“Face it, blacks. Michael Brown let you down.”
“We now have all sorts of reasons to make us doubt Brown’s humanity. He may have stolen some cigarillos. He may have been facing the officer when he was shot. He got shot in the top of the head, which might mean that he was surrendering, or might mean he was being defiant. He made amateur rap songs. Perhaps worst of all, he’s been caught grimacing at a camera making a contorted peace sign, and it turns out that he was pretty tall.”
oh my god this is so real, and so well described. this — “Evaluating our [own] humanity on an unfairly weighted scale. Their scale.” — is everything all of the time. It feels like a quick, reduced version of what it means to be a member of any “minority” population, where another identity group has traditionally controlled the power and the media and thereby controlled the lives of everyone else and so in order to function in these established power structures and in the context of that set of media the “everyone else” has to spend a lot of time evaluating themselves within “their scale”. And it’s exhausting.
