Mia,
Washington, DC,
District of Columbia
I have been repeatedly shocked for decades of my adult life at the way in which our system works so effectively for white people at the expense of a wide range of black, brown, and indigenous peoples. This white supremacist system simultaneously allows them to pretend these huge advantages don’t exist through a complex system of denial that approaches delusion. In my profession, over a period of decades, I have watched white people, both male and female, promoted above better-qualified people from a wide range of cultural backgrounds, including members of all of the other continents exclusive of Europe. Despite the objective superiority of B/B/I candidates, the unflinching devotion of white people towards each other, regardless of what is often mediocre or even subpar performance, most often results in promoting whites at the expense of higher-performing B/B/I people.
I was shocked afresh when, as a supervisor, I was told that one of the black people I supervised had pushed a white female in a different department so that she had fallen and ‘slid across the floor.’ He denied it, and I–having known him for a decade–found this highly implausible. But there was skepticism about my response to senior administration and by contrast a great deal of support for this white woman. One of the senior administrators–white male–told me I was ‘playing the race card’ on his behalf.
I wanted to tell him that our white supremacy society has the other 51 cards in CONSTANT circulation on behalf of white people: white supremacy is white people who repeatedly play the whole deck–all 52 cards–at the expense of a wide-range of B/B/I peoples: pretty much, all of the rest of us, or 90% of the human race. Black people are framed as opposite white in this toxic binary–are required for white superiority–and are therefore often subject to greater discrimination and abuse. But all B/B/I–members of all worldwide continents–are victimized because white supremacy is the first global movement that consolidates power to only 10% of the human race.
The “race card” for whites is actually a full deck, constantly working to their advantage.
When white people accuse ANY B/B/I person of using the ‘race card,’ what they are really saying is “how dare you take even one card out of the 52 that automatically belong to me just because I was born white.” And this is a grossly amoral stance that shouldn’t be acceptable to anybody of any race if, as both a national and global society, we expect true equality.
