BLM Movement

BLACK HISTORY MONTH

Why Black Lives Matter

My daughter and I marched in 2020's Black Lives Matter/George Floyd protest in Tallahassee. We were proud to support her African American heritage, on her mother's side, her right to speak out on her own behalf and to let the world know that we've had enough of racism, hate and bigotry in this country.

I just learned of the BLM movement that year, but it started with three women in 2013, one of whom had simply made the comment on social media that black lives matter. And, C'MON, this is a bare minimum requirement, for a human life to matter. Black folks are human beings and so, of course, their lives are sacred, have meaning and value. The fact that this has to be stated for the record is the truly sad part.

These women--Garza, Tometi and Cullors--met at a black leadership conference that year, bonded and created a website for their grassroots organization. As Tometti reminds us, "Black people aren't a monolith." The black community is just as diverse as every other ethnic or racial group. The media just likes to perpetuate stereotypes, but you shouldn't buy into them. They only serve to fuel the hate and bigotry we still see today. The BLM co-founders were horrified and largely motivated by the killing of Trayvon Martin the year before they met. But it was the George Floyd murder by police in 2020 that saw the movement explode internationally.

I am convinced that so many people being home bound and isolated by COVID that Spring gave them a reason to get outside and to congregate. I know that I was paying so much more attention to the MSM and social media at that time and I couldn't get enough of the George Floyd/BLM coverage. I was outraged, as were my daughters. It took no convincing to get my youngest to march that day in downtown Tallahassee with me. It's a memory I'll always cherish.

She and every black member of my family matters significantly. In society, it's a bare minimum to say that one's life matters. Of course, all lives matter, but because of systemic racism and bigotry, we sadly have to single out black lives because they haven't always mattered in this country.

And since it's Black History Month, we should honor the legacy of Black Americans because THEIR HISTORY IS OUR HISTORY! And we should continue to demand better of this country and its government. That's why I'll be joining the continuing protests across all 50 states on February 17th. Please join me and take to the streets.

#BlackLivesMatter

(Editor’s note, the book “Call and Response: The Story of Black Lives Matter,” by Veronica Chambers, 2021, help to inspire and inform this post. It has lots of great photos plus a timeline of the civil rights movement.)

WHITE BIRTHRIGHT (MANIFEST DESTINY)

MANIFEST DESTINY

The racist ideology that white men have a God-ordained right to power and control over people and land. It was the ideology of Europeans who sought to colonize the West, native peoples be damned! Pretty much how the story of North America, specifically our part, played out, right? Because God gave us that birthright, or right by being born white, right? Just ask the passengers aboard the Mayflower.

When they got lost and landed north of their destination, they didn’t feel too welcomed by the non-whites who already lived in the area we would later name Cape Cod. So once they landed, they conspired to produce the Mayflower Compact in 1620. America just celebrated the 400th Anniversary of this event in 2020. Why is that significant? Well, it was Manifest Destiny in full effect. The white Europeans had arrived!

"The ideology of Manifest Destiny inspired a variety of measures designed to remove or destroy the native population. US President James K. Polk (1845-1849) is the leader most associated with Manifest Destiny. Manifest Destiny inflamed sectional tensions over slavery, which ultimately led to the Civil War,” says The Khan Academy.

Interesting how you can draw a straight line from our domination of Native Americans to the institution of African slavery using that ideology as a guide. And how that same ideology persists today in American democracy all these centuries later.

WHITE BIRTHRIGHT

I’ve written here about white privilege a number of times, but my most elaborate explanation can be found here, “Understanding White Privilege.”  But trying to explain this to uneducated white people is a lesson in futility! They get hung up on one word, privilege, and misunderstand that to mean family wealth or socio-economic status. I watched a video on the Troubled Waters YouTube channel the other day where the host, Reese Waters, talked to another black man about this problem. They agreed that the word “privilege” was the problem. We need a better word. I chose birthright.

