Someone sent me a sound bite from one of those cowardly white supremacist piles of diarrhea where he was steadfast insisting he harbored not one racist sweat gland in his body. Then he went on to talk foolishly about how European people are the ones responsible for all advances in civilization. Besides the obvious and overwhelming ignorance in that comment, I surprisingly found myself getting angry after watching that filth. After thinking about it for a while, the reason for my anger became clear to me. Its really time for us to make it very uncomfortable for people to keep walking around here acting and talking like they have no idea what white supremacy is, how it brutally oppresses brown people, and how European (White) people benefit from this system. The same needs to happen as it relates to the oppression of women identified folks, LGBTQ folks, physically challenged folks, and anyone else oppressed that I failed to mention.
Yes, its time for you Africans and other brown folks to drop this struggle into the laps of your family, friends, co-workers, neighbors, etc., who act as if they don't understand what's happening here today. And, yes, White folks, its certainly time for you to disrupt the mindless ramblings of the folks around you who are watching FOX News, or whatever the hell they call themselves doing, while acting like they don't have a clue what people crying oppression are talking about.
You all know what I mean. People who claim that there is no systemic oppression of anyone. That all people have to do is stop blaming anything outside of themselves for being oppressed. The people who say those poor people in Africa are that way because they don't believe strongly enough in Jesus. Those people who claim that the Muslim woman who was beaten was beaten because she is a Muslim and that's a terrorist religion. The people who claim that group of Africans harassed and killed by the police in London, England, New York City, or Sydney, Australia, were killed because they didn't cooperate. You know, those people who say life is "all about the decisions you make" while ignoring the times the police let them go. Yeah. All those sickening people. Its time to make their lives much more uncomfortable. Why? Because agitation is a necessary tactic when organizing. Kicking up dust is a proven way to get people going and the very definition of kicking up dust is making people who are sitting on top of oppression (by denying it) as uncomfortable as is humanly possible.
Why is this necessary? Because they are straight out lying! All of them. They all know damn well that this is an oppressive system that was built on oppression and is maintained that way. Yes, I'm talking about your racist parents (whether they are African, European, Indigenous to the Americas, many of them support this racist system against brown people, especially Africans. They justify it just like their white masters have trained them to do). I don't give a damn how much they mindlessly parrot what they see on FOX, those people are playing you. They know much more about how this oppression system operates than they are acknowledging and despite the fact I don't know your racist parents, I can prove it.
You see, clarity came my way several years ago when I was reading an article about a group of well to do White parents located somewhere in all White land. These people were up in arms about a decision to change the name of their local elementary school from that of one of the many violent colonizers that most of these schools are named after to the Martin Luther King Jr. school. These parents, ever insisting that it would be impossible to find a drop of racism in any of their saliva, kept saying that the reason they opposed the name change was because changing their neighborhood school to the MLK school would bring a stigma that would adversely impact their children's ability to succeed in life. The irony should be obvious to even the most dense people reading this. If these White parents could recognize that their children would be stigmatized for going to a school named after Dr. King, how the hell is it that they can't possibly understand the systemic stigmatizing that happens to our children on a daily basis?
The truth is they do understand it. And if you don't believe that just ask the racist white people surrounding you (if you are White) or the bourgeois brown people surrounding you (if you are not white) if they would change places with poor brown people? Just ask them if they would be willing to start their lives over and just change places with any poor brown person anywhere. It isn't a trick question. You see, these are the people who say life is about making decisions. That if someone has misfortune, its only because they haven't put in the necessary work to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. That's what your lying people always say right?
Now you know as well as I do that your people are not going to say they would change places with poor brown people (if they said they would you also know they lying through their racist lips). Now the issue is if they truly believed the worthless rhetoric they are forcing all of us to hear all the time, there should be no reason why they wouldn't change places with anyone. If life is all about choices why wouldn't they trade places with someone in the ghetto? Someone in the barrio? On the Rez? Someone in the poorest place in Africa? Its all about choices right? They could demonstrate to the entire world just how to pull those boots up and overcome that adversity, but they won't agree to do that because your lying people know that there's much, much more at work here. They know that there are forces at work that are in place to keep us oppressed and they damn sure don't want to have to encounter and deal with those forces because they know that they have never had to deal with them. And, they know that they wouldn't be nearly as determined, mature, and strong enough to deal with them as we do on a daily basis. But, they will never admit that in public (although I've had countless white people admit it to me over the years - always after they had downed a few drinks).
