The Way for Black Lives Matter to Go
The difference is, can we develop the trust and the introspection it will take to truly change…I am talking to white folks now.
We have implicit and explicit racism and prejudice (so does everyone, it is part of being human).
But white privilege has been weaponized by politicians and sheer greed.
It started over 400 years ago with slavery. The “New World” first of all was a product of greed. But more than that, the Europeans brought with them a hatred of people of color because of the Moorish domination of Europe for centuries.
Columbus came to America and saw, Moors. In fact, he even named the new world, and the new people, Indians…which they weren’t. Nor were Columbus’s group of thieves the first Europeans or Polynesians to “discover the new Continents either. The New World was visited by several groups prior to Columbus. There is lots of scientific proof that Columbus was not even close to the first European or Asian to make it to the “New World”.
But the Doctrine of Discovery, that most of you know nothing about, put being white and Christian as the only people who could own property in the New World. That did away with two groups to own the New World: Native Americans and African Americans, because they looked Moorish. (some of them were) and they had something the Europeans desperately needed (living space).
And here ties in fascism. Hitler built his empire based on living space. He blamed the Jews and Communists for being in the way. He used his fascism to weaponize discrimination and plunged the world into war and genocide to achieve his fascist goals. And the real goal was land!
And this is not just a European phenomenon. Japan, the most recent glaring example of weaponized racism into fascism, decided that it should compete internationally after years of isolation.
The United States was partly to blame here. The naval excursions of the late 1800s and early 1900s, traveled around the world showing off the “new Navy”.
This imperialism had a purpose of course, the United States was coming out of its post Civil War isolationism. The United States was becoming a world power, with the most modern, for the time, military in the world. That would change with the developments in Japan in Germany in the early twentieth century.
The roots of WWII were sown in the early twentieth century.
So they sold two things unwittingly to the Japanese when they stopped in Japan to show off their new “naval toys”. One, racial hegemony was ok to use grow nationalism and two, weaponizing nationalism militarily was the new way of the world (actually it was as old as the Egyptians).
Empire building became a world view.
And Japan moved into fascist expansionism and picked the most obvious target…Russia.
Russia? That’s right, Japan attacked Russia over its incursion from Siberia into China. In a brief war, Japan used its new military toys to defeat the Russians who sued for peace.
The world was watching as the United States and Japan emerged as Pacific powers. And they were on a collision course for the future of the twentieth century.
Racism is a novel and fictional paradigm. It is based on Eugenics, the false science that has been refuted many times.
But in 1920 it was doctrine, with the incredibly wrong idea that the color of one’s skin, the size of the nose, the size of the brain (they barely knew anything about genetics at the time) was a determinant of progress, of human ability.
They were dead wrong, but Hitler and the KKK were watching.
The early part of the twentieth century was one more bad time of American racism. A backlash against freed slaves gave rise to the KKK and other hate groups, led by a Democratic President (Wilson) that weaponized the eugenics nonsense into I.Q. Tests that discriminated against “foreign cultures” that was given emphasis by WWI. In some states speaking German was a crime in xenophobic America.
Hate thrives on war…especially when it delivers unbelievable wealth to one group, WASPs…
So America moved into the twentieth century without paying much attention to the millions of emancipated slaves who had slid into unspeakable poverty in the post Civil War America.
And the prosperity of a New World, that had been stolen from its inhabitants, was huge.
Even the deadly Pandemic of 1919 did not slow it down. On every front the culture of whiteness expanded and got meaner.
The Roaring Twenties were based on this opulence…but with a caveat..The Great Depression that crushed people of color.
Blacks and browns were declared inferior. The Exclusion Acts made it impossible to emigrate from Japan or China unless you smuggled people in…so Chinese and Japanese still came, but were criminalized the minute they set foot in America.
This tactic of exclusion was copied by Trump and his new age fascists with his infamous wall; it is just the Exclusion Acts all over again.
Two World Wars only made white privilege more a badge of honor, a way to success, a narrow path however, because women and gay Americans were also excluded.
White Christian Males need only apply, was the watchword of the twentieth century. America was the land of opportunity with an asterisk.
