Na de
moord door politieagent Derek Chauvin op George Floyd, sloeg de vlam
weer eens in de pan: beelden uit Minneapolis en andere steden in de VS laten ten overvloede nog
eens de woede zien van gekleurde mensen die als vuil worden behandeld
door de politie in de VS, die jaarlijks een fiks aantal gekleurde mensen
vermoorden, waar de daders NB ook nog eens voor het overgrote deel
mee wegkomen…..
Op 23
februari dit jaar werd Ahmaud Marquez Arbery door een ex-agent en
diens zoon doodgeschoten, alleen omdat hij bezig was met joggen en
dat was in de ogen van deze twee fascistische racisten het teken dat
hij wel een misdadiger moest zijn, immers de man was gekleurd en
hardlopend…… Deze twee fascisten kwamen er in eerste instantie
ook nog mee weg, ‘logisch’ immers het zijn witten en die staan nu
eenmaal bovenaan de ladder, terwijl gekleurde VS burgers niet eens op die
ladder mogen staan….
Afgelopen maart was het de beurt aan Breonna Taylor die in Louisville woonde, zij werd in haar huis doodgeschoten, ofwel vermoord door 3 politiemannen…… Pas deze maand heeft de FBI aangekondigd een onafhankelijk onderzoek in te stellen naar de moord op Taylor…. Lachen past hier niet, anders zou je je daadwerkelijk kapot lachen…… De FBI in combinatie met een onafhankelijk onderzoek is een gotspe!!
De hiervoor opgesomde moorden zijn nog maar het spreekwoordelijke topje van de ijsberg……
Veel reguliere mediaorganen in de VS klagen vooral over de woede van de gekleurden na de zoveelste politiemoord op een gekleurd persoon, zelfs een eerder als alternatief bekend staand mediaorgaan als Zero Hedge laat vooral de vernielingen zien en laat als klap op de vuurpijl ronduit racistisch en fascistisch commentaar van lezers onder het bericht staan……..
Caitlin
Johnstone schreef een artikel na de moord op Floyd, ze analyseert de
maatschappij waarin dergelijke moorden als ‘normaal’
worden gezien door de witten en….. de gekleurden….. Waarbij
opgemerkt dient te worden dat de gekleurden dit wel als een ‘normale
gang van zaken’ zien, echter doordat het in de VS schering en inslag is wat betreft moorrddadig politieoptreden tegen gekleurde mensen, maar waar deze bevolkingsgroep letterlijk doodziek van
wordt, we leven immers niet in 1720 maar in 2020…. Het is dan ook allesbehalve vreemd dat de woede van deze mensen telkens weer uit de hand loopt….
Johnstone
wijst niet alleen naar de VS waar dergelijk geweld mogelijk is, maar
ook naar haar ‘moederland’ Australië, waarover ze volkomen terecht
stelt dat dit een door de witten gestolen land is en dat over stromen
aan bloed van de oorspronkelijke bewoners, ofwel eenzelfde scenario
als in de VS en de rest van de 3 Amerika’s……..
Je zou
denken dat het hier wel heel anders aan toegaat en het politiegeweld dat
hier wordt gebruikt tegen minderheden, kan niet in de schaduw staan
van wat er in de VS gebeurt. Hoewel: ook wij kennen uiterst
gewelddadig politieoptreden, neem de moord op Mitch
Henriquez….. Henriquez werd zoals Floyd door een politieagent
vermoord middels de nekklem, terwijl zo’n 4 andere agenten bovenop
het slachtoffer zaten….. De man moet al bijna dood zijn geweest
toen men hem in een politiebus sleurde, i.p.v. een ambulance te
bellen….. Henriquez moet zijn overleden in die politiebus…… Kortom alle betrokken agenten zijn schuldig aan de moord
op Henriquez…… Uiteindelijk
werd één agent veroordeeld tot een voorwaardelijke gevangenisstraf
van 6 maanden (….) en een jaar ontzegging van de uitoefening van zijn beroep…… ‘Gerechtigheid’ anno
2019……. GGGVD!!!
De
politie in Nederland is bij herhaling betrapt op etnisch profileren
en toch is er niets veranderd, het gebeurt nog steeds…… Zo zag ik in
het begin van de ‘intelligente lockdown’ een paar agenten een
gekleurde man apart nemen, terwijl hij zijn fiets op slot wilde
zetten, hij werd tegen de muur gezet waarna de twee hem aan de tand
voelden over de fiets en waar hij deze gekocht had…. Let wel: de
man zag er bepaald niet uit als een verslaafde die fietsen steelt,
mooie kleding, alleen wel een heel grote bos met haar en kijk dat is
al uiterst verdacht: een gekleurde die een in de ogen van de agenten
een dure fiets op slot zet en dan ook nog eens een gekleurde man met een afrokapsel >>
‘uitermate verdacht, zoals je begrijpt….’ Gelukkig lieten de
agenten de man vrij snel gaan, maar als witte sta je wel verbluft toe
te kijken, walgelijk!!!
