blog #6

I like Tim Wise, he mentions racism 1.0 which is the blatant bigotry, but there is another kind and we can not just accept that okay black people are not being lynched anymore so racism is over. Its not, there still exists some bias, even favoritism, if you want to call it that. I like the way he discusses Obama how jusst because a white person voted for Obama doesn’t mean that person does not hold a bias, they just see Obama as an exception to the rule. Also that if Obama was not all that he is if he was even slightly less, like if a black person crashed 5 airplanes like Tim Wise, he would not have been elected people would not have seen it the same way. Black people can be as mediocre as white people and still be accepted, I absolutely love that he mentioned this because I have never really seen it this way before. I knew that racism still existed, but I mean this is just such a truism, but it is a big elephant in the room squashed behind the tv while commercials featuring white people repeat over and over. I mean that is the truth, in my experience, especially when the issue of opportunity comes up. White people say I will except them but they should just try if they were upstanding citizens like me. But they can not become upstanding middle class citizens because you keep them down with comments like that. How is a person of color, who is poor supposed to make it far in life when everyone looks at them like wow you fucked up somewhere, its your own fault your probably on drugs, or a prositute. When in reality, how are they supposed to become anywhere else when we pigeon hole them like that. Or even when it come to language like Richard Rodiguez was talking about his double life, the private and the public identity, Richard Rodiguez is considered the exception to the rule, but we pigeon hole bi- or multi-lingual people the same way. The exception to the rule should not be oh you are a person of color and you made a “respectable” life for yourself, but it should be you made a “respectable” life for yourself even though we were holding you down with our bias.

Okay so for some reason my computer will not play the second part of the Tim Wise interview, so I will work with what I have now and watch that later on another computer. Anyhow now I have to relate this to the Brown v. the Board of Education.

The Brown v. the Board of Education decision was a monumental step towards equality… on paper. In reality, the Supreme Court can change rulings but not minds. White had been living thinking that blacks were inferior, that is not an easy mind-set to change. Just as it does today, racism is illegal in many terms, however it is still there, white people still see black people as inferior. The context has changed but it is still there. Segregation is still prevalent in many places, the suburbs are spilling over with white people, but people of color are in the majority in the inner-cities. How is this fair, how does represent the repel of the Jim Crowe Laws? Oh wow, we let black people sit in the same waiting rooms now, how very amendable of us. This is passive, too passive white people need to roll up their sleeves and reach into the “ghettos” and the “slums” and help pull out our fellow humans who we pushed into the cracks of society through out the years.