Sunday, August 29, 2004

The woman at Silver Rights seems shocked, shocked that a white person would write something racist on the internet. I read the guy's entry, and I'm like 'what a pussy!" He says wanting reparations is 'emotional', but his argument is emotional too- Oh, someone might have to take responsibility for their actions! Oh the horror! It's the typical stupid white person who seriously thinks that somehow the effects of one's actions magically disappear if you make excuses for them. I'm sorry, but they don't. If this guy wasn't so emotionally overwrought with conservative white guilt(we did something wrong, so we have to pretend it was right), he'd notice what even a five year old knows. "Sorry" (and we didn't even really get a sincere sorry at that) just doesn't cut it.

He blathers on about the Jews. WTF? The Jews got reparations, dude. The Germans weren't pussies, they took responsibility. They didn't make up a bunch of lies and excuses. If your ancestors hadn't been pussies, we would have dropped this a long time ago. I mean seriously, if the Germans had been "well, we all didn't personally put the Jews into ovens, and make their skin into lampshades, and plus, didn't all the Jews killed go to heaven?" everyone would have laughed them out of the room. That excuse is so flimsy that it's pretty insulting, in fact.

I like how when a black or latino or something does something, it's all about the personal responsibility. But if white people go around getting all kinds of shit they didn't earn because of slavery, and oppressing people, it's suddenly no one's responsibility, and we should just forget about it. White people, we're smarter than five year olds, and five year olds know that excuses don't cut it.

Rant over, but here's some good information to educate you, if you want to be educated. There are thousands of books and articles, most available at libraries or online, that you can look at if you want to be educated about this subject. But if you're uneducated, and try to spout off on it, you shouldn't be surprised that you don't get any respect. To get respect, you need to respect other people, and that means trying to find out the consequences of slavery and Jim Crow, not just assuming that magic fairies made these consequenceless acts. I'm not saying only whites need to educate themselves, but if blacks, Hispanics,etc already get taken to task, but whites don't, so it's important to take them to task sometimes, so they don't get so so complacent.

For reparations, I don't want money- I want to know that they sincerely feel this is wrong, that it won't happen again, that they'll try to fix a bit of the cultural genocide, and give black kids more opportunities to succeed, that they have been denied for hundreds of years. Affirmative Action helped, I'm glad that someone decided to try to help reduce the discrimination in a conscious fashion, but we need some more here. You can't just do stuff half assed, and then blame the folks you fucked with.

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