Lees de
uitstekende overdenking van Johnstone. Eén ding is zeker: voor gekleurden bestaat er
amper gerechtigheid als het gaat om politie-inzet (ook in ons land)
en zegt het voort!
Meditations
On Whiteness
You’ve
probably already seen the
footage
of a white police officer named Derek Chauvin cheerfully suffocating
a black man named George Floyd to death with his knee while Floyd
pleaded for his life. This went viral around the same time as another
viral video
where a white woman in Central Park called New York police on a black
man who posed no threat to her while making sure to inform the police
that he was black, and just weeks after video
footage surfaced
of a black man named Ahmaud Arbery being shot to death by a
white former cop and his son while out for a jog.
So
race is on everyone’s mind, and rightly so. And whether we’re honest
with ourselves or we throw a bunch of verbiage at it to try and
compartmentalize away from it, white people are all aware when we
watch George Floyd being torturously murdered that there’s no way it
could have been us on the business end of that knee. Not because of
our impeccable manners or our sparkling personality, but because our
skin is a certain color.
And
whether we choose to directly acknowledge this reality or not, we’re
going to experience discomfort on some level. And mainly what I want
to say here is, that’s okay.
It
can be tempting to try and distance ourselves from this discomfort by
making it about individuals: that individual cop was a bad, bad man
and I would never do such a thing, and I didn’t, so I have no
accountability here. And of course it’s true that you were not
personally directly responsible for George Floyd’s actual murder, but
white people who urgently advance that truism are only ever doing so
to avoid confronting the more uncomfortable reality that they live in
and benefit from a society which guarantees that they will never be
on the receiving end of such brutality.
White
people have a lot of unprocessed feelings about racism, their role in
it and the extent to which they’ve benefited from it, both in America
and here in Australia, where the bright sun on my pale skin is a
constant reminder to me that I am an alien on stolen land.
Those
unprocessed feelings will probably express themselves in angry
vituperative comments on this essay by white people who are afraid of
simply feeling their feelings and getting real with themselves,
because this is uncomfortable, confrontational stuff.
“Identity
politics!” is an objection I often get when I try to talk about
the reality of racial power dynamics in our society, probably because
I have a lot of readers who follow me because of my criticisms of the
Democratic Party which often cynically exploits race and racism to
advance political agendas.
But
this isn’t identity politics; it’s not about politics at all. This is
about healing, and being real with ourselves.
“Bah,
white guilt!” is another common objection. “You just want
us to feel guilty! How does white people feeling all guilty help fix
racism??”
They
always talk about guilt. Guilt, guilt, guilt, guilt, guilt. I never
brought guilt up, but that’s what they argue against. Which is of
course very telling.
Obviously
guilt in and of itself is not the objective here. Nobody’s claiming
that the world’s racial wounds would be healed if white people just
went around feeling guilty all the time; that’s a vapid strawman that
is advanced by white people who don’t want to viscerally grapple with
the reality of the advantages their whiteness brings them.
But
also, why such a fearful, defensive response to the possibility of
experiencing guilt?
Why
treat guilt like it’s made of molten lava? Guilt is just a feeling;
it won’t hurt you. You just feel it, listen to what it has to say,
and then once it’s been felt all the way through it subsides. There’s
no need to fear it, and it’s not legitimate to reject ideas on the
basis that they might cause you to experience it.
It’s
not about guilt, it’s about consciousness and curiosity.
Consciousness of the way racial power dynamics play out in our own
lives, and curiosity about the experience of other races in our
society.
White
people are averse to emotionally processing the reality of their
privilege for the same reason rich people aggressively insist they
worked hard for every penny they have even though they know they
received way more opportunities and advantages than the average
person ever sees. Life is hard and abrasive for everyone, even for
white people and even for rich people, so acknowledging you’ve
received a head start in some way over other people can be one more
thing in your mind telling you you’re deficient, in addition to your
father’s voice and your first love rejecting you and all the other
painful inadequacy stories you’ve got circling through your
consciousness.
White
privilege doesn’t mean white people don’t suffer or that some white
people don’t have it harder overall than some black people. All it
means is that having white skin is an advantage, and that all other
factors being equal a white person will have an easier time in our
society than a person of color. And that this is because our society
has been shaped by white supremacy for many generations, leaving many
remaining effects.
Healing
can’t happen without consciousness. Healing our society’s racial
wounds won’t happen as long as white people are compartmentalizing
away from the reality that our lives have been easier than they would
otherwise have been if we’d been born a different race, and that this
is because our ancestors killed, enslaved, exploited and oppressed
people who didn’t look like them for many generations before we got
here. That while we didn’t personally cause this dynamic, we are
interwoven into its tapestry and we have risen above others because
of it.
