I am a voracious reader. I love books. There’s a reason that slaves were kept illiterate. There’s a reason that public education for black, brown, red, and yellow children as been eroding for almost 60 years.
If you can devalue and dehumanize a group of people oppressing them becomes easier. Once that devaluing and dehumanizing is institutionalized the hard work is done.
In this country we have witnessed a tremendous backlash to the Black Lives Matters movement. This backlash has intelligence and police authorities defining the movement as ANTIFA and terrorist. The question you have to ask yourself is WHY??? What is it about BLM that stimulates such a visceral reaction. The answer is simple yet complex. BLM is seeking to have people seen as humans with value deserving of the same treatment afforded white citizens. The very idea of treating non white people equal flies in the face of centuries of indoctrination.
In Isabel Wilkerson’s book Caste there is a passage that speaks about abolishionist William Goddell’s observation of the quandary of black people in Antebellum America. In his words “He is accounted criminal for acts which are deemed innocent in others,” Goodell wrote in 1853, “punished with a severity from which all others are exempted. He is under the control of the law, though unprotected by the law, and can know law only as an enemy.” These were words written by Goodell in 1853 and that remain frighteningly true in 2021. People who say that slavery ended in 1865 are woefully ignorant to the legacy that still permeates American society.
I love to read, I suspect that this may make me an enemy of the state.
THINK!!
EYES WIDE 👀 OPEN!!!