Racism is crazy. I don’t know how any logical person could be racist. I was raised in Southern California. Everyone is a different color here. Lumping people together into groups and assuming they are bad because of the tint of their skin is just nuts and it’s tearing us apart.
When I was about 10 years old I had a best friend named Cliff…short for Clifford. Cliff was black, and I hung out at Cliff’s house almost everyday. In Cliff’s neighborhood, I’d walk around and wouldn’t even think twice about it…but I must have stuck out like a sore thumb. I didn’t fit in…and yet somehow Cliff and I were like peas in a pod. I loved them and they loved me. A kid doesn’t think racially unless he’s taught by a parent or other adult how to be racist. So wouldn’t it be nice if all of the intelligent adults in our world would view the various races of the world through the lenses of a child…and just chill? But here we are in the United States…devolving into racist, sketchy, cynical human beings.
I’ve come to believe that there is another race out there that people should be more worried about than any other. It’s the sub-race of a stupid people within each race. I know that sounds childish and immature but if you look closely, you’ll find that there’s a select group of individuals found within each ethnic group that ruin it for everyone else. These people represent a very small minority of individuals in each ethnic group. Their hatred and outrageous sentiments don’t represent the feelings of the majority of their race.
Agitated pot stirring people are found in each ethnicity, from each end of the color spectrum. From white to black…you see them on TV and hear them on the radio. We can’t let ourselves view an entire race in a negative light just because all you see in the news are are certain subset of each race doing bad things or being portrayed by the media as doing bad things. Good people in each race have to be smart enough to not get caught up in the rhetoric of the race of stupid people. But lots of good people watch the news. Not only do they watch the news, they rely on the news. For hours on end, they consume headlines, interviews, and commentary.
So here’s how racism gains more steam. This really small but loud group of hate filled people want to get in the media because they have nothing better to do. They want the attention, and the cause they’re engaged in has become less about principle…and more about the newfound attention they’re getting. The news covers these really loud and hateful people from any race because the really loud and hateful people get the most intense reaction. The more intense reaction in the media, the more money the media makes…therefore the media keeps covering the loud and hateful people. Round and round we go…on the TV, on the radio, and trending on your favorite social media outlets.
The media doesn’t care whether you’re black or white or green or yellow. Just as long as you’re loud, and mad. They don’t even care if you lie. The more controversy the better… and sadly enough, racism sells. It has sold and has been selling since the beginning of time. For what reason…I have no idea. Do you realize that our perceptions on people, races, and ethnicities are being shaped by a partnership between the loud and stupid people of each race and the media. You don’t have to be a genius to see the relationship between what the media covers, and what makes the media more money. You don’t have to be a genius to see what types of things go viral on Facebook and Twitter, and what things are suppressed and never brought to light.
Just two weeks ago, I stood in the middle of the bloodiest battlefield on American soil where about 46,000 people lost their lives over racism. That was in 1863. Hundreds of thousand of white men fought for and along side black men to end the color struggle in the United States. An estimated 620,000 white and black men ultimately died in this conflict. On our soil. In this land. Close to the sum total of all US casualties in war conflicts since it’s existence. Wives lost their husbands, children lost their fathers…and for what? Because white folks were willing to lay down their lives to liberate black people whom they’d never even met? Fast forward a hundred and fifty three years, and here we are being brainwashed by the media and politicians into distrusting people that we’d otherwise trust. It puts everyone on edge. You walk down the street and you see someone that’s a different color than you and you wonder…does that person hate me…just because?
In 1865, Abraham Lincoln at the end of his second inaugural address asked the nation to “strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds.” But the media is bored…and so are the small group of agitators from within each ethnic group. They want more blood, more website hits, more impressions, more money, more chaos. It feels like there is more racism brewing out there than I’ve ever felt during my lifetime…and right now is not the time to go through that again. There are too many other external threats to have Americans fighting against Americans, cops against citizens, citizens against cops, color against color, brother against brother.
We can’t buy into it. We can’t let the media sell it to us. We can’t listen to the small group of racists from each ethnic group and the politicians that are stoking the fire. We can’t lump everyone together and allow it shape our world view. Black people are generally good. White people are generally good. Latino’s are generally good. Asians are generally good. Cops are generally good. People… are generally good. We’ve got to identify the exceptions to a race…and ignore them.
