Allowed To Be Angry

“The details and symbols of your life have been deliberately constructed to make you believe what white people say about you. Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure, does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity and fear.” - James Baldwin

I haven't written for a bit. For once, it hasn't been indolence, apathy or ambivalence that stayed my hand. Rather, it's been anger; the kind of impotent rage that only someone who has experienced the bitter fruit of genuine oppression can empathise with. The combination of outrage, shock, resignation and impotence that is unfortunately far too familiar to far too many people. I imagine that gay people can relate to this feeling, where irrational, historic prejudice takes precedence over rationality and justice. I know people of any minority background, particularly those with a colonised history, can relate to this feeling. And I imagine many women can too.

Why so angry now? Maybe it's just an overdue reaction to a tsunami of prejudice and hatred that seems to have found a comfortable home in 2016. Black Lives Matter, a statement so factually accurate that to use it as a name for a movement seems idiotic. But when it provokes objectionable responses from belligerent whites stating that all lives matter, it becomes apparent just how indifferent some of our fellow citizens of planet earth are about their fellow men and women. We elect people who want to build walls when we need people who can build bridges. Ah well, I suppose if God had wanted us to be strategic and considered like chess players, he would have made us black and white.

As much as I don't see white supremacists on every corner, I'm beginning to see a lot of black inferiorists (although under the circumstances is it really that surprising), and this makes me rage. Because i thought we'd moved on from this. Because i hoped that social justice and the criminal justice system had evolved to the point of recognising that human beings the world over had universally recognised inalienable rights. But we don't. Black Lives Don't Matter. In fact they mean less than **** all. Like brown lives, red lives and yellow lives they are as disposable and worthless as the system that discards and mistreats them. Be it a movie from today or a snapshot from yesteryear, if your life ain't white it's probably nit right.

I know, I know, we're all equal. Are we? Really? Walter Scott. Just another name in a seemingly endless list of victims of police violence. Shot 8 times in the back, running away from the cop and STILL, a majority white jury can't see that the white cop is a murderer. More than 500 black and ethnic minority individuals have died in suspicious circumstances while in state detention in the UK over the past 24 years, but not a single official has been successfully prosecuted. NOT ONE. I can't watch yet another video of a black person being killed. And it's not because I don't care; it's because all of us are a few videos away from becoming completely desensitised. Lynching blacks in segregationist America was an inhuman abnormality. The British castrating Mau Maus and using their scrotums as wallets in colonial Kenya equally so. The Belgians cutting off the limbs of indigenous people and murdering them with dogs in Congo. The public execution of Black people will never be normal.

There is NO JUSTICE for black people in white societies. If this statement makes people uncomfortable, **** it. Telling my sons that they are STILL seen as a threat and a target, explaining this bullshit to them, shattering their perception that they are perceived as equals in these venal, bigoted, corrupt, hypocritical, racist societies makes me more than uncomfortable. It makes me angry. It makes me feel impotent. It makes me feel like I can't protect my kids. A Muslim commits an atrocity and they're a terrorist, a white guy does the same thing, he's a loner. Muslim fanatics are terrorists and therefore Islam is evil; the KKK murder with impunity for a century in the name of Christ but Christianity isn't to blame. Nor is it to blame for countless paedophile priests. Hypocrisy - racist hypocrisy.

Brexit. Trump. The extreme right in the ascendency everywhere. Racism is and ALWAYS has been real for Blacks. For Asians. For Muslims. So please, please, please don't tell me that "it's only a minority". That makes you feel better and less uncomfortable. The problem is the ****ing silent majority. If you stand by and watch a woman having her hijab ripped away, look away when a gang of yobs hurl insults at an interracial couple or tolerate the abuse of black and Asian people you're worse than the perpetrators to me because you're pussies; and don't get upset at being called pussies, because your hero Mr Trump says it's alright. At least the racists are transparent in their hatred. I realise this might make some people uncomfortable. **** your discomfort.

Rant over.