I used it once already at the top of this post. It was the white man’s “God-given birthright” to take land that wasn’t theirs. Now, had they been of royal lineage, they would have had their own lands in Europe to claim as their BIRTHRIGHT. That’s how it works. Your birth into the right family, say the ruling class in Europe, would have given you this privilege. But the Puritans aboard the Mayflower TOOK this right as their own. It wasn’t really their privilege from birth. Yet, they believe GOD ordained it so. Again, Manifest Destiny wasn’t just the right of the wealthy, the ruling class. It was the birthright given to white Europeans BY THEIR DEITY! Thus, white birthright. 

And as the Khan Academy pointed out, this ideology, or way of seeing the world, still permeates our government, our society. I discuss this and make it very personal in my post titled “Systemic Racism.” It’s just as real as Manifest Destiny and white birthright.

So the next time you’re in conversation with ignorant white folks, choose your words more carefully. Words matter. Understanding matters.

If you’re a white person reading this and you still don’t get it. Imagine that your European ancestors had been rounded up, shackled to the hulls of a slave ship and transported half a world away, lying in their own feces, only to be auctioned like hogs in a foreign land. If you can imagine being free in your homeland one minute and a slave in unfamiliar territory with a whip across your back for making eye contact with your captor-owner the next, MAYBE these ideas will begin to crystallize.

SYSTEMIC RACISM

I've written about race in America quite a bit in the last eight or so years because it affects me deeply and personally, like on a soul level. From the above pics, you can see that I live in a very MULTI-RACIAL family. My sister adopted an African-American sibling pair the year before I adopted my first daughter, who is white, and four years before I adopted my second daughter, who is multi-racial. So when Americans started shouting "ALL LIVES MATTER" in 2016 and again in 2020, I had to dissent. ALL lives haven't mattered even though the preamble to our Declaration of Independence signed in August 1776 PRETENDS THEY DO!

I wrote in June 2016 that "the backlash to the Black Lives Matter campaign is rooted in ignorance," and it very much is. Ignorance of history. Ignorance about white privilege and how this country was founded. "ALL MEN" were endowed with "UNALIENABLE RIGHTS." But even as our forefathers penned that, they didn't really believe that ALL LIVES MATTER. In fact, they ruled that African men were 3/5 of a human being, justifying their lower status and white ownership of slaves. The founding fathers believed in Manifest Destiny and that it was bestowed on WHITES by their Creator. Hell, it is believed that George Washington's "wooden" teeth were actually those of slaves...but I digress.

Cartoon I posted in March 2016

I concluded in my June 2016 blog post that, "It wasn't blacks who created the divide amongst humanity. By and large, it was white people. It began with the premise that races OTHER THAN white were somehow inferior. In the case of Africans, they were classified subhuman. The African slave was classified chattel. They were no different than livestock and often treated WORSE! So white people created the US v. THEM culture between themselves and everyone of a "lesser race" (blacks were often referred to as "mud race")."

That STAIN ON AMERICA is what we are still living under the dark shadow of. It is the basis for the systemic racism we see in our Institutions, from governance (at all levels) to housing policies to media disinformation. But even still, in white-controlled America, we still have African-American's towing the line to protect the status quo of racial inequality. Watch this video about Tim Scott, one-time Republican Presidential Candidate, narrated and produced by a black man who compares Scott to a "magical negro" from Hollywood lore.

Not only do "conservative blacks" like Scott distort the narrative, they effectively try to REWRITE it! And our national narrative, as told in history books and propogated by the far right, is ALREADY AS WHITEWASHED as it can possibly be. It's why Republicans vehemently OPPOSE the ideology behind Critical Race Theory and want it banned from any and all curriculum. HOW DARE BLACK PEOPLE TELL THEIR OWN STORY IN THEIR WORDS!!! White America would rather keep them shackled and muzzled. WHAT'S NEW?!?!?!

