Electronic Blindness

¡Hola! Everybody...
First off, I want to thank Pat Buchanan for his outrage at that most oppressed of all minorities -- the white man! As a person of Puerto Rican descent with light skin and blue eyes, I feel his pain! Actually, I am black/ brown. I consider myself a person of color -- a Latino. I'm black! I am black, that is, until the men in the bedsheets and hoods come for us. At that point, you are on your own, brotha! LOL

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-=[ A New Day ]=-

I’ve been meaning to let loose my “racism” series for some time now. The biggest problem (for me) has been to distill what has become a paper at least 50 pages long and over 100 references into 2-3 pages. I realize that will be impossible an impossible feat, so I will try to concentrate my writing on this topic over a series of entries here.

It’s going to be hard journey. Going through the denial and excavating the truth has been extremely challenging to what little sanity I can claim. There’s much to uncover, much more to deconstruct, as waves of conservative “scholars” continue the work of denying its existence, racism has become whitewashed.

It exists. It’s a lot different from your understanding. More importantly, I have realized that for us to get to the new day, we have to look in the mirror and acknowledge the truth. Racism would exist even if there were not one racist. It’s in the very fabric of our society, in all of our institutions. Shit, for some it’s in the very air -- literally.

On CNN, Soledad Obrien will have her own Black in America, pt. II series. I’m sorry, but I am loathe to watch yet another series on race without its proper context. I am tired of seeing electronic images dedicated to creating a pathology of the experiences of black and brown people and of poor or the working poor. Contrary to the teachings of Corporate Christianity, being born into a poor family isn’t a sin. Being poor isn’t a sin. To be sure, what I am offering here is a journey through the heart of darkness at the end of which I hope we can all emerge into the dawn of a new day where we can all work toward reconnecting to our essential humanity.

I believe we stand at the precipice of a quantum evolutionary leap. Our choices today will decide whether we will make this transition successfully or become the first species to cause its own extinction. I also believe there are enough of us to lead us through this quantum leap. There are more than enough cultural creatives to succeed. On the other hand, all that is needed for failure is our quiescence.

Why write about racism? Well, for too long, there has been an enormous amount of financial resources and energy poured into denying its existence. This is how we got to being the world leader in incarceration. If being poor is a function of your intelligence (or lack thereof) and racism doesn’t exist, then it follows that locking up mostly young people of color is justified. Welcome to the new eugenics! Dumb black and brown and po’ white muthafuckas born of sexually promiscuous crackhead teen mothers, spitting out litters of sociopathic cop killers -- the super predators. Now, that’s an image you can cop to and yell “Yeah!” when a neocon politician stands up on his soapbox and talks about getting “tough on crime.” All that is needed is to racialize poverty and it makes it the fault of the victim. The new racism, people, is clothed in the language of personal responsibility and the myth of rugged individualism.

We didn’t drink the Kool-Aid -- we guzzled. Even black and brown people buy into the imagery. Why else would a black leader like Obama address the NAACP by condescending poor blacks? Newsflash, muthafuckas: the vast majority of poor people of all colors are trying to eke out a living and trying to instill good values into their children. They don’t need your fuckin’ sermonizing. Stand on any street corner on any given morning in any given poor, working-class neighborhood and what you will see are droves of good people going to work for bullshit money, run by bullshit employers with little or no benefits, for longer hours and less money and less security than 20-30 years ago.

Poor black people, people of all races, are working and dying because they had a pre-existing condition while you muthafuckas are looking for a way to appease your corporate masters. Good people, hard-working people, are dying because they can’t afford a medicine, or some administrator denied a potentially life-saving procedure. People are working and dying in emergency rooms as others literally step over them while they gasp their dying breath. People are working and working and working because they can’t retire because some CEO decided their money was best kept at some secret offshore account. People -- poor people, working people, people of all colors -- are working and dying needlessly.

Fuck you.

But I am going to do more than expose racism. As disgusting as it is to muddle through the literature, it’s not a hard thing to do intellectually. At the end of all this, I will humbly offer my own proposals. I will answer the question of how to change the seemingly all-powerful structures. How can an individual (or the sum total of all individuals) stand against the pervasiveness of oppressive structures that seem as inescapable as death?

That’s the hard part. That’s the big question. And, you will find no clear-cut answer here. This is because the definitive answer doesn’t exist... yet.

I will say this much: as long as you stay transfixed by the spectacle of the world as presented on the TV machine and on the internet and in newspapers, it will always seem like a system beyond your control. As long as we cannot think beyond an image created for us by the media, we will live enamored of our golden shackles, our eyes blinded by electronic images, our ears plugged with earphones. We see what we are shown, hear what we are told, and mindlessly bleat about the successes of a nation (“we’re no. 1!”) whose leaders do not know nor care about us.

There is a new day, and it’s not to be found in your store of canned goods and stockpiled ammunition. All that’s needed to come to the realization of a new day is for you to seek the truth, remove the blinders, and stop living as if no one else exist.

You may not read what I will share, or you may find its truth too depressing. I say, welcome to adulthood. Welcome to the dawning of a new day.

Love,

Eddie