The fact is, there’s no way to tell how much racism is in the heart of men and women. There’s no way to know how many acts of racism happen in the United States. You can’t know what motivates people to do and say the things they do.
If you think something that happened to you was motivated by racism, how do you know? How do you really know?
People do things and say things all the time that have reasons and motivations behind them that are nothing like what we think they are. Because the fact is, we can’t read minds. We’ve never been able to read minds. I guess it’s one of the failings of humans.
So we’re left to our own experiences and perceptions. Some of us feel like racism is everywhere. In fact, some of us believe there are “white supremacists” around every corner, walking among us, waiting to make lives miserable for black people everywhere.
There are others who’ve never really paid attention to it and just gone about our daily lives. They’ve seen or heard racists thoughts or acts from time to time. Some of them have spoken up while others have let them go.
There simply no way to really know how much racism there is out there. But one thing we can be sure of: there is racism, and it comes from all over the place. Sometimes, a black person says or does something because of some bias against asians. Sometimes, a white person says something inappropriate about a person from India. The list goes on and on.
It’s not a question of if, but how much. Is it happening so much that it’s truly stunting the growth and opportunities of an entire segment of people? And if so, more than any other group? Substantially more?
I’ve been on the earth for a good number of years. I’ve lived in two different countries and resided in five different states. I’ve been involved in large organizations that were majority black and majority asian. I’ve dated black women and asian women (along with white women).
Race wasn’t even a consideration in my upbringing, and not really much where I grew up. It’s never really been a huge factor in my life, and it’s not really been a big factor in the lives of those I’ve been fortunate to learn about.
Based on the anecdotal evidence available to me, along with my personal experiences, and a life time of news items, stories, and examples I’ve seen, I just don’t think race is an issue warranting anywhere near the attention it’s getting – and certainly not any of the violence happening as a result.
If anything, it’s quite the opposite. The United States is full of minority success stories (universally popular ones, as well as individual levels we’ve all personally witnessed) that would simply not be possible if there was, in fact, systemic racism.
The only reason I think we’re even discussing race is because Democrat politicians need to keep it alive as an issue upon which to run. If they can’t present it as an issue for them to solve, they have no race issue, and therefore, no reason for blacks to vote for what was otherwise the party of racism.
We have to believe that only black people are being mercilessly brutalized by white police officers, without any regard for the number of white people who’ve also been killed and brutalized by officers (both of which is ridiculously small, when considering the tens of millions of police interactions every year).
The Democrat Party has a long history of racism that’s been well-chronicled (including on this site), so I won’t get into the list, with the exception of creating the KKK with the purpose of intimidating Republicans and the blacks they supported.
At this point, continually beating the racism drum beat is just fanning the flames of a small community of blacks and whites who truly believe their life circumstances all simplistically boil down to a lifetime of racists keeping them in their place.
Unfortunately, that message comes with no accountability. It gives away control of those lives to the narrative and the people writing it.
Every day we constantly harp on racism, in a country that has come so far since the days of real racism, is a day we keep it alive and fail to move on from it forever.
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