Tim Scott shucks and jives with the very best of them, selling his version of "the American Dream." Ask most African-Americans what they think about this dream! Just like the preamble to the Declaration, it's HORSE MANURE! It doesn't apply equally. What Scott's story wishes to ignore (dare I say, WHITEWASH) is the struggle his parents and grandparents faced in a country that didn't see them as equal human beings! It ignores the fact of how they even got to this country. MOSTLY BY SLAVE SHIPS ACROSS THE ATLANTIC!!!

Most Black Americans did not immigrate here BY CHOICE, they were dragged here BY FORCE in some of the MOST INHUMANE means possible! And though their blood, sweat and tears built this country, sustained the Southern U.S. Economy until the Civil War, and was spilled on the battlefield (from the U.S. Revolution through the latest conflict in Afghanistan), they were not treated as equals until the civil rights movement some 100 YEARS after Emancipation!

So spare me the false narrative Tim Scott. Even today, you could just as easily be profiled, assaulted and killed as George Floyd!

To that point, I have to worry about my own daughter.

Unless you've had to "have the talk" with your kid, YOU DON'T GET IT!

My daughter has faced micro-aggressions her whole life! She doesn't look any more African than Kamala Harris. But she's a lot more brown and "ethnic-looking" than her white friends. If a group of them is caught smoking weed (a legal drug where she lives) out in a public space, guess who the cops are going to single out! 

You don't think racism still exists in America?? YOU ARE BLIND. Maybe you're just too white and need some black friends, I don't know. But it is a SYSTEMIC problem rooted in our very dark past. It's just a fact.

And if you don't understand white privilege, I invite you to read my post from August 2017. In it, I write how us whites "benefited from the way the system had been rigged for all of history." That was an inherent privilege bestowed on us by "our Creator," I guess. It goes back centuries to Europe and the Roman Empire. It was the basis for the rise of Nazi Germany and wanting to engineer an Aryan society of blond-haried, blue-eyed whites. Nazism was very strong in America in the 1920's at the height of the KKK movement. Look it up. Manifest Destiny all over again.

The bottom line is, YOUR EXPERIENCE is not your neighbor's experience, regardless of the class or race of person he/she is. HOWEVER, the white American experience is VASTLY different than the black experience in this country, and if you'd just take the time to ask or to look into it, you'd see that. JUSTICE FOR ALL doesn't mean for folks on both sides of the tracks and it never has! We see it every day in stories of police brutality and racial profiling.

That's proof of systemic racism. It's built-in. It's always been there, from slave times forward. America is a melting pot and we all give society it's flavor. Without the black experience, told by black voices (not the Token Tim Scotts), we lose some of that flavor that makes us all Americans. I see that when I go to one of our oldest cities, New Orleans. You talk about rich American history, rooted in Europe, Africa and the Caribbean! Jazz music, which started in the Treme', a historically multi-cultural neighborhood in the heart of N'Awlins, is the most American music there is! Cultural diversity is our strenghth, not our weakness, and it should be celebrated.

This isn't my white angst or guilt coming out. I don't hate myself or the race I was born into. I had no say in the matter. Neither did my daughter. But this is deeply personal to me, not just because of her, or my brother-in-law or my many nieces and nephews. I got sick watching the original Alex Haley's Roots in the 1970's as a kid. It was so eye-opening and stomach-turning revelational to me. It changed my perceptions from then on about race and how one was so disgustingly treated. So please don't come at me with your white angst about how your power and circle of control is vanishing. White Americans will be in the minority in another couple of decades. Get used to it!

SYSTEMIC, STRUCTURAL SEXISM (In America)

It's funny that the European countries we were beholden to and where most of us immigrated from are so much further advanced than we are when it comes to equality and social policies. Even Mexico, to our South, and Spanish-controlled Florida in the 1800's had abolished slavery when the trade was at it's peak in our country. And ever since racial equality has been a thing and gender equality (and insert social justice or policy issue here), the Europeans, namely British and French have been way ahead of us, Great Britain's Slavery Abolition Act of 1834 following France by some 40 years. Spain, who brought slavery to this continent, signed a pact with the U.K. in 1817 to abolish the slave trade. And even though we got on board in 1865 after the Civil War tore this country apart, slaves still weren't free. After a short period of "reconstruction," the South still persisted with the "new slavery," sharecropping, and Jim Crow Laws. It took the civil unrest of the 1960's to finally end the systemic racism and oppression of African Americans, a cancer that hasn't been totally eradicated from our culture.

