Speak Directly to Our Issues or Shut Up
Racism is a construct; a social construct. And it has benefits. Money can be made off of it. People who don’t like themselves can feel better because of it. It can describe certain kinds of behavior that are wrong or misleading. So [racism] has a social function. But race can only be defined as a human being —Toni Morrison
A caste system is an artificial construction, a fixed and embedded ranking of human value that sets the presumed supremacy of one group against the presumed inferiority of other groups. —Isabel Wilkerson
What I was pointing to was that, yeah, blackness is a fiction; whiteness is a fiction. When we live according to these categories, we’re living within a fiction. Of course, it’s a fiction with very real consequences. —Jess Row
The human race is on the precipice of violence and destruction based on the fiction of race. On Tuesday, November 3, 2020, this country will cast its ballots for or against the Trump Administration, who some believe, has substantial ties to White Nationalists groups. However, regardless of whether President Trump is reelected or rejected, that will not solve the issue of race and the counterproductive politics of race.
During the past decade due to social media, facts have become less important and fiction has run amok. We as a nation and as humans have become more polarized and less able to be objective and agree on a set of facts. Well, there is one fact that is difficult (at first blush) to accept but nonetheless is true and affects all our lives: The concept of race is not real.
Yet it is this fake news of a concept that has dominated American politics for over two hundred years.
The concept of race is embedded with a false notion of superiority or inferiority based on DNA when in actuality it is a set of social rules that create a social hierarchy not based on DNA but on appearance and perception.
Or to speak it plain, if you can pass for white then historically you were able to get all of the privileges within society of being what is socially considered “white” even when the person’s DNA says otherwise. Due to the social construct we call race there exists racism, which breeds hatred, which breeds emotionalism, which breeds the politics of race, which breeds bad policy for most of the country.
Both parties have abused the politics of race by painting the other side as the racial boogeyman while they are allowed to skirt, ignore, and/or distort real issues that need to be addressed, which prevents the maintenance of a justice, fair, and economically equitable society.
After the Republican Party transformed from the party of Lincoln to the party of Goldwater, they (with a few moderate republican exceptions) have used the boogeyman stereotype of the criminal black man to generate fear to drive their constituents to the polls in their favor.
The Democrats have used the racist republican boogeyman to generate fear to drive their constituents to the polls in their favor. Neither party has done a good job in delivering for either of their constituents other than fear mongering and pandering to the wealthy.
The first step is to stop the fear tactics. We can no longer allow our votes to be hijacked by fear. We must embrace the habit of forcing all politicians that court our votes (local, state, and federal) to speak succinctly and directly to our issues or shut up.
Maybe if we all as human beings can reject the politics of fear and get into the habit of coming to the table of discourse and speaking honestly to each other about our issues we can see that we all have more in common than we have differences and we can forge a common ground where we all can eat or we shall all starve on a barren wasteland of our own creation.