This raising of the bar as it relates to stopping their dishonesty is important. It will help us in several ways. It will eliminate the ability of these lying lack of character people from diminishing the experiences of oppressed people as they routinely do right now. It would also save us time. When these people, in their bourgeois liberal form, tell us that we should respond to oppression by somehow going to the system oppressing us to seek justice, we can just avoid all that confusion by telling them how stupid they are for suggesting something that they themselves know would never work to solve the problems.
Of course the real problem isn't just your lying people. The real problem is many of us who permit the conditions to continue to exist where your people can maintain this lie. We do this by pretending that this system will change just because we want it to. That we aren't going to be required to change along with it. We deny that the change we need will require us to be much more uncomfortable ourselves than we are willing to be right now. We are not willing to stop relying on fantasy. We instead prefer to continue to perpetuate our own lies that we can bring about justice just by getting upset about oppression instead of committing our lives and raising the bars to become much more consistent. To listen to things we don't want to hear and submit to them when they make more sense than what we are doing now. Many of us aren't willing to do any of those things. Instead we keep doing the same thing over and over while expecting a different outcome which we all know is the definition of insanity. Than, we have the audacity to look down at our noses at our lying people when we are all playing the same game, just with different cards.
Kwame Ture said is perfectly in 1967 when he said "the white man has been playing God for centuries. Its time for us to tell him play time is over!" I'm going to humbly add to that statement by saying that play time is over for all of us. If we are not uncomfortable in ways we cannot control and we are not willing to sit in that uncomfortable space while engaging the work to build ourselves beyond that place in healthy ways, we are not willing to grow. And if we are not willing to grow we are not serious about challenging this system. And, if we are not serious about challenging this system we are not really about working to agitate our sick and dysfunctional people into becoming better people. Its time to make a decision. You should know that whatever you are, you are not fooling anyone besides yourself. Make that decision to do something you are not doing that raises up your effort and stick to it. Push yourself and stop settling for projecting an image. I was 22 years old when I changed my name, thus eliminating the name that was identical to my father's name. It took four years, but he got used to it and accepted my African name. Why, because he saw the hard work and commitment I engaged in to live up to the principles my name projected e.g. "fighting for what I want." He saw me do my best to represent that in my day to day life, in raising my daughter, and how I presented myself. He saw the challenges I faced. He grew to respect that despite the fact I had abandoned his source of pride, his name. By the time he died, he was playfully asking me to give him an African name. I don't relay that story to brag. I tell you that to hopefully inspire you. It wasn't easy having an African name in the 1980s and I suffered extensively because of it, but that's how you build character people. So, can we do something to stop this fakery, lying culture that dominates us? Can we start putting in work? Serious work that improves upon whatever serious work we are putting in, or at least think we are putting in, now?
Yes, its time for you Africans and other brown folks to drop this struggle into the laps of your family, friends, co-workers, neighbors, etc., who act as if they don't understand what's happening here today. And, yes, White folks, its certainly time for you to disrupt the mindless ramblings of the folks around you who are watching FOX News, or whatever the hell they call themselves doing, while acting like they don't have a clue what people crying oppression are talking about.
You all know what I mean. People who claim that there is no systemic oppression of anyone. That all people have to do is stop blaming anything outside of themselves for being oppressed. The people who say those poor people in Africa are that way because they don't believe strongly enough in Jesus. Those people who claim that the Muslim woman who was beaten was beaten because she is a Muslim and that's a terrorist religion. The people who claim that group of Africans harassed and killed by the police in London, England, New York City, or Sydney, Australia, were killed because they didn't cooperate. You know, those people who say life is "all about the decisions you make" while ignoring the times the police let them go. Yeah. All those sickening people. Its time to make their lives much more uncomfortable. Why? Because agitation is a necessary tactic when organizing. Kicking up dust is a proven way to get people going and the very definition of kicking up dust is making people who are sitting on top of oppression (by denying it) as uncomfortable as is humanly possible.
Why is this necessary? Because they are straight out lying! All of them. They all know damn well that this is an oppressive system that was built on oppression and is maintained that way. Yes, I'm talking about your racist parents (whether they are African, European, Indigenous to the Americas, many of them support this racist system against brown people, especially Africans. They justify it just like their white masters have trained them to do). I don't give a damn how much they mindlessly parrot what they see on FOX, those people are playing you. They know much more about how this oppression system operates than they are acknowledging and despite the fact I don't know your racist parents, I can prove it.
