Friday, July 24, 2009

The Police and Being Black

With all this talk about the police arresting a Harvard scholar for breaking into his own home I have been thinking about race relations, and some of my own experiences, as a white man, with the police.
Okay so, first of all if I were to mouth off to a cop I would be told that I should know better and I would be called an idiot for not knowing to keep my mouth shut. But if I was black all of a sudden the cop is the idiot and a racist. That is reverse discrimination and is not fair.
HOWEVER, that being said, white people who deny that black people are treated unfairly by the police are completely clueless! Anyone who thinks that justice is fair and police do not treat whites better, well, here is a true story that happened to me.
I was hanging out in a dead end ally, drinking beers, under age, with a black friend when a beat cop walked up on us. We saw him coming, and clearly he saw what we were doing. There was no getting out of it, no place to run. We were caught, red handed, and I was already contemplating what I was going to say to my parents. The cop was looking dead at my friend and started rolling up his sleeves. He glanced at me and said "Go home kid, but the jungle bunny stays."
I'll never forget that, I was raised very much Liberal and that was my first real experience with racism. Before that I thought racism was something that happened a long time ago, before any of us were ever born.
The biggest argument I hear from ignorant white people is that the slaves were freed over 100 years ago, why do they still complain? This is an ignorant comment because even though that was a long time ago, segregation was just gotten rid of in the 1960's. That means that black people that are, say between 25 and 40, were raised by parents, not great grandparents, not grandparents, but their mothers and fathers, grew up in a world where it was illegal for them to pee in the same toilet as a white person. And they are supposed to be all happy and grateful that their life is so wonderful now.
Just remember, they are not in the ghetto because they are stupid, or lazy, or evil, they are in the ghetto because there poor, and they are poor because we had the entire history of this country to build up our communities and earn a decent living, and they have only been able to do so for the past 40 years. And guess what, when we had only been here for 40 years, we where the poor ones. The Irish immigrants were considered criminals, and drunks and were treated poorly, and the Italian immigrants were poor, and considered all mafia members and on and on. Every population that was looked down upon as criminals and lazy and thieves, were poor and, because they were looked down upon, had to work twice as hard to build up to where everyone else was. The main difference between where the black population is now, and where the minority white populations of the past were at that time, is that, back then, even poor white people that were treated badly, were treated better than blacks so now they have to work three times as hard as everyone else for the same benefit.

No comments:

Post a Comment