Hurricane Katrina has pulled away the curtains on some of america's dirty big secrets. One of them being racism. It is very true that classism has also been revealed in all of this, but that is a given in a capitalist society.
Lately, there has been a lot of "controversy" over Kanye West's remarks saying that George Bush doesn't care about Black people. Now, some people are saying that this is not a race issue, but a poverty issue. NO! This is a race issue. It is an issue of how, in this country and in this world, race and class continue to intermingle.
Whether Bush cares or doesn't care about Black folks means nothing to me. However, it needs to be said that race is part of the reason that the people of New Orleans were not helped out faster. Sure, many of us, including so-called people of color, would like to believe that if eighty percent of the people trapped in the dark dome, the filthy convention center, sleeping under highway underpasses, and waiving "help us" signs on roofs were white, it would take the government five days plus to evacuate people from the city. But can we really look at ourselves and the history of this country and actually believe that. And if this was just a poverty issue, is that something we should be celebrating? - Yay, poor white people are treated just as badly as poor Black people... glory, glory hallelujah!
It doesn't make any damn sense. We live in a white supremacist and classist society, but these things are not separated from each other. Classism feeds off of racism. Racism empowers classism. And when I say racist I am not talking about any person calling me nigger, or not being able to sit in the front of the bus, or being able to go to a majority white school, or live in a majority white neighborhood. When I speak of racism, I am talking about institutional racism. Institutional racism is much more powerful than the racism battled against by the so-called civil rights leaders of the '60's.
Institutional racism is the disproportionate amount of Black people who live way below the poverty line; the disproportionate amount of Black men and Black women who are in the prison industrial complex and on death row; Black people being less likely to have proper healthcare and access to healthcare; Black people being less likely to be in adequate public schools; Black people being in neighborhoods where toxic dump sites are present (environmental racism). I could go on and on, but I would just get a hand-cramp from all of the writing. And yes, many of the policies of George Bush and the Republican party has had a detrimental effect on Black folks and other "people of color." And that's not to say that the Democrats have been that much better, because they really haven't, but that is another story for another post.
What bothers me is that it has become "chic" for people to say that something is about "class" and poverty rather than "race." This is problematic. It's problematic because it takes away from the reality that racism (white supremacy) is still one of the biggest problems that this country has yet to deal with. And it is about time that people, my beautiful Black people in particular, stop letting the white establishment off the hook by saying everything is about class. Let us stop these games with the truth. Too often Black people have dealt unintelligently with the truth; we have been walking around it like it is a game of "ring-around-the-rosy" (I think that is the name of the game). And I don't know if we do this so that we don't hurt white people's feelings or because we don't want to endanger our earning potential, or because as the Last Poets said, "Niggers are Scared of Revolution." See, the truth is revolutionary, and a lot of us are too scared to start a revolution.
Malcolm X said that he had made the decision to tell the white man the truth about himself or die. It is time that we decide to live with the truth and live for the truth. Black people, we need to speak the truth when necessary, as necessary, because it is necessary!
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