounts to anything more than a white witch hunt, its momentum will be wasted lynching scapegoats, and its only long-term impact will be to distract poor Americans from the real source of their problems: America’s predatory financial system and its control of the government. Until that’s addressed, most Americans, particularly anyone living in a ghetto, can expect to live in poverty and suffer all the horrific consequences that come with it… together.
White people aren’t the enemy. CEOs are. They were the ones who owned the cotton plantations and had the capital to ship slaves across the Atlantic ocean. They were the archers who put the target on African-Americans backs. Now America has billionaire CEOs of every color, even black ones, oppressing their wage slaves indiscriminately. To modern business owners, everyone is a disposable resource who is worth less than the products they make.
Since Caucasians are the largest group of poor people in America, they’re actually the most logical ally and most illogical enemy for the Black Lives Matter movement in its struggle against the financial system. However, joining forces with white people to organize bigger protests will only result in the corporate-controlled government deploying bigger columns of riot police to brutally shut down the assemblies the same way they did the Occupy Wall Street movement, which was mostly white. If protesters respond to violence with violence, the only result will be the government justifying further militarization of the police force and erosion of everyone’s civil rights.
The American government doesn’t care about protests. All it cares about is money, because money is power, debt is slavery, and debt-slavery yields the highest, most long-term profit margins. If the poor can pool their resources and build self-sufficient communities that provide free food, water, and shelter to its members, then the rich will lose their leverage over the poor and thus their control. If Americans can coerce their government into prioritizing spending taxes on the necessities of life for all citizens instead of a more high tech police state, then everyone will be free from the desperation and indignity of poverty. There are multiple approaches that could work, but the goal of the Black Lives Matter movement must be systemic financial reform or it’s just hacking at the branches of income inequality.
I’m a blonde haired, blue eyed male, born and raised in America. At the age of 20, I moved abroad and spent 10 years living overseas. I left for a lot of reasons, and although escaping racism wasn’t a deciding factor, it was a fringe benefit. I liked the idea of living in a country where racism isn’t a major issue, and where nobody would blame me for hundreds of years of racial oppression.
10 years of traveling the world taught me my assumptions about racism were naive. It’s true that while living abroad I wasn’t subjected to any more white guilt for killing Indians and enslaving Africans, but I did have to deal with being stereotyped as a fat, loud, ignorant, arrogant, militant American who is personally responsible for the American government covertly destabilizing weak countries and invading large ones under false pretenses to steal their oil. I was never the victim of a hate crime, but I visited a few countries where I would have been robbed and/or killed just for being an American if I walked down the wrong side street at night. On the upside, some foreigners stereotyped me as a rich American who knows every Hollywood celebrity, neither of which is true, but the misconception made some people excited to meet me.
I was already aware that Americans’ reputation preceded me. So I expected to be the victim of a little discrimination from the most simple-minded foreigners. I didn’t expect to discover that every nationality I encountered was a little racist against someone. In places with the least diversity, the locals found groups within their own race to be prejudice against.
I never spent any time with hate groups. The acquaintances I made were regular, non-violent, decently educated middle-class folk. They all had friends from other races and cultures, and they all believed in equality, but in private, especially after a few drinks, they would quietly utter the same passive-aggressive stereotypes about whichever race they felt was committing the most crime and mooching off the taxpayers the worst.
Initially, this discovery depressed me, because it meant there isn’t a magical land of tolerance and equality to escape to. On the upside, it helped ease my white guilt a little, because looking back at race relations in America, I realized white Americans aren’t the exceptional villains my history books taught me we are. We’re just like everybody else.
You could say I was becoming more prejudice as my perception evolved since I’d come to stereotype the whole human race as racist. Being a vigilantly self-loathing white man, these secret thoughts weighed heavily on my soul until I’d visited a few more countries and taken a few more psychology classes. Specifically, it was Introduction To Child Psychology that brought me to my final way of thinking about racism.
The human brain, especially in children, is designed to mimic adults. It’s a quick, easy way to adapt to one’s environment without having to think deeply. In adulthood, we still use subconscious mental shortcuts to navigate our way through life. We can transcend these base instinctual habits to an extent, but the architecture of our brain will always be wired to use the least amount of thought to understand and react to the world around us.
