Week #14 Of The New Life

At the end of one of the recent The Daily Social Distancing Show episodes, they showed a video of a young Black woman describing why she and perhaps some others would want to destroy stores. After she explained that, she ended with the following message. That message approximately said that we should be glad that Blacks only want equality and not revenge.

We Whites are lucky that equality is all they want. Why? When we look at history, what is obvious is that White America has incurred a moral debt to different groups of people of color that it has no way of paying back. And considering how some of that White America includes moral majority types who pride themselves on telling others to take personality responsibility for their actions, such a fact serves as a basis for some of the worst hypocrisy seen in the history of mankind.

Do we really want to end racism? Those Blacks who want equality instead of revenge are doing their part. What is White America's part?

The first thing White America must do to end racism is to acknowledge our moral failings, both in the past by our ancestors and the present by ourselves. We are not talking about the individual alone, we are also talking about the group. We are talking about both individual and corporate, with White America serving as group in the word corporate here, moral failings. And if we are religiously conservative Christians, we should feel freer to acknowledge those moral failing because of the forgiveness provided in Jesus Christ, but the imperfections of our faith do not always allow that.

The second thing White America must do is to restructure our laws, both civil and criminal, so that they are less punitive. Face it, we have a very punitive society. It reminds me of these words from the song, For What It's Worth about the beginning of paranoia (click here for the music):

'It starts when you're always afraid
Step out of line, the man come and take you away.'

How well do those words describe part of life for many Black Americans?

Race-based law enforcement is a fact of life for many Black Americans. Here, I am not saying that all police have problems with racism, but I am saying that there are more than just a few bad apples among police officers. How race factors into law enforcement cannot be measured by one statistic as apologists for today's status quo of law enforcement. The measurements include racial profiling and harassment, false arrests and evidence planting, not providing the accused with adequate legal counsel, harsher prison sentences for Blacks than for their white counterparts, physical abuse and then killings. And I am probably missing some other problems here. Those who deny race-based law enforcement do so by being selective with the data.

Why must White America look to make our legal system less punitive? It is possibly for our own good as for the good of others. After all, haven't we incurred a moral debt that we could never pay? If so, then shouldn't we empathize with those who make mistakes or have even deliberately hurt others? Here we need to ask whether revenge in the name of punishment is more important to us than rehabilitation.

But there are reasons why White America would resist reducing the punitive part of the justice system. After all, if we are still a society based on White Supremacy, we need a justice system that enforces a hierarchical society. That introduces authoritarianism into the mix. For authoritarianism, in this instance, is a heavy-handed way of responding to those who would challenge the system based on White Supremacy.

For the most part, authoritarianism is heavy-handed because it is basically based on fear. It is based on the fear of losing control, and in this case it is a fear of losing that hierarchical structure where White America reigns supreme. And part of the fear of losing control here is based on the reality of the moral debt we have incurred and the response we should expect in return. So not only is our authoritarianism based on fear, part of that fear is based on real guilt. And that real guilt tells us that we are not innocent.

There is another part of authoritarianism that we must do away with if we are to greatly reduce racism. That part of authoritarianism is black-white thinking. Here, black-white thinking applies to looking at those in one's own tribe, one's own race in this article, as being good despite their faults while one looks at those from other tribes, especially opposing groups, as bad despite their strengths and good points. The labels of good and bad don't fully recognize all that we are. Instead they are used to focus select group of traits a person has while other important traits are ignored.

There is no one who is all good and very few who are all bad. And thus when we come to grips with what is wrong with us, we should want society to deal with others who have failings as we would want society to deal with us. But black-white thinking does not allow for that because it prevents us from looking at ourselves as being mixed bags of good and bad.

Finally, the last thing we must do to significantly reduce, racism is to follow the advice of Martin Luther King Jr when he spoke out against the Vietnam War (click here for the speech):

I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.