The black and white relation explained
Is it racism or is the problem socio-economic? The race black and white relation amongst each other is a tricky problem to solve due to the enriched history shared between whites and blacks. We here today more politically that from the liberal point of view everything is to be blamed on white supremacy and systematic racism, while from the conservative point of view there’s the acknowledgement of the wrong doings of white folk, but their answer is everyone faced discrimination so stop living in the past. Both of these ideas or ways of thinking are very detrimental to black and white people, simply because they’re vastly extreme ideas. Race relations between blacks and whites looks to be better than it ever has been, more interracial marriages, no more segregation, no lynching, no race riots directed toward one another. Despite those truths there still lies those who remain very prejudice and bigoted, racist even. In conversations as to why those types of people remain there’s never any good, objective answer. It’s again either “white supremacy”, “all white people are devils”, or “blacks can’t stop living in the past”, “racism will always exist so why talk about the few, slavery happened to everyone so get over it”, “how are you affected by something you didn’t go through”. I’m sure everyone is familiar with those talking points but the point or questions that rarely get brought up is how much of the problem is solely race, how much does one’s environment play into one’s behavior, and how fast do we expect 300+ years’ worth of thinking to be eradicated. Looking at both perspectives, better understanding is to be gained when addressing the race relations between white and blacks, how much of the treatment is racism or simply a socio-economic issue
Why aren’t black people optimistic
There’s a genuine question in regard to black folk and it revolves around a notion that they can’t get over the past, they only look at the bad that was done to them, they ignore the fact they weren’t the only group who was discriminated against. These notions are made by some white people, the same white people that ponder on the question of white aren’t black people optimistic. Some think that because blacks are doing better now that they should have nothing to be skeptical about. Obama being the first black president surely should’ve arisen some hope, over 90% of the players in the nba are black, same goes for football, rap and hip hop are genres with majority black artists. If you look at everyone profession, I named with the exclusion of the president you’ll see that all those professions are entertainment, they all involve providing a form of entertainment. After slaves were free in America they weren’t given or allowed any rights, they were also not permitted to indulge in the 40acres and a mule act. So, you have millions of individuals with no rights or land. So, by default they’re only going to do what you allow them to do, and one of the few things that they did allow was entertainment. Blacks were allowed to box, allowed to perform in big jazz bands, tap dance, essentially any form of entertainment they were allowed to partake in. It got to a point where once they were allowed a step in the entertainment door, they thrived and dominated. The only bad news to that is, those professions are the top 1% talents of the world, and that doesn’t speak to the 99% of blacks that aren’t professionals or entertainers. Using the success of black entertainers is a horrible reason as to why blacks should be optimistic, the top 1%’s success does not make blacks optimistic. The harsh reality is blacks suffer from single parent homes at a higher rate than anyone else, so by default odds of success are already low, single parent homes are also likely to be located in what most would consider high crime rate areas. High crime areas are never a good environment to raise a child, but the majority of single mothers can only afford those environments to live in. 46% of black children grow up with a single mother, there’s nothing to be optimistic about when you’re already starting behind in life.
White people: thought process
A lot of white folks suffer from a zero-sum mentality. They think that when another group of people are benefiting, that it comes from the expense of white people, even when that is not the case. When you have a country that was built on slavery and the slave owners were the ones who benefited at the expense of African Americans, it isn’t hard for them to make the correlation that blacks benefiting has to come from their expense. Slavery ending not even over 200 years ago means that the bad habits and ways of thinking aren’t going to be eradicated at the same time that slavery was abolished. This isn’t to excuse and or meant to sympathize with white people who share this way of thinking but more so a better understanding as to how a zero-sum mentality can still be around. Every ethnic group has faced the wrath and discrimination from white Americans, including white Europeans. The immigrants on the other hand weren’t dealt the same cards as the blacks and natives. Blacks were slaves, and the natives were slaughtered and force to perpetually migrate. It’s hard to see how cruel and immoral you are when you aren’t affected by the consequences of your actions. Slaves were black individuals in a white country, the mammy took care of the master’s child, the slaves prepared dinners, picked the cotton, and any other forms of labor. Everyday your life being subjugated to serving white people gives you a perspective and a knowledge about them that they’ll never have about blacks. Blacks have saw the monstrous actions committed by whites, from people smiling in lynching photos, to the lashes and beatings, brutal raping’s, the mutilations…
Black people have seen the horrors white people have committed and gotten away with, the last thing a black person would want to do is voluntarily get in the way of white people for they’ve seen what happens to others who stand in their way. White people on the other hand have this irrational fear of black people, I say irrational because of the failure of logic being applied in the thought process. White Americans owned slaves, raped, beat, and tortured them but whenever there were slave revolts, they then regard slaves to animals, brutes if you may say. The idea that someone revolting against the individual who’s causing them harm shouldn’t be surprising but to them it was. The disconnect from reality that slave owner had is truly depressing. From the slave revolts to the false rumors of salves wanting to rape white women. With such serious accusations, you would think that slave owners would have had to spend a lot of time with the slaves. How can a person speak about another individual they’ve never met, the way white people thought about slaves having hardly any real time around them is astonishing. The way of thinking still exists today.
