We’ve all heard it before. The whole “you’re racist against white people” argument. It usually follows up with someone explaining social stratification theory, and how “reverse racism” is not a thing. To anyone with common sense, that would be a valid argument. But for some strange reason, white folks enjoy “debunking” sociology (an actual science, by the way!) with their dismissive argument of the “enslavement of the Irish people”.
The Irish that came to America were indentured servants that had full legal rights and were not considered property. The dynamics were completely different. White people stole black folks from Africa, declared us as legally subhuman, and subjected us to cultural genocide for well over a century. They instilled systems of oppression that disadvantaged us at every conceivable opportunity, and even after the system of slavery was “abolished”, decades later we are still subjected to redlining and generational poverty, horrible abuse at the hands of law enforcement, and sentenced to years in prison for petty crimes due to our faulty judicial system.
“Every possible aspect of society perpetuates racism in one way or another.”
If we go back to history when there were points where white folks were “enslaved”, it could never be compared to the disastrous past we’ve faced. White people weren’t taken away from their country by black people who were too lazy to work. They weren’t forced to work under deplorable conditions, labeled as not human, dehumanized, publicly lynched, bombed on their own country’s soil, or unlawfully experimented on by the government. People love to play the victim in order for them to not be confronted with reality.
Marginalized groups of people that have experienced centuries of institutionalized racism & colonization shouldn’t have to be nice to their oppressors when it comes to activism. Minority groups that are systematically disadvantaged > your feelings. White supremacists get on social media to show receipts of activists on black twitter being sarcastic, exclaiming “white hatred” when really, insults directed towards whites wouldn’t affect their social status or privilege. That is not oppression.
Black people are exclaiming our hatred for whites when it was them who declared we weren’t human. We are exclaiming our hatred for whites when they declared that we were only 3/5 the value of a white man. They put us into zoos with monkeys and chimpanzees, saying we were animals. They made it illegal for us to live outside of the ghettos. They required us to use different water fountains & restrooms. They committed treason under their own constitution and dropping bombs on U.S. soil because we were giving children free food. They coined violent slurs against us, reducing us to the six letters of the n-word. They disproportionately slaughtered us in cold blood in the streets with videos and pictures of our bodies being put on tv screens in public spectacle like they’re on display.
You have the privilege of saying “two wrongs don’t make a right” because you’ve never been targeted by centuries of systemic racism. You’re a couple hundred years too late for that, so stop making yourself the victim. We have plenty of other things to worry about.
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