When White Privilege Just Isn't Enough

Feb 20, 2010

I started this post yesterday. I never got around to finishing it due to having 'stuff' to do. I think being in the midwest, lacking twelve full hours of sunlight has a way of having a diminished sense of seeing things sometimes. I am happy with my life and how I am in it. Yeah, I've made hard choices, command decision and mistakes that affected not only myself but others along the way, and I am satisfied with every move I've made. It's my life and I refuse to be unhappy.

I also understand that being who I am, living in the era I live in has its... Limitations. I try hard every day to try to deal with the world as if I have none even though I know that every step I take, someone that has no clue as to how it is to walk in my shoes puts a tiny pebble of doubt, hate, misunderstanding or prejudice in my pocket. By the time I get home from my day's journey, I have the equivalent of a quarry by the way of my trousers.

I never asked for it. Neither did my grandfather or his grandfather, but it has been given to us and we still carry it. Never have I asked anyone who hasn't ever driven down my block to come there because I know that they cannot stomach the bullshit, but it is spoon fed there, so the expectations of men who look like me are low. Results contrived for the solutions to the world's problems are unexpected, dividends aren't even considered to be yielded unless I can score touchdowns or hit jumpshots.

But I'm 40 now and there isn't a market for me. Well, it isn't that large. Never has been, even though some of us have climbed through open windows of opportunity and have made impact. The fact remains that there are no expectations for us. It is the mark of the attitude of living with and whithin the status quo, even though we have so much to offer. 

We should be angrier. We should hold a grudge one million times more than we already have. The atrocities committed against those that look like me that has happened in MY lifetime...

And I'm not supposed to ask for reparations

I'm not supposed to bring certain conversation up

I'm not supposed to want apologies

I'm not supposed to feel the pain of all of my lost mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters, sons and daughters

I'm supposed to just smile and take it, forgiving the sons and daughters 

And we do.

We just take it.

And we act like it never happened.

And then when the TV gets turned on to the nightly news, we see a brand new form of a very old version of an anger so horrid that it reminds me of the days where it was common place to see another me swinging from a tree.

And I believe that just the sight of our current sitting president causes such a feeling.


When White Privilege Just Isn't Enough  - 2/19/2010



I've been black my whole life.

I've been a witness to a lot of travesty.

I've had to live in a world... No, a country where folk are shunned from keeping it real. I mean it's looked down upon and for some, it's downright disrespectful to bring certain stuff up in conversation. I would have never made it growing up in the Jim Crow or Civil Rights Era.

The truth is the truth and unfair is unfair.

This country was founded on rebellion, slavery and developing stolen land from the native peoples. This country has also thrived on military might, racism and a class based system that pits the middle against the lower, leaving the upper to prosper in the brokering of the class wars. To watch the utter arrogance of the American people as we speak against the development of other nations... To watch how we police the world so no other nation can gain equal footing burns my ass when just a few days ago the men who murdered Sean Bell...

Never mind about that.

What we're all witnessing these days is not the elimination, but the decline of white privilege. The country as a whole is taking a new shape by the numbers and those who had the unspoken privileges and graces in the past are getting balanced out in more ways that one.

I cannot finish this because of how I feel right now. There is an anger that I feel coming from parts known that feel like the stuff I've seen from the horrid past. Fear, trepidation xenophobia and finger pointing because there is someone else sitting in the office of power and certain folk just can't stand it.

They are angry and upset because for a few scant hours in their lives they have almost been made to live like we have for ages. It ain't everybody but... It's enough to take notice.


You know:
None of my family ever brought guns to a health care rally.
No one I know flew an airplane into a Federal use building.
I've used the N-word before, but to my knowledge, I haven't replaced it with the word 'Socialist'

It might be high time I got on my horse to warn the folks to start clinging onto their guns and religion

incomplete 2/19