You see, clarity came my way several years ago when I was reading an article about a group of well to do White parents located somewhere in all White land. These people were up in arms about a decision to change the name of their local elementary school from that of one of the many violent colonizers that most of these schools are named after to the Martin Luther King Jr. school. These parents, ever insisting that it would be impossible to find a drop of racism in any of their saliva, kept saying that the reason they opposed the name change was because changing their neighborhood school to the MLK school would bring a stigma that would adversely impact their children's ability to succeed in life. The irony should be obvious to even the most dense people reading this. If these White parents could recognize that their children would be stigmatized for going to a school named after Dr. King, how the hell is it that they can't possibly understand the systemic stigmatizing that happens to our children on a daily basis?
The truth is they do understand it. And if you don't believe that just ask the racist white people surrounding you (if you are White) or the bourgeois brown people surrounding you (if you are not white) if they would change places with poor brown people? Just ask them if they would be willing to start their lives over and just change places with any poor brown person anywhere. It isn't a trick question. You see, these are the people who say life is about making decisions. That if someone has misfortune, its only because they haven't put in the necessary work to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. That's what your lying people always say right?
Now you know as well as I do that your people are not going to say they would change places with poor brown people (if they said they would you also know they lying through their racist lips). Now the issue is if they truly believed the worthless rhetoric they are forcing all of us to hear all the time, there should be no reason why they wouldn't change places with anyone. If life is all about choices why wouldn't they trade places with someone in the ghetto? Someone in the barrio? On the Rez? Someone in the poorest place in Africa? Its all about choices right? They could demonstrate to the entire world just how to pull those boots up and overcome that adversity, but they won't agree to do that because your lying people know that there's much, much more at work here. They know that there are forces at work that are in place to keep us oppressed and they damn sure don't want to have to encounter and deal with those forces because they know that they have never had to deal with them. And, they know that they wouldn't be nearly as determined, mature, and strong enough to deal with them as we do on a daily basis. But, they will never admit that in public (although I've had countless white people admit it to me over the years - always after they had downed a few drinks).
This raising of the bar as it relates to stopping their dishonesty is important. It will help us in several ways. It will eliminate the ability of these lying lack of character people from diminishing the experiences of oppressed people as they routinely do right now. It would also save us time. When these people, in their bourgeois liberal form, tell us that we should respond to oppression by somehow going to the system oppressing us to seek justice, we can just avoid all that confusion by telling them how stupid they are for suggesting something that they themselves know would never work to solve the problems.
Of course the real problem isn't just your lying people. The real problem is many of us who permit the conditions to continue to exist where your people can maintain this lie. We do this by pretending that this system will change just because we want it to. That we aren't going to be required to change along with it. We deny that the change we need will require us to be much more uncomfortable ourselves than we are willing to be right now. We are not willing to stop relying on fantasy. We instead prefer to continue to perpetuate our own lies that we can bring about justice just by getting upset about oppression instead of committing our lives and raising the bars to become much more consistent. To listen to things we don't want to hear and submit to them when they make more sense than what we are doing now. Many of us aren't willing to do any of those things. Instead we keep doing the same thing over and over while expecting a different outcome which we all know is the definition of insanity. Than, we have the audacity to look down at our noses at our lying people when we are all playing the same game, just with different cards.
Kwame Ture said is perfectly in 1967 when he said "the white man has been playing God for centuries. Its time for us to tell him play time is over!" I'm going to humbly add to that statement by saying that play time is over for all of us. If we are not uncomfortable in ways we cannot control and we are not willing to sit in that uncomfortable space while engaging the work to build ourselves beyond that place in healthy ways, we are not willing to grow. And if we are not willing to grow we are not serious about challenging this system. And, if we are not serious about challenging this system we are not really about working to agitate our sick and dysfunctional people into becoming better people. Its time to make a decision. You should know that whatever you are, you are not fooling anyone besides yourself. Make that decision to do something you are not doing that raises up your effort and stick to it. Push yourself and stop settling for projecting an image. I was 22 years old when I changed my name, thus eliminating the name that was identical to my father's name. It took four years, but he got used to it and accepted my African name. Why, because he saw the hard work and commitment I engaged in to live up to the principles my name projected e.g. "fighting for what I want." He saw me do my best to represent that in my day to day life, in raising my daughter, and how I presented myself. He saw the challenges I faced. He grew to respect that despite the fact I had abandoned his source of pride, his name. By the time he died, he was playfully asking me to give him an African name. I don't relay that story to brag. I tell you that to hopefully inspire you. It wasn't easy having an African name in the 1980s and I suffered extensively because of it, but that's how you build character people. So, can we do something to stop this fakery, lying culture that dominates us? Can we start putting in work? Serious work that improves upon whatever serious work we are putting in, or at least think we are putting in, now?
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