Thursday, September 17, 2009

Jimmy Jimmy Jimmy

All I could muster in my mind after hearing former US President Jimmy Carter's opinion about the Health Care Plan fallout is "thank you, someone has finally said it". That it is not a person of colour so he will not be called out on racial anxiety as white people often say we do. Jokes have always been made of this. I remember a string of "it's because i'm black" commercials (can't remember which product was being endorsed) where the black person was taken the mickey out of for "seeing" racism even where it may not exist. There are a pile of anonymous commenters at Macon D's stuff white people do blog who make there similar remarks. It's a quintessential case of denial and it just doesn't help. Dr Robin Smith often makes the analogy of "putting a plaster over a tumor" and them hoping it will in away with respect to psychological wounds. Unless the cancer is treated accordingly, it's not going to heal. That's what nations such as the Uganda, Rwanda, Liberia, USA, South Africa need. Healing. Healing which may only emerge from open discussion about issues of race and not juvenile insults and rants toward the nation's leaders and their plans to make the nation better for all.

I'm of the notion that one who tries to deny racism or avert speaking of it is just as worse as the racist himself. When a person is not critically aware of the world around them, they are easily prone to absorbing ideas about race and gender that the majority upholds. In the US, it is the white capitalist male-dominant ideology that reigns supreme and if you couldn't be bothered to apply proper critique. You might end ur riding along the wave and standing firm for belief systems that have reinforced social division and not facilitated fair treatment of all human beings as equals.

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