Mimicking cultural norms and making generalizations is what we do. Punishing yourself for doing this is like beating yourself up for feeling horny. You’re designed to do that too, and you need to acknowledge that reality before you can find a healthy way to manage your libido. Sexual urges only become a problem when they control you and negatively impact your life or other people’s. Censoring your sexual thoughts and forcing other people to do the same will only accomplish suppressing an instinct that will never go away. You won’t defeat it. You’ll just lose control over it, shut down society’s dialogue on the subject and create a new reason for people to fight. The same is true for racism.
Just to be clear, I’m not saying that racism is okay. Racism is illogical, and we should all be vigilant to curb it within ourselves, but the world can’t unify as long as we belligerently police each other for generalizations and microaggressions. Social justice warriors are just as guilty of using mental shortcuts to find a reason to hate as any hardcore racist who accosts other races in public. They’ve just found a way to hate that’s politically correct on the surface.
Society would achieve more unity if everyone was allowed to be 10% racist. If we acknowledge that dirty little urge and teach ourselves to keep it in check, we can understand, accept and love ourselves and others better. Then we can just get on with our lives.
The most important reason to be honest about one’s own micro-racism and to accept a certain level of overgeneralizing from others is because every group creates the stereotypes outsiders attach to them. It’s true that you can’t make blanket statements about any group, but if you spend enough time in any group, you’ll eventually see members doing the things they’re stereotyped for. Pretending those tendencies don’t exist forces you to warp your perception of reality to justify your preconceived conclusion, which is the definition of cognitive dissonance and is a form of insanity. When everyone is in denial of their own group’s dysfunctional behavior, and everyone militantly excuses and defends everyone else’s problems, nobody improves. Then everyone keeps repeating the same mistakes and teaching them to their children for the rest of the future.
Before you go shouting at other people to check themselves, you need to check your own culture, because you’re just as good and bad as everyone else, and you’re just as slightly racist. If you believe nobody else has the right to criticize your group, then you’re the only one who can improve the arbitrary segment of humanity you’ve decided to identify yourself as. If you won’t acknowledge your flaws, then your arrogance and close-mindedness are causing more harm to your group than any outsider.
Humanity wouldn’t be so fractured if people weren’t so proud of their race, nationality or culture. On a long enough timescale we all came from the same country, and we all go back to the dirt after we die. In the meantime, our biology is 99.9% identical. It’s just as ignorant and divisive for anyone to be proud of their race as it is for the KKK. Fanatical racial pride leads to fanatical racial prejudice. Accepting that everyone is family, and nobody is perfect leads to sanity and harmony.
Not all Trump fans are racists. This is an open letter to Trump supporters who are.
Dear Racist,
I come in peace. Hear me out.
I’m a white, blonde-haired, blue-eyed male, born and raised in small Texas towns where racism was so common and casual, children, like me, took it for granted. I was raised in a trailer… by a racist, surrounded by racists. I used to be with you, but I’m not anymore because I joined the military after high school and got stationed overseas for seven years. I learned some perspective-changing facts about the world in that time.
Watching American television will give you the impression America is more racist than anywhere else, but that’s just because America’s problems get more airtime. America’s racism isn’t exceptional. Everyone in the world is a little racist, because stereotypes are exaggerations of facts. So every racist is a little bit right, but since everybody is doing something wrong, your enemies are equally justified in their criticisms of you too.
None of us are perfect, and most of us aren’t that bad. We’re all trying to do what’s right, even if our concept of right/wrong is deplorable. We all suck at being good, because life didn’t come with an instruction book. Every race is struggling, but we’re in this together. We’re literally family, and this is the only one we’ve got. The only way we can make the most of our life is together.
After learning these truths, I met two white supremacists in my travels who I became good friends with. I debated boycotting them from my friend list, but I compared them to everyone else I knew and realized if I refused to associate with anyone who believed and did things I think are stupid, then I couldn’t be friends with anyone. Nobody could. We’re all too different and too big of fuck ups. The bottom line is, we’re on the same team.
We also have a common enemy. Nobody’s life sucks because other races are bad. Everyone’s lives suck because of poverty. Think about this next sentence for as long as you stay racist: Every bad stereotype races create for themselves, are symptoms of poverty.
