Light And Dark

Why do all the black hash tags no longer exist?

And yet we still have all of these…

In every single conversation about racism, inevitably white people will insist that they have experienced racism and that my discussion of racism, because it offends them, means that I’m racist.  White people cannot, have not, and will never experience racism.  

Racism is the intricate system of oppression, denigration, and devaluation that deems people of color as inherently inferior and that has existed for centuries.  It is not possible for white people to be born into a society where they are constantly told, in both overt and covert ways, that they are inferior merely because of the color of their skin.  White people are NEVER told that their hair, facial features, and body types are not considered the standard of beauty.  White people have never ever had legislators regulate their lives in a way in which they are left disadvantaged and substandard to people of color because legislators are always white, thus they have never lived in a society where their best interests are intentionally undermined.  

·         White people have never turned on a television and been faced with every face they see that looks nothing like them.

·         White people have never worshipped a God that looks unlike them.  They created God in their image, they have convinced the world that God is white and every image of a Judeo-Christian god (capitalization intentional) for thousands of years has been Caucasian.  

·         People of color have never colonized, controlled, and destroyed a nation and its population in Europe.

·         White people have never had their entire history, names, identities, art, culture, religion and history stolen from them.   Let that and the implications thereof sink in for a minute.

·         White people have never been told that the world’s greatest musicians, artists, philosophers, and scientists are people who look unlike them.  

·         White people are never told that their culture, music, speech patterns, and norms are abnormal.

·         White people NEVER have to fear that people of color are going to control and dictate their fate in a legal, medical, professional, or financial institution.

·         White people have never had people of color dictate their morality and/or social norms.

•             White people have never lived in a society where people of color have denied them rights as human beings nor have they ever been told that their attractiveness means they have to have facial features as close as possible to people of color.

Because white people have never experienced any of those things, they have never experienced racism.

A white person who has grown up in a Black neighborhood has never experienced racism because racism is not bigotry.  Bigotry is someone not liking a person because of the color of their skin. Racism is a complex, intricate, multilayered system of oppression that informs everything about a person’s identity, both white and black.  Racism informs how parents raise their children, it’s how one is socialized, it is NOT being discriminated against once or twice because you are in an interracial relationship.  Racism is generational, it’s the very fallacious belief that allows whites to think that their ancestors kidnapping, raping, torturing, beating, colonizing, and murdering people of color makes them somehow inherently superior or that it’s a fact that can be ignored so they don’t feel uncomfortable.  Racism is the arrogance that white people inherent because they believe that they can have the last word on every conversation, that they know it all, that they have a right to silence anyone who disagrees with them.

I know, I know! Saying that a white person is racist is the single most offensive thing that a Black person can say.  According to white people, a white person has to be wearing a white sheet, burning a cross, and screaming, “I hate Niggers,” before they can be considered racist and even then, there will be white people insisting that they know them personally and they are a good person and not racist.  I’ve seen it.  

First and foremost, there has never been another group of people kidnapped from their homeland, forced to give up their names, forced to give up their language, forced to give up their families, art, history, culture, and their entire identities to the same extent as Africans who were enslaved in America. Not the Irish, not the Jews, not Cambodians, no one on the planet has endured what the descendants of slaves suffered. Want to know how I know this?  Because white people won’t let you forget about Jon Benet Ramsey 30 years later, tthey won’t let you forget about OJ, you know they would never let you forget about something as horrific as an event that robbed them of their humanity for generations.  Whatever his name is, the nudist, says a that the Jewish people were enslaved and they pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and it’s only niggers who keep insisting that we are the victims of racism. 

OK, so let me ask a few questions to see if the tragedy of the Jewish Holocaust compares to the tragedy of slavery in a game I like to call Oppression Olympics. 

1.  How long were the Jewish people enslaved during the Holocaust?  Was it for generations?  Were Jews taken into concentration camps and made to live there under German rule as inferiors for multiple generations without being able to read, write, or get any education?  No, they weren’t.  The individuals who entered the concentration camps knew freedom, autonomy, they knew independence before they were imprisoned.  They were ripped from a world where they functioned as normal human beings.  Those individuals who were fortunate enough to survive that hell, when they were freed, they knew how to live and function as a human being in a world that saw them as human beings.

