Don’t sleep on racism
Racism is not just part of the past; it is an indelible part of the present. The interesting thing about the sickness of racism is how it operates. There have been Nigerian friends that have seen it but did not recognize it at first. A Nigerian associate of mine once told me that he had been stopped by the police in his nice car, but when the conversation took place between the officer and him, the officer was at first very rude but and after he looked at his name on the license and insurance card and saw it was African he immediately changed his tune. The reason for this is explained in the twisted logic of white supremacy. The Nigerian was not an American black and therefore was given more courtesy.
Examples of this also took place in the South during the days of segregation. Some blacks discovered that if you talked with a Caribbean accent racist store owners would let you shop there. Their logic was based on the fact that they were not dealing with a “Negro,” but with a black person that was better than American blacks. However, it does not always work that way as many Nigerians and others from Africa are discovering that their skin color is seen before anything else. Just walking around a white neighborhood, or jogging, can produce frantic cries for the police to come and “investigate” what has been described as a “suspicious” person. All a white person has to do is call the police and say the so-called suspicious person is black and immediately a patrol car will show up—sometimes a horde of officers. This happens in San Antonio quite a bit.
Sometimes white people will call the cops simply because they don’t like “loud talking.” This often happens of college campuses when blacks pick a specific area of the school to socialize between classes. The racism does not stop there as any progress made of black people is often seen as an affront to whites. When Obama was elected many of us forgot how this racism works and should have known that you better “Stay Woke,” for as soon as Obama became president the white hatred surfaced and eventually became embodied in a racist candidate named Donald Trump. Trump has been defeated, but better stay woke because the racists that came out of the closet for the last four years are planning more bigoted actions.
One must remember that the majority of white did not vote for Obama in 2008 and even a smaller number voted for him in 2012. The racism of old has gone nowhere and thanks to Trump he has raised the confederates from the grave. When Obama was elected again in 2012, racist radio nut Rush Limbaugh screamed that the country was lost, and one man by the name of Henry Hamilton killed himself because Obama won and left a note cursing Barack. This is the depths of racist stupidity which survives generation after generation. Many progressive people claimed that Trump would not win the election because moderate Republicans would not allow it—ignorant analysis of the strength of white supremacy. Ignorant analysis of the claims that we won the civil rights movement! Sure we made some gains, but when people went home and went to sleep, some even claiming that crime in the community was the new civil rights movement; racism was ready for a comeback. One cannot confront crime in any minority neighborhood without understanding the system that created the problem in the first place.
