Charles Blow: "We MUST love the brown bodies that the world would discard-even the "thugs""
Of Bikers and Thugs
MAY 21, 2015
Charles M. Blow
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By the way, is anyone asking about the family makeup of the bikers in Waco?
No? Exactly.
History teaches us that this is a flawed premise. This country has a history of race riots, some that stretch back centuries, to a time when two parents in the home was the universal norm. Did that prevent the violence? No.
We have to recognize what these disparities and the way we see and discuss events, particularly violent ones, are all about: an underlying fear of, distaste for, suspicion of the otherness of blackness that informs these beliefs. This is a hatred, whether the conscious considerations are malicious or benign. This is a hatred, which says that blackness is inherently lesser. This is a hatred that at its most insidious can even be internalized.
Only love can defeat that kind of hate, particularly as it manifests itself in such subtle terms. It is a love that must move against these waves of current and historical thought and sensibilities. This love, in a way, starts with black people themselves, and always has. It demands that we love ourselves wholly, it demands that we love the very flesh that the world despises, and “love it hard” as Toni Morrison wrote in “Beloved,” because the world beyond our own hearts hates it.
In a sense, we must love our flesh hard because the world hates it hard.
We must build our own fortifications against systems and structures of brutality and subjugation that have long endured — that break us and blame us for the breaking.
When we come to love ourselves, we can more clearly see the lies that buttress the hatred, and it all begins to crumble like the ashes of a thing consumed by fire.
When we love ourselves, we honor ourselves and we see that black betterment isn’t simply about choice and culture but also about a defying and a demanding — defying the simplistic narrative of a personal pathology that society is salivating to impose, and demanding a dismantling of the systems of oppression (like racially tilted policing, criminal justice and incarceration) that play an incalculable role in black community destruction.
And while we can’t demand that the world love our flesh as we do, we can — and must! — demand that it stop pretending that its hatred of it is some cultural chimera concocted by a racial grievance industry. We can demand that the data around racial bias, which stretches across society, be accepted as fact rather than opinion.
We can demand the right to call hatred by its name and to its face. We can demand the right to exist, fully and freely, in the wholeness and beauty of our own humanity.
We must see the brilliant light in our beautiful darkness and love the brown bodies that the world would just as well mark and discard — even the “thugs.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/21/opinion/charles-blow-of-bikers-and-thugs.html?_r=0