(Or why ALL white people are RACIST)
I asked the question to anti-racists recently, "What have you done in the past that was racist?" Tons of white people responded. Most of the answers I got were, "I viewed Black people negatively, I believed XYZ about Black people." (Fill in the blank with a stereotypical depiction of Black people.)
Everyone who responded listed racist thoughts and beliefs they had that were straight from the anti-racist laundry list of white offenses and microaggressions. Very few white people identified actual behaviors or actions that were racist and the ones that did responded with benign, innocent, casual instances of racism. Even fewer identified any behaviors that were hurtful or examples of overt racism.
All the respondents (with the exception of one or two) were all quite adamant that racism wasn't as bad as I said it was because they couldn't think of anything they had done in the past that was offensive, hurtful, or malignant. They were quite content to admit that they had white privilege and they felt shame for being racist in the past, but they were equally as assured that their racism was of the lite variety and that they were innocent of anything that would be considered offensively racist.
Most of the respondents arrogantly asserted that racism was only in certain parts of the country, that I was exaggerating, that they knew more about racism than me, and that I was seeing racism where there wasn't any.
That speaks to just exactly how immature, uniformed, and deluded white people are about race, racism, the impact and scope of racism, their participation in it, and how pervasive it is.
Conversely, I asked Black people to describe the racism they face constantly, so that we could shed light on the behaviors of white people that are offensive and racist and pervasive. Not one Black person offered even an attempt to respond. that speaks to just how used to racism Black people are. We can't even identify racism because the system was built so that being oppressed is the norm and we don't even have the vocabulary or wherewithal to address it.
Today, here, now, I want to address the misperceptions, rationalizations, and false beliefs white anti-racists have about racism.
One of the responses I got referred to an analogy, created by another white person who was working diligently to dismantle their white privilege and racist beliefs, that racism was like high fructose corn syrup being in foods where you wouldn't expect it. That analogy is completely wrong. It couldn't be more wrong in fact.
I'm going to gently suggest that racism is far more pervasive than high fructose corn syrup is in foods. Yes, it's in processed foods and you can barely touch an item in the grocery store without it. But the fact is, you can buy produce without it, fruits and vegetables don't have it. Meat and fish don't have high fructose corn syrup either. Rice and grains don't have high fructose corn syrup. You can shop at coop health food stores that offer foods with it. There are companies that specifically create healthy food without additives and chemicals. You can grow and make your own food that doesn't have high fructose corn syrup.
Equating racism to HFCS is a false equivalent because it implies that racism is pervasive but not ever-present.
EVERYONE born in this society, Black, white, and other, is a victim of racism. White people benefit from it. White people are emotionally, mentally, and psychologically crippled by it. People of color suffer from racism in that we are so debilitated, we don't even understand or grasp what life would be like outside of a racist context. No one is immune from the plague of racism, there is no one who isn't touched by it. There are no pockets of places where racism doesn't exist.
The analogy that I prefer, the analogy that is more accurate than the high fructose corn syrup is equating our reality to a video game.
The video game was designed in what we understand as 1000s of years ago but that's not entirely accurate. Time is an illusion, time is a feature of the game and it's been manipulated by the programmers of the game to make it seem like white people are the creators and inventors of all, the architects of society and civilization. The programmers created a game in which white people are always the winners, Black people are always the losers, and everyone else is somewhere in between.
Being born in racist AmeriKKKa, the epicenter of the deception, programmers designed the game so that white people have all the superpowers, you have all the super weapons, you get all the points, and your character doesn't get shot or killed or dinged, your upgrades don't cost anything, the whole game is built to make white people the superhero and the winner. Cheating gets rewarded, the game is built so that white people win without skill, ability, merit, or prowess.
More importantly, white people get all the points that the Black characters earn in the game. Black characters invent, create, and build everything and the programmers wrote the code so that it appears that white people created everything.
The rules of the video game apply to every character. There aren't any characters in the game that operate under different rules there are no characters in the game that are programmed to operate under different rules.
THERE ARE NO CHARACTERS IN THE GAME THAT OPERATE OUTSIDE THE GAME'S DESIGN.
In the game, the Black characters get not only don't get any points or any superpowers, they not only forfeit all their points to white characters, Black characters get dinged for any mistake they make but they also get dinged for any mistakes that the white characters make.
The game is designed for Black characters to lose and for white characters to win in all ways, always.
White characters can destroy the planet, colonize countries to exploit it's populations, white characters can manipulate the economy and give false value to items and things in order to gain wealth and power, white characters can be sexual deviants who molest children in plain sight and who are still given the benfit of the doubt, they operate criminal networks with impunity, they never suffer the consequences of their actions. They steal, lie, cheat, and murder and they are still seen as moral, upright, upstanding, and inherently superior.
Do all the characters do those things? No. But all the characters benefit from the program being designed to depict whiteness and without flaw.
ALL THE WHITE CHARACTERS BENEFIT FROM THE PROGRAM THAT DEEMS WHITENESS RIGHT.
The white characters have been programmed to see themselves as godlike, even if they aren't as rich and wealthy as the programmers, they still see themselves reflected in the faces of the programmers who created this false reality. They don't comprehend the unfairness of the game, they see it as the way things have always been, it's not unfair, it's the way the programmers designed the game, it's the way things are supposed to be.
