The Power of White Apathy

Sounds counterintuitive doesn’t it? How can doing nothing at all actually demonstrate power? Quite simple. White power and white privilege are two very different concepts and realities. There are thousands of white people in this country that influence or create public policy that hurts black people. Yet there are millions of white people that benefit from the creation of that public policy through no fault of their own. White power creates white privilege. The two hundred million white people in this country all receive white privilege whether they want to or not. They always have so it is all that whites know from birth. Only a few brave souls even attempt to jettison their skin color birthright (or birthwrong).

Why would a white person intentionally undermine their own privilege? The right says it’s white guilt. I’m sure that’s a component of it. White people should feel guilty for receiving unearned privilege at the expense of blacks. Maybe some whites just want to do the right thing though and it’s not about guilt at all. The majority, however, just want things to stay the way they are. They are the source of white apathy toward black suffering. They really believe they play no part in sustaining white supremacy because to them that is represented by skinheads and the KKK. We are all literally indoctrinated into this system from childhood, mostly through public schooling and revisionist history but most of us also learn the sordid truth as we age.

What can white people do to fight white power? More importantly why should white people fight white power? After all black people aren’t trying to fight black power right? This is the fundamental flaw in white thinking. They assume that blacks and whites are coming to the dinner table on an equal footing. We are not. Black power was a response to white power. Black rage is a response to white oppression and injustice. They would not exist without white supremacy. White power is, in fact, a prerequisite for black power.

But is it really white apathy we are dealing with here? Or is it simply that whites tacitly do not want to relinquish their dominant social status? This is the other critical flaw in white thought: that black prosperity creates white misery. That is simply untrue and has been proven untrue in studies time and time again. Why then do whites persists in this manner? Are they just evil? Is it selfishness? Do they really see blacks as inferior? Do they think it’s just too difficult or too much work? I think all of these play a part but none more so than the fear of losing material wealth that whites have accumulated over the centuries from slavery, the GI bill and other government policies that continue their pernicious effect on the black community as a whole.

Whites have spent the majority of their time on this planet in fear. They fear everything and live in constant insecurity. I believe it has something to do with how they evolved over time but that is open to debate. The white mind thrives on rankism. Its main goal is to create a social hierarchy that is advantageous to itself. If this is innate to Caucasoids, and I believe it is, then it will take drastic psychological change to reverse it. The first step is getting white people to admit that they fear anything that is different from them. Diversity is not embraced by whites. It is seen as a threat even when it is exploited to their advantage. Whites will never collectively admit that this is their pathology. America creates a bubble for whites so that they do not have the burden of self-examination. Whites view themselves as normal and everyone else as abnormal. Unless that status quo can be altered radically there is no way to burst this social bubble.

We are already seeing whites in panic mode now as corporations globalize in search of cheaper labor and lower operating costs in foreign lands. This resentment and anger is being directed at nonwhites when the culprits are the powerful whites that run corporate America. Of course poor and middle class whites that feel their advantages slipping away have little recourse against the corporate machine. It is much easier to blame nonwhites than organize to curb the power of corporations that are exploiting all workers by taking advantages of lower living standards in other countries. It is laziness and race loyalty in the hopes that skin privilege will win out in the end over profit. It will not.

Ignorants: Those who do not know and refuse to admit it

I’m suggesting a new use of the word ignorant when dealing with the issue of belief or religion. Normally ignorant is just an adjective but I propose its use as a noun. Every human being on this planet is ignorant about something whether its brain surgery or ice sculpting or what have you. We are ALL ignorant of the afterlife. Everything that religious people believe has been doctored to give those in power control over their subjects. Conversely nonbelievers cannot say with complete assurance that there is no God. That is an equally ridiculous assertion to make with certainty.

Are belief and non-belief equally wrong? No, belief is more wrong because it purports having knowledge of things that it cannot possibly. Nonbelief typically relies on science and reason and is therefore no where near the leap that believers claim to make. It does not not require a leap to say that there is probably no god but it does take a leap to say there is no god without qualification. It is unknowable. It is also duplicitous of nonbelievers that say religion has caused more death and destruction than any other aspect of human tradition. That is probably accurate but so has science. What about the atom bomb and the airplane and gunpowder? Are weapons not instruments of science that contributed to the fighting of those very religious wars themselves? We are all to blame.

Let us freely admit to ourselves that we are ignorants, the noun form. We cannot divine through spiritual experiences what will happen after death. Personally I lean toward nothing. If nothing happens to ants, cows, birds and pigs then why would anything happen to me just because I have a larger, more efficient brain? The very suggestion is unscientific at best and insane at worst. We are nothing to the universe except a species of beings fortunate enough to have a small aperture in time to exist before the universe, through its various unemotional means, proceeds with its normal activity and kills us all. If humans don’t kill themselves first then surely the sun will expand and engulf the planet. If we escape that then surely the universe will eventually collapse upon itself again as it has done many times before it explodes into life again. This is the cycle of our existence. Live with it and die with it. We have no other choice.