James Baldwin said it best when he said “Most white people have had black friends in school, but after school hours they never come to my community to see how my people live, white and black people are segregated from the schoolhouse door. Therefore, they do not know what it is like for blacks to go back home, no idea how they live. There’s nothing against blacks, its lack of empathy and immense ignorance we pay for the price of segregation. That’s what segregation is. You don’t know what’s happening because you don’t want to know, that’s what segregating involves”. White people their entire lives have attempted to separate themselves from every ethnic group. Which leads me to talking about something I believe to be their white purity.
White purity
It’s not a mystery that white people have lived their entire lives separate from the rest of Americans. Majority of whites lived in predominantly white areas, but failure of private life has had the worst effect on black and white relations. If whites weren’t afraid of their private lives, they would have no reason to look at blacks. The problem they invented was meant to safeguard their purity. The guilty white imagination has been assigned to the blacks. It’s easier to think about and blame another group of people than it is to think about the horrors white people have done to blacks. People can’t bear reality; they prefer fantasy as a truthful experience of their reality. Coming to terms with reality means self-reflecting which many refuse to do. Again, I would like to mention that the abolishment of slavery isn’t even over 200 years yet, so to get millions of people to escape certain ways of thinking is going to take a little longer. The white purity goes hand in hand with the zero-sum thinking. Blacks getting any assistance or form of benefit in their minds means it’s at their expense, and that they will in return be negatively impacted, or that they aren’t good enough to receive the help that helped benefit blacks. This way of thinking comes from white people who have little to no real experience with black people, by real experience I mean someone who’s either lived with or has spent a good amount of time with black people. What would be a good amount of time some may ask, there is no set time rather its more do you purposely not put yourself in spaces with black people. As Baldwin said most people may have had a black friend in school, or may have a known one, but never went to see what that person’s life was like. As a black person you can’t escape the reality that the world you live in is white, white people are the majority population so it’s hard to escape it. White culture, and history is displayed so largely that it’s hard to not have an understanding of white people. Black people cannot escape American culture no matter how hard they try, whites on the other can avoid African American culture.
It’s in avoiding African American culture that it makes it easier to think what the media portrays. By staying away from reality, you can make reality what you want, and the last thing white people want is to feel guilty, so they feel their reality with negative notions made about black people. Speaking of the word guilty, white people have an irrational fear of guilt, because they cannot be guilty of an action they did not commit or was not responsible for. This shows that they are aware of reality and can recognize how wrongfully treated blacks were, but they’re afraid of white guilt, when they can’t be guilty if they wanted to. You can apologize or share sympathy for actions that resulted in someone’s misfortune, but you cannot be guilty of someone else’s actions, unless you could have prevented such actions from being committed. America is the most diverse country in the world, yet it is very common for other ethnic groups to live amongst themselves, only problem that occurs with white people is that they always have been able to do that. Majority of middle class and higher-class areas are predominantly white.