Poor, white rural people voted en mass for Trump because they’re living in trailers, eating generic food and still can’t afford to save money. They’re working at grueling, low paying jobs, and when they turn on the television after a hard day’s work, they see Black Lives Matters protesters rioting and killing police, complaining about being stereotyped as dangerous. To exhausted, white Americans who have never been to a black ghetto, this looks like proof African-Americans are bad.
The bigger picture is, ghettos will make anyone angry and desperate. Just look what it did to Eminem. America’s ghettos are full of every race acting like caged rats. The only reason inner city violence is epidemic, is because ghettos are economic dead zones, just like rural America.
White country folk cope with poverty by drinking, using drugs, fighting, petty theft and broken marriages. If you think that’s prejudice of me to say, then you should be more upset at the country music stars who sing all your favorite songs about those topics. And you should be upset at rappers who sing about the same topics for the same reasons.
Black intercity gangsters, white country folk, and anyone else who lives in poverty suffer the same symptoms. They just haven’t talked to each other enough to realize they have the same problems.
Black on black shootings are evidence of one thing only: that resources are damn scarce in the ghetto. It’s wrong for black people to hate cops for all the same reasons it’s wrong for white people to hate blacks. The only reason life sucks, and it feels like we’re at war, is because in a capitalist economy, business is war, and war is hell.
If everybody had the necessities of life guaranteed, we would all just get on with our lives. If Trump kicks out all the illegal immigrants and builds walls around every ghetto, it won’t change the fact that you’re drowning in debt and can’t afford to put real food on the table for your children. Your life will still suck for all the same reasons, which have nothing to do with other races. The group of people most responsible for your suffering is the 1%.
There’s no reason for us to be fighting among ourselves. The only reason we are is because capitalists convinced us to. This is as true today as it was 250 years ago. The concept that Africans are inferior, was invented by plantation owners, who may have been white, but they didn’t invent slavery because white people are evil. They did it because they were rich, and had become so addicted to money and privilege, they’d do anything to get more.
Today, most of the anti-immigrant, anti-Black Lives Matter rhetoric on television comes from Fox News, which is owned by a billionaire, who isn’t above lying to his fans and sowing racial discord to boost ratings so he can make more money selling commercials to advertisers and gold to the audience he’s convinced to prepare for the end of the world.
Racism doesn’t help anybody. It wastes the owner’s life fuming over the actions of scapegoats, and it fails to address the root of the problem, which ensures its continued existence. Trump’s victory wasn’t a win for the Alt-Right. Trump is a pied piper leading us all to a rich man’s paradise, which looks like Upton Sinclair’s, The Jungle.
The most powerful thing the Alt-Right could do in 2017 to solve the root of their problems, is to join the Black Lives Matter movement, on the condition they stop scapegoating cops and work solely towards holding the 1% accountable for poverty. I’d like to see that happen, but I’d be shocked if it did.
If you want to live in Whitopia, your only option is to build a private city. That sounds almost as crazy as the KKK and BLM becoming BFFs, but a lot of fringe groups have made their own intentional communities. The Alt-Right already has a close-knit, well-connected online social network. You already have established leaders who have organized rallies before. Start talking about having a “Rally to Preserve Racial Purity” where your charismatic leaders give rousing speeches and then pass around a collection plate. Then buy half the land in Utah, build a wall around it and get on with your life while the rest of America drowns in its impure bloodlines. I don’t expect you to take that idea seriously either, but if you can’t stop a tidal wave, and you won’t leave, then building a wall around you is your only hope of surviving the flood.
The other option is to admit that you already have friends from different races. You’ve been getting along with other races all along. They may have some ticks that bug you, but you’ve got family members you’re ashamed of too. Life is going to be full of people of different colors. That’s how it’s always been, and that’s how it’s always going to be.
Racism is nothing more than a recipe for an anxiety attack. The moment you stop taking the pill is the moment you get to stop living in an apocalyptic war that doesn’t exist. Life is better when you let go and don’t support people like Trump.
Before you listen to anything I have to say, you may be wondering what right a blonde-haired, blue-eyed, white descendant of slave owners has to give minorities advice on anything. In which case, I’m glad you theoretically asked. It’s because the truth of my words isn’t dependent on the color of any of my skin.
