Alex Miller,
New York, NY.
White people. Some of you, not all… please notice that I said SOME…some of you have been wondering, for a while, “Why am I always called a racist?” “Why do blacks blame me for slavery? My family never owned slaves!” And that sort of gives me pause because: What, did you think you were special? Everyone in America gets it! Do you think you have it worse than anybody else who gets called names or epithets? Cuz I got news for ya Bub… nuh uh.
So, maybe your family didn’t bring Native Americans Small Pox blankets mixed with a side of Christianity. Your ancestors may not have owned slaves, castrated, and lynched them. Or maybe you don’t know anyone who made the Chinese pan for gold or dig trenches until they died on the spot. You probably don’t know anyone who turned away Jewish refugees escaping the Holocaust…or anyone who flooded society with leaflets of caricatures accusing them of being Nazi spies. You may not have even been alive when Reefer Madness instilled in the minds of millions an image of a raving mad Mexican “wetback”. I don’t think you ever interned any Japanese Americans during WWII because “they might be working for the enemy” in barely functioning shacks, while their businesses went into disrepair and got looted. You may, or may not, have made crazy ass Apu from the Simpsons-inspired jokes, with an Apu-inspired voice, to trash and degrade Indians, Sri Lankans, or Bengalis. And I pray to everything you never were a member of the current group of Islamaphobes obsessed with how “terrible every Muslim is” and physically attacked Arabs (who may not have actually been Muslim) just because of how they look and your preconceived notions of how much of a threat they might be.
Relax, my friends, dry your eyes. The Irish, the Italians, Poles, Hungarians, Croatians, Germans, Scandinavians, even Brits, have all been victims of hate and bias in this nation. I think a major difference, in this country, is that those people of European origin, eventually get fully indoctrinated into society purely off the basis of how closely they resemble the “purebred American, the All-American.” But this is how it works.
You may not have done anything, been involved with any racist faction on the planet, hurt a single soul. You may have had immigrant ancestors from European nations who got treated like utter dog shi*; but each time I get online and get called “cotton picker” “n*****” any variation of primate, or get told I’m a part of the “13%” (despite the fact I’ve never committed a crime in my life, let alone a violent one), by a different person, I don’t feel sorry for myself. It just tells me there’s plenty more where that came from. Race is as important now as it’s ever been. And if all you can do is point fingers at others for not making America a better place, if you’re not actively getting out there and helping to change America, then it’s problematic to expect people with less of a resemblance to those who caused so many problems to minority communities, to do more. Stop crying. Start changing.
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