Double standards on race - a response to fridayfryer

by user 205.188.117.74

DBachmozart writes -

Oh you (fellow) white guys whining about "double standards" when it comes to race! There was just another act of police terrorism last week in NYC where a Black dude was murdered. The cops shot 50 bullets - FIFTY! When you're shooting someone, either in self-defense or execution-style, you only need 1 or 2 shots. FIFTY is torture, it's making a sport out of it.

A few years ago, NYC's "finest" tore apart another Black guy - Diallo - with 41 shots. And let's not forget the plunger up the ass of Louima where he had to go to the hospital emergency room. Every US city has horror stories like these - LAPD vs. Rodney King. If it wasn't captured on videotape, many whites would never have believed it. Police harrassment, humiliation and terrorism against Blacks and Browns is a fact of everyday life. If whites could live in Black/Brown skin for 24 hours or just open their f....n' eyes, they'd see it. But I guess it's easier to live in denial.

This whole society is based upon double standards - the difference in unemployment and underemployment rates, $ spent for schools, healthcare, incarceration rates, life expectancy, home ownership -- where's your protest against that? As long as this crap is going on, there is most definitely NOT "one race." As the Kerner Commission Report about the causes of the rebellions of the 60s said, US society is divided into TWO hostile factions. It's a cancer eating away at America - ten million times the threat of a bin Laden.

When a white guy says something racist, it's not the words in and of themselves that carry a punch to the solar plexus, but words as a reflection of POWER and the lack of it. The "n" word by whites is a "reminder" for Blacks of their "place" and the ultimate power of lynching or cops and the prison/industrial system to maintain that "place." Blacks and Latinos using terms like "honky" or even "White MF" have NOTHING approaching the power of Jim Crow laws, lynchings, police brutality or corporations outsourcing jobs to Mexico and China (and thus gutting urban America) behind it. It is merely fighting back with words against those unequal power relationships. To simplistically equate the hostile words of both oppressed and oppressor as racist is like saying that a Jew in Auschwitz cursing ALL Germans is equally as bad and racist as the Nazis who put him there and will be shoving him and his family into an oven. He is NOT a "nazi-in-reverse." Time to grow up!