Racial Privilege Matters Most

26 Sunday Mar 2017

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, culture, Eclectic, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Youth

Tags

#BlackLivesMatter, #MissingBlackGirls, #MissingDCGirls, #WhiteLivesMatter, Contrast, Girls of Color, Intersectionality, Marginalization, Montgomery County MD, News Coverage, Racial Privilege, Rape, Rockville High School, Trolls, Twitter

World War Z gif of horde climbing a wall (much like the way Americans see immigrants regardless of status), March 26, 2017. (http://reddit.com).

I’m sure I’m not the only one who noticed the stark, sad, and anger-inducing contrast between two events in the past couple of weeks. One involved the alleged rape of a 14-year-old girl by two undocumented immigrants (ages 18 and 17) at Rockville High School. The press gave this incident coverage on a local and national scale. So much so that xenophobic, anti-Latino Twitter trolls got involved.

Screen shot of tweets regarding Rockville High School rape, March 26, 2017. (http://twitter.com)

The proverbial “they” used the arrests as evidence of an immigration form of World War Z, in which angry hordes of the undocumented pour through America’s border with Mexico, raping, pillaging, and drugging up White (and mostly female) innocents. “Build the wall,” “illegals,” and “liberals” all became a cabal of iniquity in the (White) America First camp. What about the 14-year-old girl, the counseling she may need, or security issues at Rockville High School in general? Instead, two almost adult teenagers are a stand-in for immigration policies and 11 million undocumented persons. But what else is new?

On the other end of the spectrum has been the lack of coverage of missing Black and Latina girls in the DC area — in fact, in many parts of the US. So little has been even the local coverage that it took a tweet (one that I retweeted myself) two weeks ago for DC affiliates to pay closer attention.

Screen shot of retweet on 8 missing Black girls in Washngton, DC, March 12, 2017. (Twitter via @BlackMarvelGirl).

National coverage only kicked in when someone erroneously posted on Instagram that 14 Black and Latino girls had gone missing in the DC area in a 24-hour-period. True or not, there was no corresponding outrage over even the mere possibility that girls of color could have been kidnapped, trafficked, raped, or murdered as part of a crime spree. Though the facts of this particular Instagram posting were skewed, there’s no debate or daily concern for what happens to youth of color, especially girls of color, in the US. When confronted with the fact that 37 percent of America’s missing children are Black (Blacks are 12.4 percent of the US population), the excuse has been that most of them are “runaways.” And with that kicks in all kinds of racist and misogynistic assumptions. “The poverty and crime and drugs” got to be too much. “They’ve been exposed to more,” and therefore, can handle being on their own. “They’re sexually promiscuous” anyway, so let them run off with older men.

No one considers the why. In this case, why would these girls run away? Physical and sexual abuse at home, leading to vulnerability outside the home to human trafficking, rape, prostitution, or run-of-the-mill homelessness and poverty. No matter how one looks at this, this should be national news. That is, if America wasn’t primed to see only White kids as innocent.

Which brings me back to Rockville High School. No one knows the identity of the 14-year-old rape victim. But based on the Twitter trolls and the Washington Post comments section, most assume the girl is White. It proves a few things, especially for me as a Montgomery County (MD) resident. One, that my upper middle-class neighbors would turn on me in a second if I met anything approaching a criminal stereotype. For them, I would represent the alleged cultural deficiencies of 44 million other Blacks. Two, that for all their so-called liberal ideology, most White Americans are center-right, no matter where they live. They will turn a tragic incident into a racial or xenophobic referendum on millions of people faster than you can say “white on rice.” Three, only White lives matter and always matter to Whites, especially when put in contrast to the lives of people of color, immigrant or native-born or otherwise.

Show me you’re a liberal by embracing the truth of your own racial privilege. Show me you’re a liberal when you have to risk ostracism from your neighbors about defending the rights of undocumented immigrants as alleged rapists or decrying how the media doesn’t cover missing, exploited, and abused Black and Latina girls. Don’t tell me you’re a liberal, when it’s obvious your racism, sexism, and xenophobia is showing.

Social Media Trolls, In a Pic or Two

16 Saturday Aug 2014

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, culture, Eclectic, Movies, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

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Blogging, Facebook, Harassment, Personal Attacks, Racial Harassment, Sentinels, Sexual Harassment, Social Media, Swarms, The Matrix (1999), The Matrix Revolutions (2003), Troll, Trolling, Trolls, Twitter, WordPress

Some folks who come at me through Twitter, my blog on WordPress, even in the “friend” zone on Facebook, are by definition trolls. According to Wikipedia (and apparently, an Indiana University webpage where the definition below comes from), a troll is

a person who sows discord on the Internet by starting arguments or upsetting people, by posting inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community (such as a newsgroup, forum, chat room, or blog) with the deliberate intent of provoking readers into an emotional response or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion.

A Sentinel cutting through the Nebuchadnezzar (screen shot), The Matrix (1999), August 16, 2014. (Donald Earl Collins). Qualifies as fair use under copyright laws – especially low resolution.

