Debra Bailey
Jul 20, 2017 · 6 min read

The Face of the New Racism

After reading the above article, I have concluded that we are dealing here with the prototypical new racist. These new racists are not driven by the same old visceral hate burbling up from the intestines of some Old Boy. Rather this new breed of racist is steeped in Black pop culture and perceives the Black people through that lenses. Written as an intolerant outsider, this author can only identify with his own culture despite being exposed to apparently several decades of Black culture. Despite the fact that Black cultural contribution make up only a small part of the overall cultural output in America, it has attracted many fans, of which one is this writer. As in Reaganite politics, the writer apparently feels that the ubiquity of black music and dance, somehow trickles down into the Black society and works to resolves the social issues confronted by more than 30 million Black Americans.

The tragedy here that this writer appears lucid but is actually very disturbed and perhaps suffering from some emotional or mental illness. This is what psychiatrists normally conclude when someone is entirely bereft of any capability of empathy or compassion.

The writer blithely cites gut wrenching statistics with complete indifference and even brutal resentfulness. Evidently, he is incensed. He is outraged. Look he says, I have not lived in a whites-only vacuum. I have been listening to your music, watching you dance and sing as well as watching you receive awards and attain fame. Yet you still decry racism. But you are killing each other. And you blame my people.

This is the very essence of the modern racist. It is a multi-layered condition that must be raggedly slowly and painful unwrapped. Your first encounter is with this lovely embrace of many things Black. These racist listen to Black music (while marveling at the frequent use of the n word). They sign up for Black linguistic styles and fashion trends. They support black athletics. They refrain from using the n word themselves and may even have acquaintances, colleague and neighbors who are Black. They consume these things as products attractively and acceptably packaged for white consumption.

And…well, beyond this point, this type of refined racist has not interest to advance. He simply poo-poos all of the factual elements blatantly exposed for even the least curious white personal such as job and housing discrimination. He disregards the most salient factors of systemic racism such as the vast wealth gap between black and white Americans. He disregards that since 1989, when the percentage of Black children living in abject poverty sank to 50 percent, Blacks have been caught up in an existential struggle for life itself. Meeting their most basic needs has become an everyday struggle that is draining and devastating the African America population. But our writer doesn’t care about that. He doesn’t care about how very few African American children have toys or have ever gone on vacation. He just despises them for being so poor.

Such racist have hearts of stone. Gone are the days when you could reach out to a racist and influence them based on tenets of Christianity or the Bible. These are teflon, untouchable hearts that are stone-like when it comes to those in trouble or in need. They just sit an wonder how these people dare complain about their sort in life.

Years ago, in England, an aristocrat who presented a troublesome threat to the English throne was imprisoned. He was too important to be killed. And too much of a threat to be set free. During his harsh imprisonment, he spiraled down into a sort of insanity where he began to refuse to bathe. As his condition worsened, he received ever harsher punishment. Eventually he was caged like an animal because, according to his jailers, he had begun to act like an animal. In the end, they built a rather small box and placed him in it.

I see a tragic parallel here between the course of this man’s life and what white America has and will do to blacks. They brought blacks to America and predatorially exploited and destroyed their minds, bodies and identities, while simultaneously raping them physically and spiritually. After clinging for centuries in the most ruthless and violent way to this system of running the nation, whites were only compelled to free Blacks by an act of war. But although they reluctantly freed the Blacks, they insured through various violent fascist techniques such as lynchings by white fascist paramilitary groups, that the Black people remained subjugated and afraid.

Did all this horrendous trauma end centuries ago? No. White subjugation of the Black people through violence, segregation and oppression only ended about 50 years ago. Since those very dark times, Blacks have made remarkable progress. The author of our anti-Black article has witnessed this progress because apparently a lot of it was contemporaneous to his youth and development into an adult.

As the white race rained down horror after horror onto the backs of Black people, Black people have managed to withstand much of it. But ultimately this unending juggernaut of assault, abuse, rejection and hate has been having a devastating effect on Black people. It has been dehumanizing the Black people. They live shorter lives and die from stress related illnesses. They live in fear, anguish and confront want and loss that whites will only encounter in their wildest nightmares. Their communities are often less safe than war zones in war torn nations and death is a frequent companion. In a strange and inexplicable phenomena, the infant mortality of the African American is as high or higher than that of many deeply impoverished nation. Their lives appear to mean less.

If Black Americans venture out of their communities, they are surveilled and rejected by store managers and refused seating in restaurants. The police are used to hoard them back into the ghetto, where they are deprived of the blessings and opportunities than any foreign born may experience. They are chased away from the table.

In the brief time since the fragile and temporary victories of the civil rights movement, Black American people have attempted to rise and throw off the yokes of their horrific past. The racist writer of this article has only seen, and has only wished to see this as a failure. Yet it is not. Rather it is a miracle, that a people who have known utter defeat, powerlessness and mass rape can heal itself and rise as we are doing. As a young bird learning to fly, Blacks have undertaken a brief and trepidatious ascent from utter loss and degradation towards higher and better life conditions for the entire race. Yet whites like the author of this article look on cynically while mocking, jeering and criticizing.

There are many who feel that systemic racism has an undeclared objective: to destroy all Blacks and thereby efface the horrific legacy of White America’s attempted genocide of them by slavery. The author of this articles cares little for that. The undergirdings of racism are invisible to brutish minds such as his. He sees neither the mechanisms of racisms, nor the plethora of privileges which it generates and from which he benefits. Nor can he perceive the superhuman, everyday and ongoing, struggle of African Americans to survive in a country which continuously and aggressively rejects, hates and wishes to destroy them. Our author asked the Black people «What have you done for me lately?” He tells them “Despite the human rights calamities committed against you in the form of legislated enslavement, systematic terrorism by the KKK and other hate groups as well as innumerable miscarriages of justice of which you were the victims: your current extreme disenfranchisement and impoverishment and criminalization IS YOUR OWN FAULT.” He judges the black people on what their culture has provided for him to consume. Such a racist little cares for what his people has done, is doing and will apparently continue to try to do to us in order to destroy us. This is the face of the new racism.

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