a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment

    Make no mistake - I perfectly understand and entirely forgive the impulse to shit on the whole of the white race in circumstances such as this. But I think a lot more forward progress will be made when the act of shitting on the white race is no longer held forth as a solution. 'cuz really? This is all the confronting of racism any of us are going to do today and it's mostly you hating on us for sharing the skin color of people whose acts we condemn. It's akin to berating Iranian Shia muslims for the actions of al shabaab.

kleinbl00 there are levels to progress.

Step 1 is admitting this shit is happening, it's real, and needs to be stopped. (There are clearly a very very very large number of people that have not gotten here.)

Step 2 is (this is where you claim to stand based on your post.) actions against the construct. This happens in 3 forms (as best as I can explain)

2a. People (read: white people and "minorities") who are aware and are active in environments where these behaviors manifest must confront them on an individual basis.

2b. People (read: white people and "minorities") who are aware must be active in engaging the people and environments who are subject to the construct in question. Part of mk 's suggestion (2a,b)

2c. People (read: white people and "minorities") must organize against the tools of the construct embedded within the environment at large (read: legal systems, government agencies, etc.) Now, I do not know how much you are aware of, but the organizers of groups like Black Lives Matter, Dream Defenders, The Justice League, etc do have concrete lists of demands. (Also a detail that must not be ignored: these groups have nothing to do with the old guard which has long been corrupted -Rev Al and friends.) Demands that can be acted upon in the near and long term by people in positions of power. reasonable demands. These demands have been the organizing points the whole time.

But, kleinbl00, I'm angry because to get to Step 2, we need Step 1. Because without Step 1, we make very slow and small progress. And I can do but so much to influence Step 1, but you Kleinbl00, who has reached Step 2, can do a lot. Because the people who need to be spoken to will, unfortunately, listen to you before they'd listen to me.

It took a breaking point in the death of Michael Brown and months of intense protest and organizing to get some very ignorant humans out of positions of power in Ferguson, MO. The Justice League has been organizing in NYC for years against NYPD's actions with few moments of "victory." We're not super heroes. We need help. And a lot of it is help from people convinced we don't. At the very least, I think we can agree that having to work from this point is indeed frustrating.