Category: Racism is Alive and Well

Over the past 10 days or so I’ve been seeing articles about California paying reparations to black folks.

I was pleased to see that beach front land LA County had stolen from an African American family had finally been returned to the family. There is no excuse for anyone to lose their property, either land, or personal possessions, simply because of the color of their skin. LA County righted a wrong they committed long ago, and it was about damn time. 

There was a time when racism was rampant, horrific, and wrong on its face. The only reason LA County had been able to take this family’s land was because racism was at the time, tacitly approved of and LA County had the power of City Hall and people who could corrupt the law. 

This once again proves the old saying, “You can’t fight City Hall”

Less pleasing is the California Reparations board. If this board was looking for similar instances of injustice as described above. Then I’d be totally on board. The problem is, California Reparation seems to be more about cash payments. Cash payments made from our tax dollars in a state that didn’t have African slavery. 

For me this raises some questions. 

Will California be paying reparations to members of the Native Tribes whose ancestors were in fact enslaved and whose servitude built Churches up and down the state under Spanish or Mexican rule?

Will California pay reparations to the descendants of Irish children taken off the streets of Dublin and sold into slavery in American slave markets right along with slaves from Africa?

How is California going to determine who gets these reparations? Will they use DNA sequencing? Or will the state resort to simply looking at the color of a person’s skin? The former is invasive, the latter is going to automatically exclude groups of people who through no fault of their own might not be dark enough. What about people who may be albino?

There was a time when America had something called the one drop rule. If a person had any ancestor who was African they were considered Black regardless of their appearance. Interestingly, when the NAZIs were trying to come up with a method to single out Jews for extermination, NAZI’s felt that the one drop rule was too extreme. They chose a genealogical method based on a Jewish family member being some number of generations back. Five generations, no problem. Only four generations back? Sorry you’re going to the camps. I wonder what criteria the California Reparations board will use.

Then there was the African American activist who said in print, anything less than $800,000 per person would result in severe consequences. Wow! That sounds more like an old MAFIA protection racket. What severe consequences? Riots, looting, buildings burning? Oh, in other words a typical Wednesday in Los Angeles.

When I read that article, my first thought was how about zero dollars? Your terms are completely acceptable. Burn down your neighborhoods or the entire city. Just realize that your actions have consequences and one of those consequences would likely be that you’ll not have a place to plug in that 75” TV you stole from the Best Buy. You can also look forward to 20 years of no-one investing in businesses or buildings in the neighborhoods you destroy. Y’all might want to loot some tents from the REI or Walmart while you’re at it.

There was another piece reported out of San Francisco about a pilot program where the city leadership was making payments of 1000 a month for two years available to poverty stricken people.

Great! Help those people get their footing and work their way out of poverty.  But reading the fine print, this is only available to African Americans. Apparently poverty is only poverty if you’re the right color. White people living in poverty and squalor is of no concern to the leadership of San Francisco.

San Francisco is also making similar payments available to pregnant poor single women. Again Great! But the fine print again specifies only African American need apply. This particular plan is being implemented in Los Angeles, and other smaller cities throughout the state. 

I’m sorry, but this is racism on its face. Poverty is poverty, pregnant is pregnant, regardless of the color of your skin.

I thought we had laws to prevent discrimination of any kind. 

Clearly I missed a memo on the nuance of racial discrimination. 

Growing up I was taught that any discrimination was bad and not to be tolerated.

Since these days it’s enough to simply identify as a woman to be called and treated like a woman.  I find myself wondering is it enough to identify as African American to be treated like an African American and therefore be eligible for these cash payments? How about if I identified as a black woman and pregnant?

“My baby daddy ran off with some skinny white girl! I need a grand a month to raise this baby!” 

I doubt it would work. 

This kind of thing is how racism is perpetuated.

For years African Americans have protested and in some cases rioted over being treated as less than. Leaders in government have been solicitous and forgiving, they’ve promised to make funding available and bring an end to racism in exchange for votes.

What will those leaders do or say when the shoe is on the other foot? How will they respond to white people protesting and rioting against clearly racist behavior targeted at them?

Or will we have the Southern Poverty Law Center designating impoverished white communities as white supremacist terror cells, then calling for these communities to meet the same fate as Ruby Ridge, or Waco? 

I find that I’m not particularly surprised when I hear white people saying things like, “We need to move someplace where the demographics are more favorable.” Which is nothing more than a polite way of saying, We need to move someplace where there are only white people.

The problem is, if white people were to carve out a couple of states and cede the rest of the country to people of color, that would be called racism. It would never be tolerated and particularly so, if white people built for themselves a nice place. This is not to say white people are more capable than anyone else, but we already have the example suburbia provided. 

At one time moving to the suburbs was called “White Flight”. The cores of cities were given over to people who, at the time,  were legitimately on the wrong side of the racial equation. People of color were ghettoized and then rightfully got angry at being mistreated and forgotten. The common explanation for these ghettos being crime ridden was these folks were desperate, and impoverished.

I suspect that while there was, at the time,  certainly a racial component to white flight, there was something else. White people simply got tired of trying. When it became easier to move to suburbia where everything was new, clean, planned and safe. Places where education was good and crime was largely unheard of, white people chose the path of least resistance.

I’m not afraid of living with people of color, I’m just tired of playing some kind of appeasement game where the goal posts are always in sight but moved at the last minute. I’ve worked with people who are actually from Africa. They have always been kind, hardworking people like myself, with similar values and expectations. On more than one occasion Africans have asked what the hell is up with African Americans? I’ve answered, that I haven’t a clue.

I find myself getting quite tired of trying anymore. I’m sick of being called names. So sick of it that I’ve actually looked into moving to a completely different country. Call it the ultimate white flight.

I’ve also considered getting a job in Antarctica. This would take me out of the USA and put me in a small community where everyone is dependent on each other for survival. I’ve been curious to find out if, in that kind of situation, the whole racism narrative falls apart and people are just people again.

I don’t believe in racism. I think it’s stupid and destructive. That being said, my experiences with people of color in California have taught me that I’m apparently in the minority regardless of race. 

It’s because of these lived experiences that I want to go somewhere and live among people that look just like me. I want to eliminate the racial stuff and if someone who looks just like me commits a crime, they get the same justice as everyone else.

I don’t want to live someplace where I, or anyone else, is favored or punished simply because of the color of their skin or ethnicity. Until ten or fifteen years ago, I thought that was where America was headed. Now I feel like we’ve taken a step 50 years into the past and are in the process of inverting all the rules too.

In my opinion, stepping back in time and inverting the rules is nothing more than revenge. It’s not a step toward equality at all.