For white characters, life is smooth sailing. For Black characters, life is
hell. Life is hell but that is all they know, that is how the program was designed, and they don't even comprehend a reality other than struggle and pain and lack and even more pain. Black characters see white characters, how they interact in the game, how the game was designed for them but the characters in the game can't change the program, so the Black characters keep on playing with no hope of things ever changing, no hope of ever winning.
A glitch in the program has allowed the white characters to see that the program was designed with inequality in the coding. But for white characters, they can't comprehend or grasp what the Black characters have experienced AND they are completely incapable of re-writing the code so that there is equality in the game so that tiny glitch, the knowledge and understanding of how the game was rigged in their favor, to the white characters, is a single grain of sand on a beach.
The white characters, however, perceive it to be the totality of racism. The white characters believe that they can understand and grasp the complexity of inequality when all they really see is a tiny fraction of it.
White characters comprehend a tiny speck of the reality of the surreal world in which they live, they don't see the scope, range, and impact of the inequality and they dismiss any complaints from the Black characters that the game is rigged in their favor. To the white characters, they have won for millennia legitimately.
White people, human beings, have been told, convinced, they BELIEVE that their whiteness is right, they believe that they are superior to Blacks, that Blacks are inherently inferior. It's written in the code. The baseline of their beliefs, built into the program, is that Black people are less than whites.
It's how the game was designed.
The game is rigged in white people's favor.
The game is rigged for Black people to lose.
So, here we are, in the real 3D world. White people have come to realize that racism exists, that the game has been rigged in their favor, they grasp that it's wrong, and they think that because they have some inkling that things have been rigged in their favor, that they understand how the game has been designed, how Black people feel, and that their acknowledgment of racism means that they are not racist.
Anti-racists, in the game of life as we experience it, collectively, see, understand, and comprehend about 5% of the whole picture, they glimpse about 5% of the inequity of the game but the assume they see, understand, and comprehend 95% of the inequality of racism. That is understandable, the game has been designed for you to think that you are the source of all that is good, right, that all knowledge comes from white people. Then there are 95% of the white players in the game still very much content to believe that the game is fair, that the fact that they always win is God's will. God, unfortunately, is a racist programmer who capitalizes off of the blood, sweat, tears, work, art, creativity, strength, beauty, talent, and endurance of Black people.
But because white people in the game of 3D life, in the world as we know it, have been programmed to believe that they are always right, that they collectively do nothing wrong, that they deserve points for doing nothing, that they deserve to win, they are shocked, offended and frustrated when they get dinged, when a Black person calls them on their racism. They can't wrap their heads around being told they are wrong and that the game is rigged in their favor.
Anti-racists are quite convinced that they are immune to the program, that they are characters outside the game.
The entire game, the life we live, the reality of this dimension, the 3D world we live in has been created so white people don't get penalized for their fuck up and they get rewarded for cheating and they always win. That programming can't be changed overnight. That programming can't be changed at all with the limited and narrow glimpse that white people have of how the game is played.
The entire game, the life we live, the reality of this dimension, the 3D world we live in, has been created so that Black people are the best players in the game, the Black characters are the most resilient, the Black characters have the most integrity, the Black characters have the most creativity, ingenuity, the most strength, the Black characters are the better players, period, but the Black characters have been programmed to believe that they are not even in the same league as white people. Black people have lived in a dimensional reality where our contributions have been stolen and attributed to white people. Black people live in a reality where our intellect has been negated and we have been designed as losers.
So here, in 2022 as we understand it, white people have been convinced for their entire lifetimes that time, space, and technology have been their domain, that they are masters of the universe. Here, in 2022, Black people are saying that the game isn't fair, that the game is rigged in white people's favor and the vast and overwhelming majority of white people are saying, "No, it's not! The game absolutely is fair. We are better and you are just complaining because you always lose and we always win but that's because we are really superior."
The small minority of white people who are doing their best to be anti-racist are saying, "OK, I get it that the game isn't fair. I get it." But they have played in a game where the rules have been bent in their favor, so their default mode, the understanding that they go back to when challenged, is, "I'm right, you Black people are wrong, I know more than you, you can't tell me because I know . . ."
That's the nature of the reality we live in. White people BELIEVE that Blacks are inferior, that they deserve to be impoverished and imprisoned disproportionately because that's how the system was designed. They can't articulate it in that way because the programmed wasn't designed for them to be self aware. The program was designed for white people to believe that they are god.
EVERYTHING in this society, every message, every practice, every belief, every law, every societal norm has been designed and programmed around the belief that Blacks are inherently inferior. There is no way a white person can be born in this society (meaning this time and space, across the globe, not just the United States) without being a victim of the belief that white people are superior and Blacks are inferior because that's the foundation of the game, that is how this dimension was built.
White people BELIEVE that racism is like high fructose corn syrup, that you only some foods have it and that it can be avoided. Racism is far more destructive, pervasive, and crippling than any additive in food.
Racism is not in the air that we breathe. Racism IS the air we breathe: it's omnipresent, it's designed into the game, the system is racist. The game has to crash and be redesigned to escape the suffocating oppression of racism.
