You have to Know Enough
According to Neil DeGrasse Tyson, the Black American astrophysicist, “One of the great challenges in the world is knowing enough about a subject to think you’re right but not enough about the subject to know you’re wrong.” This profound quote makes us think, which many of us never do much of. When someone says their ancestor fought in the Civil War for the South “against northern aggression,” they are part of the crowd that does not know enough about the fact that southern aggression included millions being held in brutal slavery. If someone claims that “all lives matter,” which they do, but saying that as counteraction to Black Lives Matter is another example of not having enough information to know that Black lives never mattered, while White lives always mattered in a white supremacist society.
The United States went from slavery based on skin color, to Jim Crow law, to mass incarceration. Each step was designed to maintain the institution of white supremacy either in custom or in social policies. Education based on myth, and excluding Black History from the history of America is still a problem as it reverberates the Eurocentric history that is mostly false or mythical… History that is made up of half-truths, omissions, lies, distortions, and erasures is still being taught, and when African American Studies is proposed there is stomach aching by those who don’t want it taught. Some of the ones that think that Black History creates a story outside of American history are people who either have a white supremacist agenda or simply ignorant and don’t know enough about Black History to even carry on a sensible conversation.
One must be careful in looking at what people who use statistics to explain away reality. One can prove any absurd conclusion by manipulating the numbers, This is but another example of social scientists using statistical models to explain away reality. Some used this approach in making the false claim that after Obama was elected we were now living in a “post racial society.” The racism got worse after Obama was elected and look at what we have now! We now have more white supremacist organizations than Martin Luther King ever had to deal with. Over used statistical methods are often used to explain away racism, protest, and social awareness about the legacy of slavery and its white supremacist child. We have seen the extension of racism across time that only goes from one mode to another. We went from slavery to Jim Crow law, then to mass incarceration, and now to red hat bigots.
If one is putting the term racism in quotes it is a clear indication that by doing so one has no idea about the horrors of white supremacy and how just walking in a white area might get you arrested or worse. People blinded by the “color-blind” racists saw all sorts of things to deny the fact that white supremacy is still a major problem in this country and often fuels police brutality, voter suppression, voter intimidation, racial gerrymandering, and other public policies designed to strip away civil rights for people of color. Some of the people that fly a Confederate flag are absolutely racist, while others lack the knowledge to understand that the “Rebel” stars and bars flag represented the southern slave owners that fought a war to protect slavery. They admit it themselves when they say they were fighting against the North to protect slavery in their legal articles for leaving the United States in a racist war.