To the preachers and teachers of color blindness, I say to you do not dilute the message… What’s the message? That black lives matter. How do you dilute that message? You dilute the message when you say that all lives matter. Of course all lives matter, but if all lives mattered, protesters wouldn’t be marching in the streets chanting, “Black lives matter.” Diluting the message is a passive-aggressive strategy to remove race from the message. Your strategy says the skin color of black men had nothing to do with black males killed by police in New York, Ferguson and Cleveland and in other cities nationwide…
To the preachers and teachers of color blindness, I say to you do not dilute the message…
What’s the message? That black lives matter. How do you dilute that message? You dilute the message when you say that all lives matter. Of course all lives matter, but if all lives mattered, protesters wouldn’t be marching in the streets chanting, “Black lives matter.” Diluting the message is a passive-aggressive strategy to remove race from the message. Your strategy says the skin color of black men had nothing to do with black males killed by police in New York, Ferguson and Cleveland and in other cities nationwide. That rationale is wrong.
The colorblind approach tries to erase anything racial and/or race-related from any racial discussion. According to this approach, race is the equivalent of color. Another way to put it is that you color-blinders don’t see race or skin color; you are the “post-racial” folks. You look at the case of Eric Garner and speak against police brutality because you argue “anyone” can become a victim of police brutality. But you ignore the evidence and statistics that show that blacks have the highest cases of injuries and deaths at the hands of law enforcement; more than any racial group. Black celebrities like Pharell Williams, Charles Barkley and even Kobe Bryant help promote your ideology. They say the deaths of black men at the hands of white police aren’t about race and they even blame blacks for inciting their own deaths at the hands of white police officers. The colorblind/post-racial ideology discredits and dismisses the argument of the white supremacist society and it is pure genius because the colorblind/post-racial argument sounds good to the untrained ear.
Color-blinders/post-racialists don’t see race or color, however they do see ethnicity. One cannot ignore an individual’s ethnicity. An ethnicity is the state of belonging to a social group that has a common national or cultural tradition. Race is a social construct according to skin color to distinguish groups of people for discriminatory purposes. Skin color that is white, brown, yellow, and etc., does not specify an ethnic group. People of all ethnic groups that do have variations in their skin color; however, tied to an ethnic group is a nationality. Someone from the Dominican Republic is clearly Dominican; in ethnicity and nationality. Mexicans, Haitians, Italians; the same is true. However when it comes to African-Americans, what is their ethnicity? Ethnicity for the African-American is a manufactured fusion of westernization, white Anglo-Saxon Protestantism, and generational African-based survivalist mechanisms and behaviors. The African-American has assimilated within American society and so this is his nation. The economic exploitation of his body has evolved overtime to not simply include physical labor but also his culture; that manufactured fusion for entertainment and profit. In exchange, the African-American has received the title of “American;” he’s allowed access to the capitalist system — just like the whites of this society.
The African-American’s ethnicity encompasses western culture and western philosophy; his nationality is American. Therefore, the color-blinder/Post-Racialist argues Whites and Blacks are the same; there is no need to see color because we’re all Americans. The truth is blacks and whites are not viewed similarly in a society founded on white supremacy. The United States of America is not post-racial. However many blacks have drank that colorblind/post-racial Kool-Aid and believe the hype. Because of that many black children and young adults are post-racial. They’ve grown up in a world without Jim Crow. They’ve seen blacks in political office; the younger ones have seen an African American in the highest office. They’ve seen blacks succeed in the arts, athletics and the sciences and in other fields. They believe the promises of the civil rights movement and many are benefiting from the spoils of capitalism. Their skin color no longer holds them back from obtaining the fruits of our capitalist society. Yet there are continuous battles fought to prevent their inclusion in circles of power and influence. Some continue to believe many that blacks are incapable of leading and decision making.
Many law enforcement officers believe that blacks are dangerous, specifically black men; a major reason black men may be addressed with deadly force on a routine police stop. The color-blinders/post-racialists argues that race has nothing to do with police using deadly force with the black males they confront. They are comfortable with separating the case of Eric Garner from Michael Brown, for example. For them, the Michael Brown case presents too much ambiguity; there was no video for the world to witness unlike Eric Garner. Eric Garner was innocent; his killing was without a reasonable cause. The color-blinders/post-racialists cannot say the same about Mike Brown. In either case, race is not a consideration. If it were, Eric Garner, Mike Brown and the other black men killed by police would be on equal footing. That would mean going against their own philosophy — they have no purpose in doing that. So they’ll call out the excessive force without ever associating it with the implicit racial biases of law enforcement departments nationwide. So they’ll say “all lives matter.” My message to the color-blinders/post-racialists is that if all lives matter, then black lives matter — so then stand with protesters and say that black lives matter. The death of blacks at the hands of whites in law enforcement is a racial issue. Colorblindness is not a tool to combat injustice, but a weapon that justifies it.
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