Women's suffrage was a popular civil rights movement some four decades earlier. Still, women don't enjoy the same freedoms, bodily autonomy or adequate compensation for similar work as men.

This is one reason we need more female representation in the Executive, Judicial and Legislative branches of U.S. Government. How can we call this a "representative democracy," a republic, when our Legislative branch is dominated and controlled by old, white men? The disparity was called out in an April committee meeting on Capitol Hill by Rep. Katie Porter (D-CA).

Pool/Getty Images (Google)

In a Young Turks video from April that garnered 2.4 million views, Rep. Porter goes head-to-head with a Heritage Foundation official, Dr. Burke, at this hearing. "Only about 28% of members of Congress are women. The median age of the Senate is 65 and the median age in the House is 58...so, on average, lots of older people, lots of older men," as she points out that policies protecting women's rights, especially single mothers, are never prioritized. These policies, specifically early childhood education, "won't benefit many members, most, the average member of Congress...even when their kids were young, most members leaned most heavily on their wives, and I say wives because most members are men...Too many in Congress don't get it because they didn't have to live it," Rep. Porter said.

She calls out "the familiar policy pattern" in Congress to invest in things they understand. "The collective body of older, richer men in Congress OVER-invest in things they understand (emphasis hers)." She claims policies to benefit single mothers don't personally benefit the average member of Congress and so they don't try to understand the problem as it never affected them personally, so they don't invest public dollars to support things like early childhood education.

STRUCTURAL SEXISM
Rep. Porter continued to call out her male colleagues for ignoring the plight of women, in general, and single mothers, in particular. She identified the ongoing inequality in public policy a result of "structural sexism."

"When we say that structural sexism continues to permeate this body...and our policies, that's what we're talking about. We're not imagining it." She claims that policies to benefit women are what "always ends up on the cutting room floor in legislation." She intends to make structural sexism go away with more progressive policies. "Women can and must contribute to our economy if we're going to have a globally competitive economy." Rep. Porter hopes that her colleagues will be moved to take action by "this single mom asking them to care, on behalf of all the other parents of young children who are struggling in this country." She claims to be the only single mother in Congress. She asked the committee, "What about the 10 million single moms? Where do they fit?"

She concluded by saying, "I'm sharing my story because my story doesn't get heard in Congress...Our whole perspective here is warped by the fact that this body is so disproportionately UN-representative of the American people's experience."

Springer Link says, "Structural sexism refers to discriminatory beliefs or practices on the basis of sex and gender that are entrenched in societal frameworks and which result in fairly predictable disparities in social outcomes related to power, resources, and opportunities. [It] also functions to normalize and legitimate such beliefs, practices, and inequalities of conditions and outcomes."

An October 2022 study by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) reports, "Structural sexism manifests via norms that constrict women’s social participation, including at work." Furthermore, "Intimate partner violence (IPV) is underpinned by structural sexism, patriarchal norms, and unequal gender power dynamics."

FSU Assistant Professor Patricia Homan developed a new structural sexism approach to the study of gender inequality and health.  Her approach, published 2019 in the American Sociological Review, goes beyond sexist mistreatment by individuals to examine how the degree of systematic gender inequality in power and resources — i.e. structural sexism — in a society can impact people’s health. This was the same focus as the above-referenced NIH study. Both point to the effects on children and society, not just women. "Structural sexism can be evident in major social institutions, such as the government and the economy, in interpersonal interactions and relationships, such as marriages and in individuals’ beliefs and identities." The effects in government were pointed out quite well by Rep. Porter. Professor Homan came to the same conclusion about more progressive policies to reduce it's impact. “The first thing we need to realize is that gender inequality in the United States is not only a human rights issue, but also a public health problem,” she said. “Therefore, gender equity policy is health policy.”

