Sweet Sugar

If I shatter your legs today, are you going to beat me in a race tomorrow? Next week? Next month?

No? What if I go “it’s in the past man,” will that help?

You have a group of people. You gather them up onto boats where they lay down shoulder to shoulder. To lay in each other’s waste. To lay next to corpses. The entire voyage.

If they were lucky enough to land in the U.S. (google the history of african slavery in south america), what’s their fate? To be beaten, raped, mutilated, worked to death. To have family units repeatedly shattered. To have their culture suppressed and stripped from them.

And all around them a culture that hates them is forming. A culture that says it’s okay to do this, because they aren’t human. “It’s okay to rape them, because they need breeding. It’s okay to use them for medical testing.  Did you know they can’t get sick? They don’t really feel pain. They’re strong, work animals. We’re taking care of them, without us they would have nothing.  They aren’t like us, that’s just nature.”

And after the system of slavery? What then? More LAWS to keep them in the same place. Even without those laws, the people around them still hate them. They’re still animals.

And with laws? Of course you know about Jim Crow! But you don’t know about Redlining.

So it’s impossible to amass wealth - did you know most wealth in the U.S. familial? Did you know that the chances you have in life are based on what the last few generations of your family did.  So what happens when you go from slave to sharecropper and the white people around you went from penniless immigrant to small business owner? Where do you think those two bloodlines are now?

What happens when my grandmother’s grandmother was an illiterate sharecropper, when the only shot at education she had was at a church that the KKK kept burning down?  When segregation guaranteed that no matter how hard she worked she wouldn’t have a shot at learning the basic skills we know you need to be successful in college?  

It means she’s poor. So what happens to the children of people like her?

In this country the poor are more likely to live in food deserts, children in food deserts are malnourished, the malnourished cannot perform adequately in even the best schools. And school funding is based on property value, and oh wait. Redlining made black neighborhoods worthless. 

And I was only talking about access to food there.

It’s ubiquitous in our social structure. It’s inescapable. The racist laws of 1776 affect the laws of 2015.  The racist attitudes of the individual in 1776 affect the attitudes of the individual of 1776.  The actions of yesterday have consequences today.

And you’re too busy telling everyone to move on to give any of us a shot at identify and eradicating those roots of racism in today.

if a woman tells you something you said or did makes them uncomfortable, listen.

if a trans person tells you something you said or did is offensive, listen to them.

stop dictating to oppressed people what is and isn’t offensive when you don’t suffer from the same hardships we face daily. LISTEN TO US.

His parents made him replace his “I’m dead inside” sign with engineering. 

buckbarrow:

i’m home sick with the flu and i just received this email from my father

STOP REBLOGGING THIS MY DAD THINKS HE’S SOME INTERNET SENSATION AND HE WON’T SHUT UP ABOUT IT