If you don’t buy that because you’ve already judged me, the problem is you need to acknowledge I didn’t ask for the colors of any of my body parts. The lottery of fate just shat me out looking the way I do. If you’re going to hold people accountable for the crimes of their bloodlines, you’d be more justified hating the actors in the video below for exterminating the Moriori than blaming me for oppressing American minorities.
The closest thing to slave owners in my family tree were French aristocrats who fled to America penniless during the French Revolution to escape getting beheaded by the poor, angry white people they exploited. All of my American-born ancestors were poor, just like me.
I grew up in barrios and ghettos where I couldn’t walk the streets at night because I’d get jumped for being white. Since graduating high school I’ve lived with at least seven African-American housemates. Every single one has explained to me in detail how their culture views white people as the enemy, and I can corroborate their testimony by pulling up Youtube videos all day of minorities advocating killing white people.
Anything I say to convince people not to revenge-kill me over crimes I had nothing to do with is warranted, but that point pales in comparison to the following facts: We’re all human. We’re all family, and I have more in common with poor minorities than white people like Donald Trump. I might not get terrorized by cops quite as much as my darker friends, but that hardly makes me privileged if I work my ass off and still can’t afford rent because I can’t afford my car repair bills because I can’t afford my dental bills because I don’t qualify for the same financial assistance as other races.
I’m not a plantation owner telling you how to live your life. I’m a fellow wage slave pontificating on how we can solve our mutual problem.
–End of disclaimer
Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election by energizing disenfranchised white voters with a year’s worth of hate speeches against minorities. The results of the election surprised and terrified me, but my terror wasn’t mixed with surprise when I saw protesters rioting across America while Mexican Americans and Muslims posted blogs questioning if it’s safe for them to stay in America.
The circumstances behind Trump’s victory almost make me believe there’s a conspiracy to start a race war. At the same time as the Black Lives Matter movement has been burning cars and inspiring murder, the American government nominated a racist to run against the most famously corrupt and unlikable politician in America. Then the mainstream media legitimized him, and the Electoral College system determined him the winner before he lost the popular vote.
This absurd series of events seems too convenient to have happened by chance, until you look at the American government’s track record of screwing up everything it does. The chaos surrounding the 2016 election conclusively proves one thing. Americans can’t count on their government to do anything for them except make their problems worse. If the government keeps solving problems at its current success rate, it’s only a matter of time before the consequences of its failures spark more race riots.
I could be overly optimistic. The fact that rich business owners manipulated black and whites into hating each other by institutionalizing slavery 250+ years ago sets a historical precedent for the financial elite orchestrating racial tension among the common people. However, this just makes it all the more tragically ironic that some minorities are interpreting Trump’s popularity as more proof that all white people are evil and complicit in a grand conspiracy to oppress other races.
Black and white racists are unwittingly blaming each other for the exact same problems. Both sides are embroiled in a witch hunt for scapegoats that’s distracting them from uniting against their common enemy. Neither side sees what they’re doing, because they’ve been living in relative cultural isolation. If they weren’t too poor to travel, and could extract themselves from the trees to see the forest, they’d see the financial elite are oppressing every race.
Trump may be white, but his actions aren’t motivated by skin color. When he looks at poor people, all he sees are suckers to be exploited, and he has black, Hispanic and Asian friends in the 1% who view the working class with the same green tinted glasses.
The current president-elect is neither the first, nor the only color of, rich political candidate to pander to extremists for the guaranteed support they’ll receive. It doesn’t take a psychic to predict he won’t be the last.
Listed below are steps minorities could take to fight poverty directly in lieu of voting on the next rich asshole who represents the lesser of two evils:
1: Stop hating white people.
The best hope minorities have of breaking the chains holding them below the poverty line is to end the cold war they’re waging against their broke white neighbors and unite with them. Even without joining forces, this would free minorities from wasting their lives hating innocent scapegoats and empower them to focus their attention on the real culprits responsible for their suffering.
2: Protest in the 1%’s neighborhoods.
In March 2016 a rapper and Black Lives Matter advocate named Tef Poe, tweeted, “Dear white people if Trump wins young niggas such as myself are fully hell-bent on inciting riots everywhere we go. Just so you know.”