WHY DO I CARE?
You might wonder why I began with the issue of slavery and racism. Well, because one led to the other as a systemic societal issue, one that persists today. We will never eradicate racism, but we can educate. The same applies to any social issue, including gender inequality.

I have raised two daughters, one who just celebrated her 20th birthday, the other turns 23 in a few days. Both of them were adopted, my youngest daughter is African-American. That is why I liken the race and gender inequality issues. She faces them both and suffers micro-aggressions on the daily, even in progressive parts of Colorado. That's why I care deeply about these issues, but specifically the sexism that is so deeply entrenched into the fabric of our culture.

My daughters both have a problem with this patriarchal society, as do I. We finally have a woman of color in the White House, but it'll still be many, many years before one is elected to the highest office. As Rep. Porter points out, my daughters, especially my youngest, are so under-represented in Congress and at all levels of government, that it's no wonder.

Screen captured image from a YouTube video posted by Graduate School of Social Work - DU, titled "Power Privilege and Oppression," uploaded six years ago

The history of humankind, as we've been taught for eons, was pushed and pedaled by the patriarchy. They have controlled the narrative, from the time of the ancient sages until the present. We've been force fed a whitewashed, male-dominated version of human history. Why did it take until 2016's "Hidden Figures" film with Tom Hanks for most of us to learn that black women were behind our successful lunar missions at NASA??? Their stories, by and large, are untold in the history books. Harriet Tubman was one of the exceptions in history class, and not the rule. How many female heroins does the Bible exalt? Exactly, very few. The Judeo-Christian worldview for all of time has been one of patriarchy. God, the giver of life, has always been portrayed as an old, white man. Why does God possess a gender? And why would we assume his race? Jesus was born of a Virgin Middle Eastern woman OF COLOR! He was a man of color. Seems kind of silly that we've been pedaled a patriarchal view even in Sunday School.

I've fought hard against these stereotypes and have encouraged my girls, likewise. They grew up to be feminists just by their observations of the world. I merely joined them when they were old enough to make these judgments about society for themselves. And because I don't want them to suffer the inequality of old, nor for their potential daughters to grow up in a patriarchal society, I've pushed for more gender equality and been an outspoken advocate of same...for my daughters and granddaughters benefit. Men have ruled the narrative--the church, government and history--for quite long enough.

"White people are scared to death right now, particularly white males. They are scared to death they are going to lose their power in the future, and they are," says renowned race relations teacher Jane Elliott. "If you want to be treated well in the future, treat people well in the present."

Two different worlds

On their Agent Provocateur album, Foreigner sang "Two Different Worlds," and that song just came back to me as I was about to start this blog post. In America, we certainly have two different worlds. In 1984, Lou Gramm sang, "One that belongs to me, one could be wrong for me," and that couldn't ring any truer than today.

On the one hand, you have California who formed a task force to tackle the question of reparations. That topic is being debated by their state legislature right now!

On the other, you have a state like Alabama still trying to hide it's most egregious sins of the past (see "Descendant" on Netflix). Or a state like Florida, where Gov. Ron DumbSantis (aka DeathSantis) is trying to kill "critical race theory," because whites down South don't like to be reminded or shamed about their awful past (or their current racism).

It's two different worlds in America, one where it's okay to say "Black Lives Matter," and others where one can only say "All Lives Matter" or face the consequences of being "WOKE!" (i.e. aware of systemic racism in this country).

It's two different worlds, one where we embrace the sins of our forefathers and one where we white wash American history and create Roman gods out of them.

I've written before about White Angst, and I still believe that's at the heart of this dichotomy. White folks just can't deal with the truth of their privilege in society. They can't understand why their WASP-y way of life, their corrupt religion or their social structures are under attack. Because they are part of the systemic racism that grew out of Manifest Destiny.

Half of this country needs to get a grip. Come to terms with what your ancestors did to African-Americans and walk a half-mile in their shoes.

It's called "being woke" for a reason. Some of you have been asleep TOO LONG!