I saw a video last week that hit me like a ton of bricks.
Here we were, just days after the Buffalo massacre, where a white supremacist deliberately sought out a Black neighborhood to terrorize, and yet again we were a nation with no answers. And this is when I saw a video by an amazing Black creator, Jameelah Jones, (whose TikTok account name is @sunnydaejones.)
In this video, she addresses “good white people allies.” She started like this:
You are being outworked by your racist counterparts. See, the racists, the ones that really hate me, they are organized and they are mobilized. And you are still listening and learning.
She goes on from there. Here’s the LINK if you’d like to see the full video (which is only a minute long) and any of her other excellent videos.
Listening and learning — this is exactly what so many of us have been doing. And not that it’s a bad thing (as we white folk clearly have a lot of learning to do), but it is just so insufficient at a time like this.
I offer no specific suggestions as to what you should do now. Each of us is on a different part of the journey to be a better anti-racist. But find ways to get organized and mobilized. We can’t just let the other side run roughshod over our fellow Americans.
Categories: Uncategorized
That is a powerful & truthful video. I am truly frightened for our country.
An old saw says that a common enemy & fear are the best community organizers. People don’t mobilizde b/c they’re happy. AND “happy stuff” doesn’t draw eyeballs. In this context the political enemy is the counter-nation of fearful haters who run rampant through national political speech & actions. But that’s abstract, not a concrete skin color, political alignment, or economic fear that can be easily targeted. So how do people come to recognize they’re being used as fearful has-beens or hateful prejudiced punks? And do they want their behavior to follow some power-grabbing fearmmonger “leader”, whether DJT, Hitler, you name it? That analysis and self-knlg is hard to reduce to dog whistles. We need to stop whistling to dogs and start asking some perceptive questions of fellow human beings, equal to ourselves, and listen to the answers. Who wants to start?
Yea we ALL need to stand up! White supremacy is a threat to all of us, our civilization as we know it. We all must get involved !
This still just shows, how, ignorant we can be, how, oblivious, we all are, to this, major problem that is, in our, near, vicinity right now.