Attacking people will only justify martial law, which will only lead to more suffering. The only affect it will have on the poverty creators is giving them something fun to watch on television. If you must protest and riot, don’t attack local business and ethnic diversity. Take your grievances to America’s richest neighborhoods, and protest there.
Show them the problems they’re creating won’t stay safely tucked away in the ghetto. Leave notes on their doors saying they can have their peace and quiet back as soon as they raise wages and lower prices at the business they’re sucking up the nation’s wealth through. This will probably get the National Guard called on you, but at least it will send a message to the right people.
3: Boycott economic oppressors.
Black and white businessmen and women have made fortunes convincing poor people to buy their overpriced brands. Instead of wearing gold chains, gangsters should wear nooses around their necks, because the rich are metaphorically selling them the rope to hang themselves with. Boycotting the rope-sellers will save poor people money they desperately need and force billionaires to switch to selling products that actually benefit their customers.
Every street corner in the ghetto has a liquor store, gun store and payday loan office, all of which bring nothing to the community except poverty. The government won’t stop the flow of economic oppression into the ghetto, but the people can by boycotting these businesses.
4: Convert gangs into legitimate business networks.
The reason gun violence is epidemic in ghettos is, resources are scarce. Gangs resort to selling drugs on the black market because it’s usually the most lucrative (if not the only) job available to young adults. To the individual, the risk analysis of selling drugs adds up, but the cost to the community outweighs the benefit. In the end, you’re selling overpriced poison to people with a crippling medical condition who are trying to ease the pain of living in poverty and numb the fear of being caught in the crossfire between you and your competitors battling to the death over market share.
So the only reason gangs exist, is because scarce resources drove street kids to earn money by joining illegal businesses, which sell products that are in high demand. This puts gangs in the perfect position to solve the problem that created them. All they have to do is sell their customers the things they need most instead of the thing they need least.
For example, if pizza restaurants won’t deliver to the ghetto, gangs could make a profit by filling the untapped pizza delivery market. Their slogan could be, “We sell food, not fear.” They could also provide a service like “Uber” to help shuttle people without cars to jobs outside the ghetto. It might not be as lucrative as selling crack, but you can make a living without worrying about earning a place in Hall.
Gangs could take this business model to the next level by purchasing crack houses, fixing them up and providing low-income housing that keeps rent money in the community. In addition, gangs could build farms and sell fresh produce to customers who would otherwise have to pay extortionate markups for food at “convenience stores.”
If gangs don’t fill these needs, churches could. If clergymen won’t, then congregations should start their own churches that invest all their donations to providing members with the necessities of life instead of providing its leaders with expensive suits, cars and houses.
5: Improve education locally.
The biggest hurdle to escaping poverty is lack of education. It’s almost impossible for students to receive a quality education at dangerous, underfunded public schools, but gangs, churches, and community organizations could solve this by providing security for students on and/or off campus.
Alternately, they could cut out the middleman by proving homeschooling services right in the projects.
The cost of a higher education is so inflated, it would be impossible to give every street kid grants to attend college, but it’s not too expensive to send high school graduates to trade schools, especially if students have the opportunity to pay back their benefactors by working for them, providing plumbing, HVAC and other skills to customers in low-income areas.
6: Source representation locally.
In 2016, African-American voters had the “opportunity” to choose between two white presidential candidates who have never lived in a ghetto and are committed to increasing the profits of the ruling class. Neither candidate would have represented the will of the poor any more than Barack Obama, Herman Cain or Ben Carson.
Latino Americans had the “opportunity” to vote in the 2016 presidential primaries for Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, neither of whom represented anyone’s interests but their own, and who achieved what little popularity they had by channeling their archaic interpretation of Christianity into hate speech on par with Donald Trump’s.
It should be obvious at this point that it’s futile to elect ethnically diverse members of the 1%. If minorities hope to be represented in government, they need to find, endorse and support the best and brightest minds from the streets.
Congress would be more representative of the people if seats were assigned according to race instead of state. That would also guarantee them minority representation, but they would have more representation than the current system that staffs the government with rich people who are good at pandering to the people they’ve made their fortunes exploiting.
