RACE - Better or Worse

I’ve noticed on FB and in other media that people are saying that Racial tensions are getting worse in this country, that Obama is blame for this, that we were getting better before 2008. As a Black man in this country I have to call BS on that. The tension has always been there, just hidden under the surface. In many ways things are no better for people of color in this country since 2000. I want us all to take an honest look at what we can do to make things better. White, black, brown, yellow, it doesn’t matter. I am going to address some of the issues here and I want honest feedback.

If you ask any black man that lives in an “Urban” community he will tell you that the police brutality, shootings and harassment is nothing new. It has always been there. The difference now is it is being reported on the media. In many ways the media have no choice but to cover it because it is being caught on camera now. What do you think would have happened to Rodney King if they had not caught him being mercilessly beat at the hands of those officers? It would not even had made the news. Many of the laws we have seem to be targeting black and brown skinned individuals, criminal or not. They (the government) says it’s to protect us (the law abiding citizens) but these laws actually cause us to feel even more unsafe in our neighborhoods. Laws such as stop and frisk, would never fly in such areas as Wall street, Upper East Side, Chestnut hill, or Rittenhouse square. There would be an uproar about how a law that allows police to randomly stop you and search you is a violation of civil rights. How it would be unfathomable to stop a high powered Wall Street broker and perform a pat down in the middle of the street for everyone to see. Could you see Brian Roberts (CEO of Comcast) being searched while out for his morning run in Chestnut Hill. These are the things they did in Nazi Germany. These are the tactics used in overly oppressive governments. Things like this are not supposed to happen here in the United States of America. I’ve heard the reason why, these are high crime areas, we are cutting down on illegal guns and drugs. Statistics show………….. None of these reasons should ever allow the systematic dismantling of our constitutional rights. This has led to black and brown people nationwide becoming fed-up and angry with the police. Innocent people are being made to feel like criminals. This is all after in our recent history of blacks being killed at the hands of police indiscriminately or police locking up black men for crimes they didn’t commit. So there was already an inherent distrust of law enforcement. Some argue that its what needed to be done, unfortunately the majority of those people seem to be white. Which means you were not the ones made to feel less then human on a daily basis, therefore while you may empathize you truly have no idea what it feels like. I bring up stop and frisk because it has been in place for years (started in 2002 for NYC) and just goes to underline what I said earlier. There was already a distrust of law enforcement.

For those that have said that Obama has made race relations worse. I implore you to look at the data. Race relations were already bad, just hidden. Obama did very little if anything to make them worse. For that you can blame Apple, Google and FaceBook. And even they didn’t make it worse as much as they helped bring it to the surface. These issues have been left festering unattended for well over a century. One way or another it will come out. I want you to think back to a little before Obama became president. Actually he really wasn’t even a household name yet. Let’s go back to June 29 2007. This was actually a ground breaking day, a day that forever changed our country and even our world as we knew it. This was the day the iPhone debuted. On the first weekend they sold 1,000,000 phones. This means 1 million people with a access to a 2Mp camcorder in their pocket. The same with iPhone 3G the next year and Android debuted that year. Now we have millions of people with handheld cameras that don’t suck. Now we need a platform that allows you to show what your recorded to the world. Yes we had MySpace but FaceBook was the real game changer here. Now we had a way to show the rest of the country what was happening to us. If the news wouldn’t listen, then we would start our own. We got connected and made our voice louder to the point that we could not be ignored any longer. We now had video proof of the crimes that were committed against us. Those 3 things allowed the country to see how post racial America really was. Yes, this all happened under Obama but it did not happen because of Obama.

In conclusion, I want to add that this is not an attack on white people, I have met some really cool white people that I know are not racist. I also know that there are many issues plaguing the black community. We as a people need to come together and do better with policing our own communities. This in one reason things have gotten worse when it comes to police in our neighborhoods. We expect them to clean up the streets, put themselves in danger, all without a bit of help from us. That’s not going to happen. The more we expect it to happen the more things will get worse. We need to work together with the police to clean up our streets. That will go a long way to helping us both. As far as race relations go we need to have a honest discussion about it. We need to openly discuss the horrors that were committed against the black race. Yes white people I know you didn’t personally didn’t enslave anyone and you personally may not be racist, but this goes way beyond you, this is a cultural legacy. One that many blacks feel your trying to white wash and pretend it did not happen. We still have people alive today that lived through the Jim Crow era and remember what it was all about. The more we can be open and honest the more we can heal this festering wound that is stopping America from being the country that I know it can be.

One final note, for the love of everything holy and right with the world. Please Please Please do not marginalize anyones experience with racism or the police. Just because you don’t see or have not grown up around it does not mean it doesn’t exist.