I was showing my mom the SNL sketch from last February – the one where the only three black students in a high school class stand up to recite a fell-good, white-savior-esque rap (á la Freedom Writers and the ilk) about inspiring black figures like MLK and Harriet Tubman. They list ’28 Reasons to Hug a Black Guy Today’ with 1 being ‘we deserve a chance’ and 2-28 are slavery.
I laughed hard and obviously before turning to my mother to make sure she was enjoying it. She looked it over without much expression before saying, ‘These people are always looking for an apology. Why haven’t they moved on yet?’
This stopped me in my tracks and my mouth was probably still hanging open from my last laugh. I tried to launch into a discussion of race-based oppression in the US, how Jim Crowe was definitely still a thing, and how black people generally lack the ability to overcome the history of slavery in a concrete and substantial way. But mostly I just sputtered.
I realized at this point that though I had prepared all my counter-arguments to racists and the people who just don’t get it, faced with an actual person and someone so close to me undoing all my race theory with two sentences made me clam up. Somehow I still cannot fathom that there are people who don’t believe that racism is alive and well in the US.
Before I went to bed last night, the Twitter-sphere was awake with the sound of injustice – 3 college Muslim students were shot execution-style by a white gunman. Tweeters were bemoaning the fact that major news outlets hadn’t reported on it and it seemed as though Twitter was the only source of information. The obvious issue is that the sudden reversal in victim and villain, with a white man so obviously being in the wrong, made it an impossible story to report on – it would, in fact, reverse the tirades of hate and abuse launched at Muslims and thus wouldn’t pull in middle-America readers.
The truth is we live in a very racial America where being in possession of a black or brown body, in many cases, is punishable by death or at least degrading treatment by law enforcers. Talking about this, point black, does not make our treatment worse. In the rare, miraculous case taking to Twitter and creating a social media storm can actually cause justice to be served. But for the most part it’s a long series of Trayvon Martins, Mike Browns, Eric Gardners, Deah Barakats, Yusor Mohammad and Razan Mohammad Abu-Salhas. At least you know their names.
Therefore talking about race and injustice based on race is doing something for us. It’s not just a useless argument that comes up at the inevitable young liberal – old conservative Thanksgiving dinner and complimentary family rending. Swapping microaggressions, creating hashtags on Twitter, and writing satirical skits are all furthering the conversation in some way. The first step in problem solving is awareness of the issue. That’s what talking does. And when we’re sitting next to people who still unshakably believe that we live in ‘post-racial America,’ talking about race becomes vitally important.
Post-graduate Sob Stories 