What Chris Rock got wrong: “Nice” white people perpetuate white supremacy

[loyalsister]

When I read Uncle Tom's Cabin recently, it occurred to me that the kind slave owners (who still referred to people as "creatures&quot were instrumental in perpetuating the ugly system. They gave comfort to people who were abolitionists in spirit, but not ready to commit to confronting and denouncing slavery. It would have been easy for people to comfort themselves in an assumption that there were more nice slave owners than there were cruel ones.
I think Wise is correct here. Of course, the same thing still happens today.

One can be perfectly nice, after all, and still fail to see that which is right before you, staring at you from the computer screen as you watch Eric Garner killed on the streets of Staten Island with an illegal chokehold. The officer who applied that pressure to Garner’s neck might himself be “nice” in the sense that he is kind to old people, babies and animals. Likewise, the grand jury that decided yesterday not to indict him for any crime might well have been filled with nice people, who send get-well cards to sick friends and relatives, participate in Secret Santa at work and volunteer at the local food bank. And what of it? Their niceness did not, clearly, provide them with the gift of comprehension, as they managed to watch an officer kill a man who posed no threat to him whatsoever—no reaching for his gun, even in some paranoid fever dream, no charging him like a bull, or as Darren Wilson put it to justify his killing of Mike Brown, like “a demon.” Their niceness came laced with nothing so helpful as empathy as they watched a man choked to death, gasping for air, all because he had been selling loose cigarettes on the street and dared to tell the officers to leave him alone when they decided to harass him for that most serious of crimes.

http://www.salon.com/2014/12/07/what_chris_rock_got_wrong_nice_white_people_perpetuate_white_supremacy_partner/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=socialflow