Without solid leaders, race-based movements like Black Lives Matter, won’t accomplish anything other than inflaming racial tensions. So more than anything else, the call to action raised by the 2016 presidential election, should be for racial minorities to source their own leaders to challenge the status quo.
Politicians and celebrities in America regularly bash illegal Mexican immigrants for being lazy criminals who leech off the system. There are about 10 million illegal immigrants in America right now, and you’re always going to have a few bad apples in any group that size, but generalizing illegal Mexicans in America as villains is detached from reality. The causes, consequences, and implications of illegal immigration are bigger than that. In order to see the real issue in the broader scope of things, you need to understand five things:
1. Illegal immigrants are people too.
Illegal aliens are just as human as natural-born American citizens. They come from the same tree of life that every other human being came from, which makes them more than just neighbors. They’re family, and from a cosmic perspective, they’re the among the rarest, most precious entities in the known universe. If there’s a God that created us, we’re all children from the same loving parent.
We’re all lost and stranded on the same planet. We’re all going through the same existential crisis, and when we die, we all return to dust. It would be illogical to have a conversation about illegal immigrants without acknowledging their inherent sublime majesty, and any solution to illegal immigration must take into account the dignity and respect due to every sentient being. To say that illegal immigrants are just outsiders who need to piss off misses the point of life.
2. They’re here to work and send money back to their families or they’re trying to build a new life in the land of opportunity.
In order to understand how to deal with illegal immigration, you need to understand why people risk traveling thousands of miles across deadly terrain in a strange land where they’re hunted by police. Most of the people who do that aren’t rapists and criminals. Some of them are women and children, but most of them are fathers who left their homes and their families to find work so they can provide for their loved ones. Some want to stay in America, but most want to return home after they’ve made some money.
Think about that, and then think about the words written on the Statue of Liberty:
“Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
‘Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!’ cries she
With silent lips. ‘Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!'”
The bedrock of American political ideology has always been love, hope, freedom, and industry. Those are the same values that have motivated so many Mexicans to answer the call of Lady Liberty. That’s not to say that opening the borders unconditionally is the best solution, but that would be more American than building a wall from the Atlantic to the Pacific ocean and lining it with armed guards.
3. They do the jobs Americans can’t.
It’s a well-established fact that Mexican immigrants aren’t taking high paying, in-demand jobs. In 2010 The United Farm Workers organization challenged Americans to come work the jobs that Mexicans have been taking, and not one American took up the challenge.
It’s an understatement to say Mexicans are taking the jobs Americans don’t want. Frankly, they’re taking the jobs Americans can’t do. Immigrants work 13+ hours per day in inclement weather doing backbreaking work with almost no breaks for almost no money. Even if an American could endure the inhumane working conditions that immigrants suffer every day, their wages would be so far below the poverty line they wouldn’t be able to afford a basic quality of living much less The American Dream.
4. America’s economy is based on slave labor.
To say that Mexicans are taking Americans’ jobs today is like saying black slaves were taking all the good cotton picking jobs that colonial-era white settlers were entitled to. The work Mexicans do is tantamount to slave labor. Since America’s agricultural and construction industries (to name a few) are so heavily dependent on immigrant labor, that means the American economy is built on slave labor.
Any American who believes all the illegal immigrants should be deported is a hypocrite every time they go shopping because the low prices they enjoy are the direct result of immigrant slave labor. If all of these workers were deported, prices would skyrocket giving anti-immigration advocates a whole new set of problems to scream about.
Since the economy depends so heavily on illegal immigrants who don’t want to spend the rest of their life in America, the simplest solution to the problem would be to make it easier to obtain temporary working visas. The reason that solution hasn’t been implemented is because then American businesses would have to pay their slaves a living wage and give them all the perks entitled to legal workers. That would raise the cost of goods as surely as deporting all the undocumented workers. Very few business owners would lobby the government to do that. It works out better for their bottom line to keep distracting the public with talk of building walls while continuing to enjoy the fruits of slavery.
5. Mexicans go to America looking for work in the first place because South America’s economy and political structure have been systematically destabilized by the U.S. government.
So many South Americans head North to find work because their economies and governments have been systematically destabilized by the United States government to ensure that none of its neighbors could challenge it economically or militarily. This has also allowed the United States to outsource jobs to South American sweatshops while also guaranteeing a steady flow of workers will come North to work inside America without any legal protection. So screaming at Mexicans for taking Americans’ jobs is blaming the victim.
