Saturday, December 15, 2007

There's A Deep Wound Across Our Consciousness

Yes, there's a deep wound across our consciousness.

It's called racism.

Since I look "white", and was raised in a white society, it took me many years to comprehend some of the subtleties of racist behaviors. There are days I still don't "get it". I have to think and contemplate and pray on it, before it comes clear to me.

But you know, as a Woman, I experience similar behaviors every day. For example, if I go into Home Depot, men think nothing of stepping ahead of me when I'm trying to get an employee's attention. The same thing happens when I'm at the auto parts store, or buying tires. Unless I step right up to the customer service desk and get a manager, I'm likely to be ignored. And even then, while I'm being helped, guys will walk up and start talking to the manager, as if they're maneuvering around a tree or a post. It's like I'm not even there. I don't exist in their world.

Substitute racism for sexism, and the situation of my Brothers and Sisters of Color becomes clearer by the day.

Our society has a bleeding wound across it, and only if you actually experience it, do you even start to understand how deep, how ugly, how consuming it really is.

It's part of our society that the overt racists (and die-hard liberals, businesses, bosses, and individuals) don't WANT to understand. It's pervasive. It's an undercurrent in that deep river we call racism.

It's a crevasse that people fall into and can't get out of.

If you don't know it's there, you don't see it unless you really educate yourself with an OPEN mind and heart, and even then, you don't really understand it. You just may realize that it exists.

Unless you're POC or a woman who's experienced the situation.

We women, of every color, experience being ignored while all the men are being helped, and the men just step up right in front of us, like we have no business being in the hardware store. Or the auto parts store. Or the workplace.

We women, we're supposed to act, talk, be a certain way and if we don't, then we get pushed aside and/or ignored. And if we demand better treatment, we're pushy, bitchy, or [gasp] lesbians. Because nice girls don't act that way...

HUH!

POC receive that SAME treatment, and people act like it's OK.

There's a little box that we're supposed to fit into, and we're not supposed to step outside of it. Never. Except maybe Oprah, or Magic Johnson, or Obama. But then, they're "different", they're "not like the rest of them". Compartmentalized thinking. But as a poster on another forum pointed out, back in the day, Oprah, Magic, Obama would've been sitting in the back of the bus with all the other POC. And they would've been equally at risk of the noose. The same noose that hung in the "white tree" in Jena, Louisiana just this past year.

Well, you know what, I'm standing up and shouting, "IT'S NOT OK!"

Not until society STOPS and takes note of the chasm that divides our country, do we have a prayer of throwing a rope to our Brothers and Sisters, our young women, who may still be lost in the depths of its despair, then we can close the wound, let it heal.

Our children are being lost in this chaotic undercurrent that's condoned by society. People shake their heads and tisk-tisk, but do nothing to see or comprehend the the root causes. Nor do they choose to step up to help promote change.

Oh, yeah, they're willing enough to call for banning rap music, or complain about kids' clothes, but trust me, they didn't pay any attention until THEIR kids started "acting Black". Then all of a sudden, they noticed that our society promotes violence, sexism, racism. It becomes a huge issue.

Ironically, these are the same parents who paid to see "The Godfather" movies, "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid", "Tombstone", "Colors". They never noticed that American society has ALWAYS glorified violence. Somehow, they think that the violence of our past is OK, but suddenly the violence of today isn't.

America has always been violent. Always. Right from the beginnings, when the Europeans came to colonize a land that already had people living there.

You can't fix something if you don't know (or deny) its existence. Only when you acknowledge the REAL problem, not just the symptoms, then you can start working on the healing. And God knows, we need a healing on the psyche of this nation.

Too many Americans float through this life, denying that there's even a problem, and then when it broadsides them in their perfect little fantasy world, they blame the victims who are trying to speak out on it.

Sigh...

Too many Americans don't even try to peer through the glass dimly...
...and the wound keeps bleeding.