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Re: Still racism?
Posted By: Rootsie In Response To: Still racism? *LINK* (Jahvier)
Date: Monday, 19 April 2004, at 12:00 a.m.
You can choose to put on dreadlocks and not get a job because of it. You can chant Rastafari and believe that makes you a downpressed person with the right to 'repatriate' to Africa. You can do anything you want to try to distance yourself from the system of white privilege from which you benefit directly no matter what your choices are. None of it is worth anything to the blacks who still suffer, or to your own self spiritually for that matter. Blacks can't put on and take off their blackness like a pair of shoes. And you can't put off your white skin, and the bare fact of the matter is that your white skin alone grants you advantages which blacks will never have. That is the sick reality of this world. And your skin also gives you a series of soul-murdering assumptions, unconscious till you make them conscious, which are on display in your post.
You cannot develop spiritually and skip the 100,000 years of human history since some blacks left Africa and became white. You cannot develop spiritually without dealing with the real world as it is. Spiritual growth has everything to do with how you conduct yourself here and now. How do you even imagine that you should 'repatriate' to a place whites pillaged for 500 years? You think they going to welcome you 'home'? Well actually, given the natural generosity of many Africans, some actually might. But certainly no one should move to Africa without understanding the historical issues and a willingness to really engage with the issue of race.
And of all people, whites who call themselves Rasta should be willing and able to reason on race and listen to blacks without branding them 'racist'. The government of your country is racist. You don't think you have responsibility to deal with that? How is it you fail to notice that modern Rasta began as a movement of BLACK people for BLACK liberation? What you think 'Blackman Redemption' is?
If you are drawn to it, and nobody is suggesting you can't be, what does this mean in terms of the way you will live your life? If it is that you think you have found a way to 'cure' your whiteness and the HISTORICAL RESPONSIBILITY you have because of it, whether you like it or not, it won't work, and it's absolutely dishonest. Blacks did not choose to be black and deal with that reality, and we did not choose to be white. But somehow whites because of their privilege think they can simply ignore the fact.
I suggest you do some reading on these sites and get yourself some history.
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