Africans who were enslaved, those ripped from Africa, transported to the New World, they also knew what it meant to be free.  Here’s the kicker, slaves born into the system of slavery, those who never knew freedom a day in their lives, those who never made an adult decision about their destinies, about their lives, never had the same luxury as Jews who were imprisoned in Nazi Germany.  Slaves born into they system never learned to read, write, they never learned how to run a household on their own, they never learned how to properly raise their children.  Not because they were inherently inferior but because those options were not available to them.

2.  Were Jews robbed of their history and identity?  Hmmm, excellent question.  Jews … created history.  The entire (fake) Old Testament bible is based on their supposed greatness.  Jews have the very same religion they had since, as they claim, God created Earth.  Do African Americans have the religion their ancestors practiced? Not only do we not know what religion our ancestors practiced, we have been beaten, brainwashed, and convinced that the religion our ancestors practiced was heathen.  Jews have a language they can call their own.  Jews have songs they can sing that go back millennia.  Jews have the same names they have had since the beginning of time.  Jews have art, food, and books that go back thousands of years.  Want to know what African Americans have? We have negro spirituals we learned under the whip of the white slave master because it was illegal for Blacks to practice their own traditions or tell our own stories of greatness.  

3. Were Jews dehumanized for their appearance? Well, I’m sure some racist troll who thinks he can put me in my place is going to suggest that Jews’ unique hair texture was different and thus it made them easier to be identified as Jewish, thus, it’s the very same thing as Blacks who were enslaved because of our beautiful dark, smooth skin, our gorgeous thick, wooly, hair texture, our beautiful facial features like our wide noses and our thick lips.  We were dehumanized because our women had bigger asses and our men had bigger dicks.  It’s pretty easy to take off your yarmulke to hide your Jewish identity.  It’s not so easy to take off your skin though.  But, I’m sure, racist nudist troll is going to insist that it doesn’t matter, that those things are unimportant.  Well, let me take your child, brand them with a burning hot iron, rename them, denigrate them daily for their stringy limp hair, their thin unkissable lips, their flat asses, their inferior genitalia, and their pink, pasty, sickly looking skin.  Let me do it to their children for their entire lives.  Let me do it to 15 generations of your offspring and then we can see if there is similar damage done to their psyches. 

4.  Were Jews taken from their homeland? Ahhhh, here is where Jews can claim some competition in the Oppression Olympics.  Exodus.  Jews were driven from their home at one point in history.  Were they kidnapped?  Were they transported to another country thousands of miles away living in the piss and shit of strangers chained to them?  Were they fed food infested with maggots and rat shit?  Hmmmm.  Were they chained to the hull of a ship with no water or fresh air?  They walked for 40 years in the desert, united, together.  I’m going to go out on a limb and say that is not the same thing as being captive on a slave ship. 

There is another difference.  Jews were given a little plot of land called Israel to do with as they pleased, including the systematic oppression of Palestinians at their discretion and pleasure.  I’m going to also note here, and forgive my repetitiveness, but at no point in history were Jews robbed of their God, their names, their culture, their identities.  It makes a difference.  Want to know how I know?  Because if it didn’t matter, Blacks and Jews would be in the same position today.  If what happened to Jews was as tragic as what happened to Africans who were enslaved and their descendants then Jews were be in the same predicament as African Americans today.  They aren’t.  It’s not because they are more resilient, not because they were able to rebound better, not because they aren’t sniveling and whiny and playing the victim card.  It’s because what has happened to them doesn’t compare to what happened to slaves.  IF it was the same, if the impact of the horrors of American slavery were the exact same as what happened to any other race of people you would find the same outcome.  Jews are not better at picking themselves up by their bootstraps.  Jews are not better at rebounding from tragedy.  Simply stated, what Jews endured in history does not even compare to what slaves endured. 