Agnostics are not Non-believers

We all know it’s true, believers and non-believers alike. No one knows what happens when we die. We have no more reason to believe it’s nothing than we do something. The problem with religious people is they think their something is the only something. The problem with non-believers is they think their nothing is also the only something. How many times can I say that “NO ONE KNOWS!!!!”. No one can know and no one human will probably ever know due to our limited understanding of the universe and our tiny, remarkable but still relatively inefficient brains.

The only truly rational position for anyone to adopt is that of an agnostic or an ignostic. Agnostics admit we don’t know and ignostics admit they don’t care, which is probably a much larger proportion of believers and non-believers than anyone on either side would care to admit. Americans are consumers. They care about accruing things from day to day. Most merely give lip service to religion. We call them hypocrites but in reality these people know deep-down that it doesn’t matter what they believe because reality always takes care of itself. Sure they claim to be whatever so they can go to church, feel good about making bad choices, get buried next to their kin and all those human customs but it’s all affectation and social bullshit. It’s just like being a Mason. You get benefits if you’re a member but not if you aren’t. It’s part of the human psyche to want to elevate ourselves above the rest of our kind. The concept of rankism doomed us from the time we evolved into our present forms.

This is all religion is, another form of rankism. Of course we also have sexism, racism and money to do that as well, not to mention nativism. Can someone please tell me how I’m really that different from a person in another country just because my country has a higher standard of living and more weapons? I’m not. We’re not and that has been our problem from the get-go. My words will be spent in vain as usual. Most humans have this need to be right because we want to be admired and respected by others, as if that will somehow survive death. That vanity inevitably comes at the expense of others as our self-destructive tendencies continue to do just that. There can be no compromise among self-righteous egoists. Sit back and enjoy the bumpy ride into our own destruction, which is well on its way.

Brownwashing Race: Racism against Afro-Latinos

Many people fail to understand how Hillary Clinton has garnered the support of the Latino community or at least why more of them are not supporting Barack Obama. Many Hispanics say that Clinton carries name recognition because of her stint as first lady. I say that is probably true to an extent but it masks the real question of whether Latino support for Obama is low because he is half-African and all black in the land of the one-drop rule that still applies today. Afro-Latinos in Mexico suffer much more overt and covert racism than blacks in the United States. I believe that many Mexicans and lighter-skinned Latinos are in fact projecting the racism they learned in their native land onto Obama and other blacks when they arrive here. I don’t even think many of them doing it are aware of it but it is real nonetheless.

Spanish-speaking countries, and all countries for that matter, are racist primarily against those with the darkest skin. You never see the darker-skinned Hispanics on Univision. They are all almost “passable”. I asked a Latina friend of mine at work about this and she said it’s because “They look better”. Of course she pretended to be kidding but as a lighter-skinned Mexican herself she realizes that with lighter skin comes less racism and more privilege but never true “whiteness”. I guess that’s enough for some as long as they’re doing better than the Joneses.

I’ve also heard that many Mexicans, much like Africans, think that black people complain too much about slavery. According to them we should just get over and just let white people keep ruling and destroying the planet for themselves. How can you tell a group of people to forget about slavery when its evil legacy is part of your daily life when you know nothing about it and, furthermore, when the blacks in your own country are even worse off than black Americans? Being overworked while becoming a tool of hypercapitalism to further the agenda of the elite apparently is not a tough sell to recent Mexican immigrants seeking Big Macs, cigarettes, beer and construction jobs. We should not turn against those seeking a better way of life but we must expose them for the cowards and opportunists that they are. White supremacy was designed to turn nonwhites against each other in competition for the scarce resources afforded those with the wrong skin color and it is doing just that.

The struggle for black liberation begins and ends in the mind. Without the mind there is not struggle. Everything else is a by-product of our common dialectic in that this system must be overturned. Skin color is meaningless in reality and yet we live and die each day under this altered reality passing it on to future generations as homily. I am not willing to wait for the races to blend to rid the world of white supremacy. Power concedes nothing without a demand. One homogenized race will not eradicate white supremacy. It may alter its form and structure but something else, possibly more insidious, would replace it anyway. Waiting on anything is a fool’s game as the elite will always formulate new methods of dividing the masses to maintain their dominion over the planet.

Basically what I’m saying is that if Mexicans Americans are not with us they you are against us and that makes you the enemy. Get your mind right.