Guess what? Still race.
Every time that I have read the news in the past week, it's been about essentially the blindness of white people and the upper class in this country. Gentrification in the Bronx, white parents seeking less drug laws now that their precious little children are junkies, and of course, the KKK still being alive, well, and followed in America.
This has been my past week. Each of these has caused a reaction with me, and in addition to having read Sartre's No Exit play this week (coined the term "Hell is other people,") I've been pretty upset about all of it.
Gentrification permeates every part of our country because politicians refuse to do anything to alleviate it, or get to income diverse neighborhoods, on local, state, and national levels. So now real estate devlopers have cocaine parties and try to re-name the South Bronx the "Piano District" because they want to sell luxury condos.
White people want a leaner war on drugs now that their kids are the ones doing heroin, not the Other who they could never relate themselves to in their heads because they refuse to be nice, decent human beings.
And, the kicker, the KKK is still alive in America. If any group of anyone who wasn't white did the things that the KKK did the FBI would have fucking bombed all of their houses by now, their children's elementary schools, and their extended familie's cell phones would have been tapped. But no! The KKK is full of white people. Fucking untouchable.
Sartre was right. Hell is other people.
I still cannot believe that the KKK still exists in America. There are possibly more white terrorists than any other race in America, and still we're terrified of labelling white people as terrorists.
ReplyDeleteRacism is alive and well in America and a huge part of the problem is when people try to ignore it. We have to take responsibility and acknowledge that this "heart of darkness" is still very real. Only then can we even begin to dismantle the systematic oppression and white privilege that has been put in place in America. It needs to stop.
ReplyDeleteI think a lot of the racism that still exists today is not even on the plane of the KKK. There's a racism I know I see in class everyday. It's the systematic reasons that I'm the only black person that sits in my AP English class. I thinks it so dark that people are so blind to these issues.
ReplyDeleteCouldn't agree with you more. The hard part about it is that people don't try to understand Otherness until they are an Other, or they make themselves and Other in their head and thereby disengage with any other Others.
DeleteIf that makes any sense?