Here’s where I need to empower the Black readers.  If you ever find yourself in a situation where you have read and understood the context of what I’m trying to teach you, if you can wrap your head around the fact that no other race of people have endured what we have, if you muster up the courage to confront white people with your understandings, inevitably, you are going to encounter the, “YOU”RE RACIST,” chants from whites who are going to be offended that you would even suggest that what Blacks endured was worse than any other crime against humanity.  Here’s what I want you to ask them.  First, ask them if every tragedy was equal, if every crime against humanity was the same, if there was no difference whatsoever, why is it that Blacks in America (and in colonized Africa) have suffered greater than any other race and seem to have such difficulty pulling ourselves up by our collective bootstraps like other races?  Ahhhhh, not an easy question to answer if you are racist and think there there is something inherently inferior about Blacks in the first place.  The ONLY reason Blacks occupy more ghettos, we are more disenfranchised, is because we have been systematically oppressed in ways that far surpass anything that any other race of people has ever endured. 

Next, ask them why they are so offended that a Black person would suggest that slavery was the worst crime against humanity.  You see, inherent in racism is this notion that if Blacks claim what happened to us was worse than what happened to other races, we are an arrogant, uppity nigger.  White people have to have to have suffered more.  They have to be the most maligned.  They can’t stand to let anyone say that what happened to Africans who were enslaved and their descendants was worst than the Irish and the Jews or anyone else in history because we aren’t human to them.  If this were a real competition, and Africans born in America won the Gold medal for being oppressed, white people would contest the results, they would fight and scream that they were the rightful winners.  Why?  Because they don’t give a damn that millions of Africans were thrown overboard ships.  They don’t care that white slavers raped women to make a profit from their children.  They don’t care about the horrors we endured because all that matters to them is trying to silence our voices.  They only care about refuting facts with their distorted lies in order to claim superior status.  #alltragediesmatter. 

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Post by Michael Carr: twitter.com/MrMike_62/status/931598887986565120

If you are anything like me, then you know what it is like to be tired. No, not “feel”, actually be so tired to the point that you can feel it in your bones. You are exhausted, and here is the kicker; you’re too exhausted to sleep. Does that sound familiar? My husband does not understand this. For him it is as easy as laying down and passing out. I envy him. If it were that simple, I would be out like a light right now. But the reality is, I’ll probably be awake until five in the morning watching Peaky Blinders or playing Tomb Raider.

In case you don’t know it yet, I am an insomniac. I can’t sleep. In fact, I am too tired to sleep. I don’t know how that works out, but it does, and I am miserable because of it. I have tried to find ways that might make me fall asleep earlier. Everything from good old chamomile tea, to counting sheep, to munching on chewable melatonin tablets. They do the job for a short while, but eventually they stop working. When it comes down to it, this is a problem. I can’t function during the day. I have a hard time focusing on my homework or standing for long periods of time. Even laying down has its limits. I am so tired that I am restless. I yawn excessively, I get super irritable, and I am almost always fatigued during the day. So, I just lay in bed and think about all the things that I will eventually get around to doing in the next year or so. I mean, hour or so. Man, I am tired.

Does this sound familiar to you? If this sounds like you, then you might be suffering from chronic sleep deprivation. Believe it or not, our bodies need sleep just as it needs air and food to function. Who would have thought? During sleep, the body heals itself and restores its chemical balance. Without sleep, our brain and body systems don’t function as they should. All the coffee in the world isn’t enough to override the body’s need for sleep. Trust me, I drink two pots a day and it just doesn’t do the trick anymore. A lack of sleep can take a tremendous toll on your body and on your brain. Below are six ways that sleep deprivation can affect our body functions and systems.

Sleep deprivation can affect our central nervous system:

The central nervous system is the information highway of the body. During sleep, pathways form between nerve cells in the brain that help us to remember new information that we have learned throughout the day. Sleep deprivation leaves the brain exhausted so it can’t perform those duties well…

Philosophy explained by donuts