No amount of victim-blaming will solve the immigration problem. We need to fix the fundamental problem with the economy, which is that our entire economic system is based on oppression and unsustainability. America and Mexico both need to build affordable, self-sufficient cities that don’t require its citizens to work themselves to death for barely enough money to survive. If/when that ever happens, nobody will need to leave their families and travel thousands of perilous miles to work in inhumane conditions, and nobody will have to fight each other for the ability to build a happy life.
There’s no debate whether or not racism negatively affects the lives of millions of Americans, particularly African-Americans, who are at least three times more likely to go to jail or be killed by police than Caucasians. While minority groups like homosexuals and atheists are making huge strides towards equality, African-Americans are still struggling with discrimination and police brutality, which is still so common that it recently inspired the nationwide Black Lives Matter movement.
It’s no accident that Black Lives Matter came into existence. It grew out of the need for a revival in the national dialogue on racism. African-Americans have been suffering in silence while the rest of the country goes about their business assuming everyone is doing more or less okay. As humbling as it is to talk about racial inequality, it needs to be addressed, because if it’s not, it will lead to more suffering, which will lead to more anger, which will lead to more disunity, and eventually the tension will be released through yet another American race riot.
America needs to overcome some major hurdles to cure itself of racism. The first is the apathy that stems from people being ignorant of how hard African-Americans have it. Many affluent Americans have a hard time accepting that African-Americans don’t have every opportunity and privilege they do. Until they acknowledge that reality, they’ll go on about their lives in a daydream having no motivation to change anything.
The second, and arguably bigger, hurdle is for African-Americans to accept that white people aren’t the problem, and not all white people are majestically privileged. Until the African-American community as a whole accepts that, they will continue to live in their own racially biased day dream that misdirects them from addressing the true source of their problems.
I’d like to give my personal testimony of what it’s been like growing up as a white male in America. Then I’ll tie that into the bigger picture and offer another way to end systemic discrimination besides hating white people.
Every year in school as far back as I can remember, I learned in my history classes how “the white man” slaughtered the Native Americans, enslaved Africans and pillaged the planet. Outside of school, I was exposed to documentaries, movies, and books about all the evil things the white man has done to other races. From the earliest age, I was indoctrinated to feel profound shame for the sins of every white person’s ancestors.
The only reason I had to grow up coping with this baggage is because the lottery of fate gave me white skin at birth, which made me guilty by association. Unlike anyone else born with any other skin color, I was forbidden from celebrating my skin color. Every year I sat by and watched as all the other ethnicities celebrated government sanctioned heritage pride months. They even got their own magazines, television channels, and schools devoted to celebrating their race while I was taught the worst thing I could do was celebrate mine. It hurt my feelings watching shows like “Roc” and “Undercover Brother” that unambiguously mocked white people, and that was totally socially acceptable.
I’ve never asked for sympathy for carrying the white man’s burden, because nobody cares. I don’t deserve mercy because of my skin color. Society tells me I already have more privilege than anyone else. To celebrate anything about my arbitrary skin color would be disrespectful to everyone else. The most righteous thing I can do is resent the color of my skin and all the privilege it bestows on me.
As a child, this was impossibly confusing to me, because I grew up dirt poor. Before the age of 11, I lived in a trailer house in the middle of nowhere. I wore homemade clothes made from cheap curtain fabric. I threw up bile on several occasions because I was so hungry my stomach had begun digesting itself. My father and my older brother beat me so many times I stopped counting somewhere around 250. I didn’t spend my formative years in an ivory tower. I spent them in fear and pain.
I went to a predominantly Mexican elementary school, where I was the racial minority. My best friend in elementary school was a Mexican boy named Luciano whose mother wouldn’t let me come to his house because she was unapologetically prejudiced against white people. In high school, I went to a predominantly African-American school. The black students would punk me at lunch and steal my money. They’d throw basketballs at my head in gym class. I lived three blocks from the projects and couldn’t walk the streets at night because I would be beaten or killed for being white in a black neighborhood.