So even if you are doing well for yourself, you’ll still find yourself living amongst white people. The more an area is impoverished the more POC’s (persons of color), are there neighborhoods that exist that are middle class and up where majority homeowners are black? The answer is yes, unfortunately those neighborhoods are the minority. So again, for white people they’re for the most part always around one another. When around a similar group of people, it’s really easy to critique and comment on things having zero experience because the people around you are the same. White purity causes so many unnecessary problems not just for blacks but in return impacts whites because this stems into the zero-sum mentality.
- Redlining: In the United States, redlining is a discriminatory practice in which services (financial and otherwise) are withheld from potential customers who reside in neighborhoods classified as ‘hazardous’ to investment; these neighborhoods have significant numbers of racial and ethnic minorities, and low-income residents.
Is it racism, or socio-economic disparity
Are white people flat out just racist or do their issues with blacks have more to do with their behavior. I just explained why whites try to safeguard their purity and the reasoning behind that, I now want to talk about how much of their way of thinking is racist or the product of what poverty breeds. White people don’t think they’re superior to black people in the way that involves or implies they think black people aren’t human or subhuman. I see it as they believe their culture so to speak breeds the behavior that they deem correct, whereas they view African American culture as incorrect due to what it is they see and hear from the media. They see single parent homes, drugs, homicides, gang culture, and thievery. All the things I just named are attributes that poverty breeds. The issue prioritized isn’t race, it’s the behavior. Race only matters due to the race of the individual who showcases this behavior, if the behavior being showcased was deemed as correct then the race part becomes very minor.
I think the way we tell racists apart from those who may be bigoted or prejudiced is to look at the behavior shown, and past that if there’s any conflict then it’s fair to use the word racist. At that point the only distinguishable feature is race. The irony in all of this is white people don’t like the behaviors exhibited by black people due their behavior being a result of being impoverished. Yet they won’t acknowledge or take accountability in the role they played in that caused blacks to act as such. The toll segregation has taken on America is a toll bigger than was expected, for white people being separated from blacks meant no knowing anything about them, and for a lot of people the unknown is the scariest thing to exist. So even in the case of a black person showcasing what white people would consider acceptable behavior white people in return are still likely to be skeptical of that black person because they are having to wrap their head around the fact that what they’re witnessing goes against their reality.
Some white people don’t like to have their reality shifted or altered so they’ll deny reality itself, which most racists are those in denial of reality so extreme to where they won’t accept or believe black people are equal beings. White people safeguarding their purity means not accepting their wrong doings in fear of how that’ll make them feel, they know the wrong they’ve done but anytime you do something wrong you subconsciously are waiting for something bad to happen to you. White has nothing to worry about, but that irrational fear and way of thinking forces them to look for anything that makes trouble for them even if it makes no sense. Once blacks were able to live amongst whites they moved, once blacks were allowed to public pools, they got rid of them, once blacks were able to go to school with whites the funding on public schools dropped. Those are a few examples of whites being afraid or looking for something that they think was a form of punishment.
Purity vs reality
For a white person the hardest thing to do is self-reflect, to be able to recognize the wrongdoings towards blacks. The failure of accepting reality is what I believe is the leading cause of the negative impact it had on black and white relations. Accepting reality is harder for the group that has been taught to deny reality, from what is taught in schools, to what the media has portrayed and still portrays. It’s the feeling that if white people accept the wrong done toward black people, that it implies they themselves are somehow tied with those who committed the action to blacks. When in fact they are not tied with nor are they responsible, society doesn’t do a good job at acknowledging that. Society wants white guilt, they want everyone to succumb to the idea that white supremacy exists, and that white people should feel guilty for actions they have not committed. When in actuality white people just have to genuinely acknowledge and accept that the problems, they have toward black people are a result of how America treated them. Acknowledgement doesn’t mean you are a bad person, feeling sad or recognizing how horrible the treatment done to blacks done by whites shows sympathy and acknowledgement. Which is better than simply blaming and listing things you dislike about blacks while having very limited interaction with them. Ignorance is the price we all pay for segregation, for blacks we’re on the receiving end of how whites treat and think about us. For whites there’s lack of understanding and knowledge about blacks which only feeds the irrational thinking, and false reality they live in. The problem existing between blacks and whites isn’t a racial issue, race plays a factor, but it isn’t the leading factor. It’s the preexisting notions stemming from the socio-economic problems, that stemmed from racism that are the problem.
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