So now we have Black Lives Matter, but with a difference; the birth control pill.
Uh?? Just read on!
In the mid-sixties a pill was invented that made birth control exponentially more easy and safe. No longer were abortions necessary.
The post WWII boom was subsiding, and those who were starting a family, either by choice or accident, had this little pill that could allow all the sex you wanted, with little to no chance of babies being conceived.
From 1970 on. a peculiar development became a dominant cultural trend; white folks had less children than colored folks.
And, with more immigrations from the rest of the world, especially from Mexico, brown skinned people began to outnumber white skinned people; California, Arizona, New Mexico and even Colorado come to mind.
In the early twenty first century, politicians have took this development under their fascist wings and weaponized it. From the nativism of Reagan to the fascism of Trump.
This nativistic fascism is now the mainstay of a major political party in the United States; feeding the age old racism against Native Americans and African American into the nativism and racism against immigrants from Central and South America.
White Privilege is supported by the “local police”…who during the New Jim Crowe area, were the arms of a purge of society of people of color, ostensibly to protect Blacks from the horrors of marijuana and crack. And those efforts were called law n order!
The crack was dangerous, the marijuana that most were using including the privileged white class, was not. But its use was criminalized on purpose to attack the fledging Civil Rights movement from 1968 to present.
In the twenty first century marijuana was legalized. It is not by chance that this brought many white privileged men and women into the various Civil Rights movements because they were living proof that getting stoned on weed , or using it for medical purposes, was way less dangerous to society and to your body than cigarettes or even alcohol. for example.
So marijuana legalization and the birth control pill made white privilege less important, less necessary.
And modern media allowed discriminated groups to communicate to the white “rulers” better than ever before.
Native Americans make videos showing their culture and showing what racism has done…African Americans have a domination in sports and music (even elected a Black President) that begin to crack the barriers of racial discrimination of the 1930 and 40s.
Suddenly the Black Lives Matter have more white faces than black ones.
And marijuana legalization and birth control are two major factors, along with some improvements in education.
Barack Obama’s life story is a perfect example, along with countless others: Stanford University, once a glaring example of white privilege, now has an inclusive and diverse student body, churning out graduates like those who invented google and Apple, that have afforded a voice to otherwise historically voiceless groups.
Black Lives Matter has a variety of ways to broadcast their message, many more electronically than protesting in the streets.
So, what we now have is a President who is a new answer to Civil Rights, who is so white it glistens, who purposefully picked a Vice President is almost an albino.
These appearances are a glaring message that Make America Great Again is going to happen, no matter who it hurts. That the birth control (it is no accident that the Vice President is even against birth control pills and the legalization of marijuana must stop…in spite of a majority of people in the United States by far live in states that have legalized marijuana) is not lost on the Trumpsters…
Marijuana is still, with trillions of dollars of economic benefits from legalized marijuana at stake, needed to be re-criminalized by Republicans. so the New Jim Crowe can work again to crush minorities’ and attack liberals who long ago figured out that tobacco and alcohol can kill you!
And these criminalized political and social strategies are part of the Republican Party’s playbook right now.
Why? Because they are tried and true..war on drugs,, war on crime, law n order works!
But the birth control pill, and the selfishness of white privilege that 1.2 children has brought high wealth to ordinary white couples (or some mixed which is another story), is still king.
Cotton is king drove the segregated south, now Birth Control is King along with mixed marriages, as the “white” majority flips into a minority, a victim of birth control.
American racists raped their way to hegemonies in the 1800s and now have birth controlled themselves into a slippery slope of demographics, that by 2030 will make whites a minority in the United States. This coupled with Mary Jane, that I take every night to help sleep and to deal with anxiety and is totally legal (at least in California) is the revolution that white privilege hates.
But I am part of white privilege.
It’s freedom to plan your family and freedom to drop a gummy that are fueling the Civil Rights movement of today. And that is a reality that can kill white supremacy.
Remember where you are? American white people are some of the most selfish and ME FIRST. on the planet. The way to get them to care more about Black People is to never do away with the birth control pill and keep marijuana legalized.
In short, appeal to their selfish side…it works every time.