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- Apr 20, 2018
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In recent weeks and months, there's been quite a bit said about the matter of white folks in the modern era having donned blackface. As I sat here thinking about the behavior, it occurred to me that some things about it have changed and some others have not.
- What's changed:
- White folks -- particularly those who've long been able to remain circumstantially or willfully ignorant about blackface and what it means, its impacts, its historical extants and uses, the fears, disappointments, frustrations and doubts it invoked in the past and now, etc. -- are finally becoming understood, at least intellectually. I doubt that there's any behavioral correlate that will allow any white person to "get it" empathetically; however, the newly realized sympathetic capacity ever more whites are developing is a step forward from what it was even just a lustrum ago.
- Blackface seems to no longer be a funny thing, a thing that is fodder for "all in good fun."
- What's not changed:
- Black folks' anger, frustration, fear, dismay and opprobrium over seeing their white countrymen belittle them by donning blackface. This should not change, so it's good that it hasn't.
- Black's/minorities' awareness that racism, bigotry and race-based discrimination and its perpetuators aren't merely jerks running around with pointy white hats and swastikas.
Black folks ceasely been saying that racism and its effects are "alive and real" and not just in overt ways, and so-called reasonable folks on the right and left have denigrated, denied and discounted the verity of Blacks' assertions thus. Perhaps with the recent revelations from VA's governor and AG, more folks will believe them.
As one of my Black friends say, "Racism and homosexuality are both mostly in the closet." While Black folks know that to be so -- How can they not having 400+ years of experience recognizing it? -- far too many white folks act and speak as though it's not.
And let's be clear. Black folks don't think every white person is racist. They think every white person who gives them a reason tho think so is a racist. Of course, not all white folks give Blacks a reason to think so, but even in 2019, far too many do.