But this isn’t a complete definition. Trolls are often anonymous, or, if not hiding in the shadows, often have few followers/follow few people in social media. They don’t just “start arguments” — they launch vitriolic personal attacks on individuals with whom they disagree in order to distract from that person(s) point or main topic. They often express every -ism and -phobia they have toward other humans, as if their own humanity and the humanity of the group they think represent is the only one that matters.

And when they find themselves engaged with other trolls, they swarm an individual in the social media world like Sentinels from The Matrix series, hoping to destroy the person in the process. It’s the virtual equivalent of bullying and harassment, and they deserve as much respect in the social media world as we’d give to a bully in the real world. The kind of respect that calls trolls out and puts them in check, the kind of respect that may well involve law enforcement and legal actions.

Swarm of Sentinels about to attack Neo in Machine City (screen shot), The Matrix Revolutions (2003), August 16, 2014. (http://www.cgw.com/images/). Qualifies as fair use under copyright laws – low resolution.

Trolls do one good thing, though. They remind us there are millions of people who want to sleepwalk through life unaware of power, privilege and injustice. Or maybe, they’ve become addicted to their own misery and narcissism. So though we may want to strangle them, the best way to deal with them is with a swarm of our own, to ignore, block and check them at every turn. Too bad we can’t also use an EMP on them.

The Things Dumb Racists Say

27 Saturday Jul 2013

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Movies, Patriotism, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion

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Anthea Butler, Bigotry, Ignorance, Professor Anthea Butler, Racism, Religious Studies, The American President (1995), Trolls, Tumblr, Twitter, UPenn, Willful Ignorance, Zimmerman Trial, Zimmerman Verdict

John Bauer’s illustration from Walter Stenström’s The boy and the trolls or The Adventure, in childrens’ anthology Among Pixies and Trolls (1915), November 1, 2005. (Thuresson via Wikipedia). In public domain.

I loved, I loved, I loved reading and hearing what Anthea Butler had to say in the wake of the Zimmerman not-guilty verdict from two weeks ago (via her piece “The Zimmerman Verdict: America’s Racist God” and MSNBC). I love the courage and strength she’s shown over the past two weeks in standing up to the trolls in social media who’ve literally called her everything except a child of God in expressing the very racism they’ve attempted to deny.

If I’ve been reminded of nothing else in the past fortnight, it’s the fact that the US has a significant reading and writing crisis. In looking at Butler’s The Things People Say Tumblr page, it’s never been clearer to me that the average American can’t write a single sentence without a significant misspelling or grammatical error, and that angry people expressing their bigotry are even more prone to screw up the English language in any form.

UPenn Professor Anthea Butler, circa 2011. (http://www.sas.upenn.edu/religious_studies/faculty/butler).

Yet the most ignorant thing I’ve seen beyond the indirect threats, the nasty racist name-calling and the demeaning of academia for making Butler one of their “affirmative action” hires is the sheer ignorance about religion, Christianity and the ways in which this group of (mostly) White trolls has use both to justify their vitriol and racism. On one level, it’s pretty simple. How dare this [pick any expletive and add either the N-word or the C-word] say anything to point out how some Whites use Christianity and God to support their racist world views, right?

But this simplicity belies a greater truth. That not one of Butler’s post-Zimmerman trolls understood their own religion and the walk of Christianity. They haven’t a clue as to the sheer work it would take to earn any doctorate, much less one in religious studies. These folks have no idea that a PhD in religious studies doesn’t require becoming a priest or a pastor, or sounding all high-brow and polite in the face of injustice. (Heck, I’ve met religious studies professors who are agnostic or atheists!).

They are ignorant, and willfully so. My guess is, they are a small sample size of maybe 100 million Americans — mostly, but hardly exclusively White — who wallow in ignorance thinking that this will shield them from the inexorable march toward a majority of color country that the US will be well before mid-twenty-first century. The fact is, Butler’s trolls are so scared of change that they are threatened by a seventeen-year-old wearing a hoodie with cellphone, Skittles and iced tea in hand. As well as by a University of Pennsylvania professor who they see as unqualified (a bit of a contradiction to be threatened by someone they see as insignificant, but that’s racism for ya!).

I might have worded it a bit differently, though (but then again, I’m a different writer, no?). As a Christian for more than twenty-nine years, I don’t see my God as one who represents racist Whites. After all, we are commanded to “treat our neighbors as we would treat ourselves.”

Evelyn de Morgan’s The Worship of Mammon (1909), September 7, 2006. (Shell Kinney via Wikipedia). In public domain.

But since Butler’s trolls obviously do think that they worship God, let me at least say this. If you believe in corporate capitalism and the corrections of the market, then your god is money, and the love of/lust for it. If you believe in the criminality of Blacks and Black male bodies, then your god is White. If you believe it’s okay to voice your displeasure by calling Butler a “n—-r c–t,” then your god is one that subjugates women, especially Black women. These beliefs do not and cannot represent my beliefs in God, in the life of Jesus, heck, in life of anyone who has ever spoken on behalf of social justice and human rights in history.

To misquote The American President (1995):

“Professor Anthea Butler has done nothing to you, trolls….You want a character debate? You better stick with me, ‘cuz Professor Anthea Butler is way out of your league.”