I gave a brief Twitter thread on this. I feel that it needs to be addressed more fully. I grew up in a small town in WNY. This is a state considered to be Blue and liberal. We're not as progressive as you want to think. We're not as bad as some other areas, but things aren't good. We'll put aside the town folks versus the farm folks. Because that was a thing. In the school I went to the sum total population of students who were people of color could be counted on one hand with fingers leftover.
They were treated differently than their white peers. It was assumed by many people because they were persons of color they weren't as smart as their classmates. It was assumed that the tall fellow was going to be the school basketball star. (He was indifferent to sports and more of a practical joker.) They were always regarded with suspicion by their peers. Rumors flew that they were drug dealers and that they carried weapons to school hidden on their person.
Then an exchange student from South Africa arrived. Everyone wanted to impress him. They put on their 'company manners' and began treating the black students a bit better. As soon as the fascinating and exotic exchange student left, they went back to their racist garbage. On the rare occasion there was a physical altercation, it was assumed that the black student started it. The fetishization of the exchange student was disgusting. The popular kids clique tried to get him to like them but he preferred to mingle among the entire student population. They warned him that the black students were trouble. He ignored them and reguarly spent time talking with them. I think that is where he went from being somewhat gregarious towards everyone to slectively being polite to some and actually friendly towards others in the school (like the weirdos).
The events of September 11, 2001 happened and the racism came out in full force against the black students. Ones with names that sounded vaguely Arabic were openly called 'sand niggers' and accused of being supporters of the Taliban. Ones who didn't have Arabic sounding names got the same treatment. There was verbal and physical harassment. This all happened in a small town that was supposedly one of the better places in the county because it was home to a SUNY campus. Social pressures in that town pushed people of color to form their own groups out of a need to have safety in numbers. It didn't just happen among the kids in the high school, it happened every where.
If you were at a diner and the majority of the population in the diner was white (which it typically was) a black person would come in and a bubble of silence and suspicion would follow them as they moved through the building. It didn't matter if it was an employee coming to work or if it was a customer. All people of color were regarded with suspicion. I remember working for a time at a farm supply store in the area. I was told to regard the Hispanic customers with suspicion because they'd try to get goods for free or would supposedly reach into the till if I had my back turned. Migrant workers from the farms around the town were treated like prospective criminals. I refused to participate in that garbage.
The people who were the problem customers were never the Hispanic customers. It was the young gun white farm boys who thought they could flirt/intimidate me into giving them a 'deal.' It was the middle aged white customers who said sexually harassing comments at me. Never did I have a single problem with harassment from people of color.
Years later, I lived in a different town. All that racism was right on display. They called the gas station owned by a Pakistani immigrant "the Hindu Hut" and spread rumors about how dishonest they were in their buisness dealings. When a Hispanic owned and operated restaraunt opened up in the next town over, rumors went flying that they were staffed with illegal immigrants, paying everyone under the table, and serving food that went against health code regulations. I have neighbors that fling around the word 'nigger' when talking about anyone with more color to their skin than they have. There are a small legion of people who embrace the confederate flag as their 'heritage' and are very vocal about how black people don't belong in their community because they shouldn't bring their crack addict friends and their drug deals into the community. They say that they should stay up in the 'ghetto' where they 'belong'.
And this is in western New York, which is supposedly a place where you can life a life of opportunity regardless of your skin color. They say that segregation ended with the civil rights movement. That's not true, it just became more subtle. They say that discrimination against people of color ended with the civil rights movement. That's not true. They'll come up with bullshit reasons to refuse to give you a job or just throw your resume right in the trash. I've watched it in action as I was working in retail and people who were of color applied for work. They want people of color to 'know their place' and that place is supposed to be at the bottom of the social ladder.
I didn't meet my first person of color teacher until I was at college. I didn't meet my first person of color administrator or person of official authority until I went to college out of state in a big city. There's lots of smart and well educated people of color who could be working in education but all too often discrimination regulates them to menial labor. That's just one area of many where I have seen discrimination in action. We are not half so enlightened as we would like to claim we are.
People want to lionize Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. while at the same time sanitizing him and whitewashing his message. They want to up hold him as the peaceful protestor who became a martyr. They forget that he said "Riots are the language of the unheard." People say that the riots that happen around now are because people are bored from being under the confines of COVID-19. No, that's not why it's happening. It's happening because they are being systemically murdered under the color of law becaue of the color of their skin. It's happening because they are being systemically denied justice because of the color of their skin. It's happening because they live in constant threat of their lives and livelihood because of the color of their skin.
No one should die because of the color of their skin. No one should have to justify why they need to stay alive. There is no meritocracy that says the more good deeds you do, the more you are allowed to live. Black Lives Matter is a human rights issue. I, for one, support the movement and regret that I can not do more for them.
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