White America emotionally abuses black people
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 2015
White America's Emotionally Abusive Relationship With Black People
by: CHAUNCEY DEVEGA
.....................
People show you who they are. Black America saw the truth of Zimmerman and Wilson. White America chose to look away. Moreover, as is the habit of physically and emotionally abusive people, White America told black and brown folks that they were crazy to believe that Zimmerman and Wilson were racists.
This is evidence of a deeply felt hostility towards black people’s humanity.
.......................................
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
Black folks are only human. Racial battle fatigue still grates and stresses. Racial battle fatigue also kills those who live under its shadow. Black people are not superhuman: there are many victims, those who were somehow broken by life in a racist society, they shamble on, their lives and life chances diminished and unfulfilled.
............................
Black America has made basic justice claims. For centuries, Black Americans have only wanted fairness, justice, and perhaps even a simple and public acknowledgement that people of color are not crazy in their critiques of the color line and its many injustices—as in many ways black folks have been and remain the prescient, amazingly insightful, and "miner’s canary" of American democracy.
Black Americans are a people who are made to suffer in an abusive relationship because they tell white Americans truths about themselves, out of love, and in an effort to heal and improve the United States so that the country can live up to its full potential. Unfortunately, those truths are unpopular, and too many of our white brothers and sisters are loathe to hear them.
much more of this well-written & timely piece (mho):
http://www.chaunceydevega.com/2015/09/white-americas-emotionally-abusive.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
Observing and discussing race rarely indicates it's all one sees; though I certainly realize the rhetorical convenience of implying as such.
If your only thoughts are rhetorical absurdities... 
Very true 
What a great user name.
I posted that quote because, invariably, someone will come along to complain that the wording isn't right.
think through a useful answer or two. I don't pretend I can make them short and easy.
For years I thought I'd cleared this stuff up for myself, but Coates knocked me around, so I'll have to use him, a little, as a crutch, since I can't formulate my answers without his thought sequence.
Just to think of color as a construct is a stretch for most people, even now. Many of us are aware that there's a whole sociology of color as hierarchal as nature that we've been exposed to, we've had inconvenient arguments rage around biological and sociological arenas for decades, from the Scopes trial to Taylor's The Help to yesterday's white supremacist group meetings from Idaho to Florida. Those are the whites who 'need' to be white. They accept and need the Dream that insists on exoneration, 'equal victimization,' and innocence. These whites are all around us.
Before I read Coates, I thought of 'white' as at least a useful framing for non-minority groups who consciously or unconsciously enjoy the privileges of never worrying about safety, monitoring, modulated tones, errorless behavior and a caged existence in ghettoes. They would be me.
I didn't see myself as needing to be privileged, and I thought I could, through my life, try to be the best white ally I could be. I taught in all black high schools (Black Literature, World Literature, American Lit, Women's Lit, Film Studies) for 35 years, immersed in black teens' music, culture, church life, live in a 50% black area of Chicago, have really, really good black friends, had a black foster kid, dated black men, met Henry Louis Gates, student field trips to see Farrakhan, Cornel West etc., etc.before they were on national radar. I saw working with black people as part of reparations. I've never felt exonerated and haven't expected it.
The short answer to your first two questions, up front, is that I no longer accept any color construct for even purposes of self description or identity, for purposes of privilege or not. "Racism" is the construct, skin and bone, that drowns our thinking despite civil war, civil rights, college educations and interracial marriage increases. I've vowed to try, in DU, to not reinforce color constructs while describing language, logic and behavior problems that keep us trapped in that construct or in hierarchy. I don't need to be white, and I don't accept the Dream that props it.
Your last question implies that someone is making a rule, but what I'm trying to say is that rules about what one can call oneself in America can't be 'traditional' if the tradition was built on violence. Indians have first dibs on that claim. Forgetting that is part of the Dream of those who need to be white. I think it does apply to whites, mostly, but not only. Mostly to America, but not only, because Europe.
If you want me to summarize how we came to see ourselves as white, and what that probably means for getting on better with black people on DU, I'll call that Part II.
It would be hard to argue that we as a country are not in a better place than we were 150 years ago. 150 years ago, educated and respected, mainstream political and religious leaders argued confidently that slavery was just, right, and ordained by God. Those arguments took a bloody civil war and very long time to die. After the Civil War, educated and respected, mainstream political and religious leaders argued confidently that segregation was just, right, and ordained by God. Those arguments, too, took a very long time to die. It was not until the 1960s, after the Civil Rights Act was passed, that the Southern Baptist Convention finally abandoned it's arguments for segregation and admitted that it was wrong. Theories of "race" that were accepted without question by nearly all educated and respected men of learning 100 years ago appear strange today.
But progress is slow and attitudes are stubbornly ingrained. The masses are slow to adopt the leading edge of change and progressive thought. I was born and raised in the Deep South. I've seen racism from almost every possible angle. I've seen some change, but I've also seen that a lot things don't change, or they change very slowly.
As far as how we discuss these things on DU -- I don't know what to say. I've had posts hidden for being "racist" (which they weren't) and I'm blocked in African American group. I'm not convinced that these discussions about racial divisions on DU are of any real use.
I can testify with confidence that any optimistic assessment that attitudes in the South are undergoing a rapid change, or that the younger generation is abandoning the attitudes of their parents and grandparents in large numbers, is overstated.
Anyway, it's been fun.