My parents couldn’t afford to send me through college. So I sold my soul to the military because that was the only other way I could advance my life besides going into a lifetime of debt. I had a conversation with an Asian American officer and an Asian American enlisted woman about whether or not we should try to get commissioned and become officers ourselves. The officer told the woman she should definitely apply for officer school because her minority status will guarantee quick promotions.
I left the military and got a job at the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board where my boss was a Mexican woman with zero credentials other than a degree from an online diploma mill. She lied about her qualifications and ruined everything she touched, but management wouldn’t fire her, because they created her superfluous position for no other reason than to say a minority female worked in our department. I’ve worked for other minorities who got small business loans, scholarships and other opportunities that I was excluded from because I just happen to be born a white male. All I got was told to apologize to the world for my privilege.
The trailer house where my brothers and I were raised by our single-father who made $19k per year as a teacher
Growing up in Texas I got called “gringo” by Hispanics and “cracker” by African-Americans. While stationed in Europe I got overcharged by businesses on a regular basis for being American. Political activists called me a Yankee pig for being in the military. While stationed in Hawaii, I got called “Haole” by Hawaiians. I immigrated to New Zealand for a few years where I got called “Pakeha” by Maoris. Radical feminists tell me I’m nothing but a chauvinistic, rape-hungry meat dildo. Christians and Muslims tell me I’m so horrible I deserve to burn in Hell for not believing in their God. Rich customers walk all over me at work and treat me like a second-class citizen. Country folks talk down to me for dressing like a city slicker.
Far left liberals tell me I need to constantly “check my privilege” and admit that being white automatically makes me a racist who can’t comprehend what anyone else is going through. I’ve even been told I should feel guilty for feeling white guilt because white guilt is racist. Nobody has any sympathy for the fact that I was born into this bizarre, no-win situation, because I’m white, and that overshadows any hardships, sacrifices, missed opportunities or attacks I’ve had to endure. Someone reading this will label me a racist for bringing any of this up.
I’m not a racist. I’m nothing. I’m just a poor white trash kid who has spent my life struggling to pay my bills. I never murdered, enslaved or attacked anyone because of the color of their skin, and to my knowledge, neither has anyone in my family tree.
I’m nobody’s problem, and I have zero power to change the system for the better or worse because I spend all my time just trying to survive. Any time spent casting blame on me for anything is time wasted that could be used addressing the actual source of the world’s problems.
If you want to know why cops and judges are so unsympathetic to the African-American community, ask them directly. There’s no centrally orchestrated conspiracy within the justice system. Every time a cop or judge throws the book at someone, it’s a decision they made independently. The main reason a cop unholsters their gun, is if they believe there’s a threat to their life. The main factor in their decision to be hard or soft on a criminal, is whether or not they believe the person will be a repeat offender.
Imagine being a cop working the street beat in a metropolis. You’re looking around you, scanning the faces of everyone you see, looking for danger. Looking for a repeat offender with a gun. You’re not going to care about scrawny white kids who listen to Pearl Jam. You’re going to be looking for people of any color who dress like gangsta rappers, because if you walk, talk, and dress like a gangster, then you probably identify with gangster culture, which normalizes and glorifies crime, violence, arrogance, and disrespect for the law.
Not all African-Americans are dangerous or gangsters, but police are too quick to stereotype them that way. Many employers are too. You can blame them for being ignorant, but half the blame rests on the gangster culture that created this negative stereotype to begin with.
As long as gangster culture is synonymous with mainstream African-American culture, people will continue to stereotype African-Americans negatively. Gangster culture exists because it’s a response to the desperate living conditions and lack of opportunities in the ghetto. If you fix that, then the worst aspects of gangster culture will fade away. Until you fix that, no amount of social activism or hard-on-crime policies will make the problem go away.
The cause of economic oppression isn’t the skin color of the majority. The problem is the predatory nature of our economy. Blaming white people will never fix the economy. The solution lies in creating a more sustainable, equitable economy. Once everyone has unlimited access to education and doesn’t have to live in fear of being able to afford to survive, then everyone’s complaints against each other will fall to the wayside as we all just get on with celebrating life and the fellow humans we’re blessed to share this planet with.
Hopefully, that happens in my lifetime. In the meantime, I’m done apologizing for being white. If you’re not done blaming me for the color of my skin, then you’re a part of the problem.
The Wise Sloth 