Don't Gotta Be Drunk to Say It

Sip 24

So as many of you know, I'm a black girl living in The United States of America. Many things have been happening over the past centuries, but in last few years the rise of social media has brought a few particular cases to light. My last few weeks at school in May were tense ones because those were the weeks of Freddie Grey and our school was divided on issues of race.

There was one particular white, straight, cis-male that brought all the negativity out. For the sake of this chapter we will call him "Tim". So, Tim decided to make a problematic post on Instagram. He decided to say that in the case of Ferguson and Freddie Grey, it wasn't an issue of race and that the people of Baltimore had no right in "rioting and destroying businesses" and that violence wasn't a way to get your point across to the authorities. Mind you, Tim didn't even know Freddie Grey's name, in fact, he referred to Mr. Grey as "that guy in Baltimore." So if you can't even have the decency to look up the man's name, why do you feel like you can speak on a matter that you're not informed of?

Well he was informed shortly after because his little post sparked a huge debate in the comments section, wherein teachers also commented, and the next day at school was tense and so were the following few days and we ended up holding a meeting for anyone that wanted to come to talk about race. I had an exam so I was unable to make it. An interesting thing to note was that most of my POC friends came to the conclusion that progress was not made.

One thing I find hilarious about this situation is that Tim felt attacked and offended. The day after his little Instagram post, he and one of my friends (we'll call her Cutie) and all her friends were having a debate in the avid lab (which is a room we use at my school for science basically). This is a debate I stepped into because I could since I didn't have classes at the moment. I found in interesting that he had no evidence to back up his claims of "well this isn't a racial thing. white people get killed all the time." Well, yeah, that's a thing... Everyone gets killed all the time. However, it's the circumstances and the repercussions that matter and dictate what type of crime it is. So I brought up the Micheal Brown incident and he had nothing to say to that. I brought up the Freddie Grey incident, he had nothing in his defence. I brought up Tamir Rice, he had nothing for that as well. All of these cases were recent enough for him to have heard about, or maybe he didn't since he was too busy with his #alllivesmatter crusade.

Let me tell all of my readers something, any country that was subjected to colonialism or imperialism by a European country and was not already white-dominated (HA!) cannot be racist to white people.

Now, a lot of you may be saying, "UH ACTUALLY DJ RACISM CAN BE TO ANYONE BY ANYONE SO I'M LEAVING."

Okay, bye.

Moving on, no actually, that's not true. While it may be true that POC can be prejudice to white people (LOL) they cannot be racist in the Western world or any country Imperialized or colonized by the white man. Most definitions of "racism" have been defined by white people, but when you take a deeper look at the instances of racism in history you'll see that there is obviously something deeper.

Merriam-Webster Dictionary: "poor treatment of or violence against people because of their race" and "the belief of some races of people are better than others"

Merriam's definition one of the worst I've seen, especially that first definition she gave. Racism is institutional and will always be institutional. Let's talk about the background of American Colonialism starting with the excuse I hear from a lot of white people, "Well the Africans sold their own people to white people."

Yes, yes that's very true. In fact most of the world had slaves at the moment. Slavery is even in the bible. However, when these African rulers sold their slaves to the white men, they thought their slaves would be treated as human like they at least had been in the tribes they came from. But no, they were thrown onto ships and stacked atop each other like cargo, half of them dying along the way. Their own feces, pee and sick hitting each other on the face and then they were brought to shore, inspected like cattle and divided up and sold.

Now we have slaves, slaves that have to give their own teeth if their "master" had rotted his out by being a disgusting pig. Slaves were of course, treated like animals. We all know that. They were used as things to experiment on because blacks couldn't feel pain as well as a white and so forth. Well of course we had our American Civil War. If the South wasn't allowed to keep their slaves then they would Recede from the Union blah blah blah. So, it was so dire that they keep these humans as a way to do their work that they South would become their own country... Hmmm.

After the Civil War you could imagine how pissed the South was. In fact they were so pissed that they started groups like the Ku Klux Klan, a terroristic group that's sole purpose was to uphold White purity and protect the Whites from the savage blacks. Actually, until recently (recently being as late as the 70s) they were seen by most of America (and by most of America I mean racist whites) as heroes. One good example of this is the movie The Birth of a Nation (or the fact that they were able to exist for such a long time).

Now, after black people have been whipped into place (literally unfortunately), the most psychological work came Post-War. Here is where we start to see a lot of systematic treatment of the black people. Yes everyone, I'm here to talk about Jim Crow.

How do you make a people feel so dejected that they dare not attempt to stand up for themselves? How do you make the "more superior human" feel good about torturing and mentally enslaving a race?

Let's see. How can we make that boy who's slightly thicker than us in our class feel like sh!t? Why don't we give him a permanent nickname the whole school can call him, like Fatso. Okay yeah, catchy. Now, how do we get Fatso to listen to us? I know, let's take his food away during lunch. Oh! And then we can beat him up every now and then on the playground. Let's make him do our homework. Let's get our teachers to believe Fatso deserved it... Hmm. Why don't we make a club everyone can join except Fatso.

What's that called? Torture? No, that's just bullying!

Okay. How can we make those people that we dragged unwillingly to this country to work for us feel like sh!t? Why don't we give them a permanent nickname the whole country can call them, like nigger or Negro. Okay yeah, catchy. Now, how do we get the Negroes to listen to us? I know, let's strip them of their human rights. Oh! We can terrorize their neighborhoods. They can't sit next to us, eat next to us, school with us, or anything. Let's tie them up a tree for fun, remind them who's boss. Let's murder their men for looking at our women. Let's rape their women because we're tired of ours. Let us take our children to these murders and teach them what it means to be superior and that the Negroes deserved it... Hmm. Why don't we call this white privilege?

That we have on our hands human beings that were scared to even look at a white person the wrong way for fearing they would lose their life speaks tremendously. That we live in a civilization that ensured that they would be scared speaks even more greatly.

Now, in 2015 we have people scared to go to the police for help and our Government (as usual) reinforces the fact that we can trust no one by constantly letting off police officers or people in general that clearly had prejudice and racist inclinations to their crimes.

When I see people like Iggy Azalea who put on a facade of me and my blackness to make money, I don't think it's cute. I don't think "Oh wow good for her! She's making money!" I think that in 2015 it's still appropriate for white people to act like me but for me to act like me is "ghetto, loud, obnoxious, ignorant, and lazy." I think of all my ancestors who were humiliated by vaudeville acts that portrayed them in blackface as lazy watermelon-eating monkies despite the fact that white America depended on us to feed our breast milk to their babies and farm their lands.

Am I supposed to be proud that some white lady named Rachel Dolezal pretended to be black to "help us?"

The bigger question is do we need to help of white people? No, I don't think we do and I don't think we should. This is a battle that we as blacks and African-Americans should fight without their help. As long as the white man has even an opinion in our success then it isn't so.