And
to be honest, if you really determine to get real with yourself and
make your white privilege conscious, you will
experience guilt at some point. It’s an inescapable part of the
journey if you’re being really sincere and getting really curious
about what life is like for people of different races in our society.
And that’s okay. Guilt is not dangerous; you just feel through it and
continue on your journey. It’s not the final destination in the
journey, but it’s a river that you will cross along the way.
There
are all sorts of conscious and unconscious ways that white people
defensively protect a racist system, even when they don’t think of
themselves as racist. You can witness these dynamics in a more overt
form by simply scrolling through the comments on any of the videos
linked here, full of white people arguing in various ways that this
isn’t the atrocious thing that people are making it out to be. (Hint:
if the only time you talk about racism is to yell at people that
something isn’t racist, then you’re protecting racism.) They can
happen in much subtler ways as well, throughout all aspects of our
life, and it’s only by making them conscious and feeling the feelings
that brings up until they are fully felt that these subconscious
white supremacy-supporting mental habits can be noticed and uprooted.
My
ancestors came to Australia as prisoners, and some almost certainly
would have played some role in the genocide against the people who’d
been living here for more than 65,000 years before them. And now I
live in a society that is dominated by whiteness, and I’ve benefited
from that. I’ve never had cause to fear for my life in the presence
of a police officer, in fact I’ve never hesitated to call them if
I’ve needed their help. I had an easy youth because my parents came
from the race that has been favored by generations of white
supremacist policies in Australia. Media I consumed growing up
consistently featured people who were the same color as me,
consistently feeding me through my formative years the message that I
can accomplish anything I want in life. I’ve gotten jobs because I
understand the subtleties of white culture enough to know how to
speak and dress for different interviews, and because I had many
white contacts (it’s not what you know, it’s who you know). There are
people who pay attention to my words today who wouldn’t give them as
much respect if they appeared next to a profile picture with dark
skin. There are many other advantages I’ve had that I can’t even know
about, since I’ve never lived a day in brown skin.
This
is a reality I need to feel into and make conscious if I’m to play my
part in our society’s healing of its racial woundedness. And yeah it
can bring up uncomfortable emotions. Being white is weird, man. If we
live in Australia or North America we’re acutely aware that we’re
disconnected from our ancestral roots, but if we go to visit Europe
that feels weird and not at all like home too. We walk through the
land surrounded by the ghosts of its previous inhabitants, aware that
they had a deep connection to it and that we do not. We’re always
reaching for culture because we sense intuitively that that’s
something people are meant to have, but everything we grasp fails to
satisfy in any meaningful way. We’re aware on some level that we have
it better than other races, but we also know that life has been cruel
and abrasive to us too, and we don’t know how to solve all the
problems which white supremacy has caused.
And
if we’re honest with ourselves, it brings up a lot of feels. And it’s
okay that it does. It’s good that it does. These feelings need to be
felt. Really diving down the rabbit hole of racism and our role in it
will move mountains inside you that you didn’t even know were there,
and there will be some deep, deep emotions underneath them which will
bring burning shame, and big tears. Those tears need to come out
though. They’re what’s standing between you and true healing.
And
when you have processed through that journey, you will no longer have
in you the defensiveness about your own white privilege, and any
parts of you which were unconsciously defending and protecting white
supremacy in that way will have been purged from your system. And you
will be in that respect a much more real and authentic human being,
with a much more real and authentic relationship with the world. And
the world will feel much more like home to you.
_______________________
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Caitlin
Johnstone
| May 28, 2020 at 1:38 am | Tags: Ahmaud
Arbery,
Amy
Cooper,
Derek
Chauvin,
George
Floyd,
police,
racism,
white
privilege,
white
supremacy,
whiteness
| Categories: Article
| URL: https://wp.me/p9tj6M-2ac
============================
Zie ook:
‘Militairen op de straten van Washington: VS op weg naar een burgeroorlog‘
‘Obama en ‘change’ n.a.v. de moord op George Floyd: een ongelofelijke hypocriet aan het woord‘
‘Brekend nieuws: militairen op straat in Washington!!‘
‘Militairen op de straten van Washington: VS op weg naar een burgeroorlog‘
‘Obama en ‘change’ n.a.v. de moord op George Floyd: een ongelofelijke hypocriet aan het woord‘
‘Brekend nieuws: militairen op straat in Washington!!‘
‘Politie VS infiltreert protesten n.a.v. de dood van George Floyd en zetten aan tot geweld‘
Voor meer berichten over: politie VS, nekklem, Mitch Henriquez, etnisch profileren en/of racisme, klik op het betreffende label, direct onder dit bericht. Het label BLM staat voor Black Lives Matter.
