A Place for My Thoughts & Creative Writing





Tuesday, September 7, 2010

RaceRage

Yesterday i was saddened by the fact that a friend of mine has had such a hard time being a black man in America that he has was appears to be experiencing some deep seated race hatred.He is not the only friend I have who has this particular issue popping up, what appears to be quite a lot, and sometimes quite a lot in one day...now I am not sure how deeply embedded this racism is, for my pals, but it is coming out as a sort of blatant Angry Black Man Complex...in the one from facebook, it keeps coming up in his facebook pages. His honesty is actually rather painful to me because what it brings up in me can probably be termed a solid response of (a dose of) what is (loosely) termed righteous indignation...and a bit of reverse racism, wells up in me, to be honest. When someone uses a weapon against me, I tend to take out my arsenal as well. The hate seems to be multiplying in this sense. When you find reasons to hate me, i may respond in kind. "Judge not lest you be judged" comes to mind more often...my old timey upbringing, along with my then counter culture upbringing...both are so ticked off and offended by the subtle and the blatant forms of racial anger, well of the lashing out that it results in.

These public tongue lashings against "white people" are really something...something I don't agree to...that are going on on my "friends" pages. They are offending me more and more, the longer they go on. I despise racism so much that it already sort of pained me "to be friends" with someone who seemed to have a big problem loving people for who they are and not having a color bias against them (until they should prove that they are the good kind of people?), people who weren't any part of the daily ballast of equally racist strategies and tactics used against his people based on skin tone. Now there are many things that he and I both find disgusting about some inhumane treatment of his "existentially black" family of man, woman and child. Their causes are often taking the right action(s) necessary to secure further equality in America. But then, sometimes all they are doing, is spewing foul words that hurt the wrong folks...on facebook or something. I wonder are these folks doing this under the guise that this will affect change? I think that most folks who accept someone of a different racial origin as friends...are most often not of the racist variety, and don't need to see this banter against the race they "belong to", in fact i avoided all talk of race based on everyone i know having enough intelligence to know that Racism is in and of itself vile, crass and ignorant, as a standard.

Honestly these racially aligned posts, on his part and others agreeing with him, (brought to my attention through his posts) are beginning to really hurt me, personally. I have no other reason to dislike him. And have no goal to change his mind.  Don't care much to "make him see" how badly his posts are affecting me and yet, I think perhaps i should let him know something and so yesterday i did say something along the lines of reverse racism being a real bitch, and that "i know a little" having spent seventeen years in Hawaii as a white woman, being called (in effect) an "effing haole" all the time, and being subjected to sometimes subtle and sometimes blatant disrespect all because of my skin color/ hue/ tone...which WAS unfair, at best, and torturous at worst. At times I thought I would be killed just because certain folks hated "my" people....people from history books mainly, like Capt. Cook whom i have personally never met.... I am sure that once I was raped by four men in a night because of my race. Thanks a lot Captain...of course he had as much to do with that negative moment in my life as i had to do with Hawaiian people getting mistreated, and cheated out of their lands, and etc...but I guess that is my point.

Happy to be alive but not without being very unhappy, that racism existed in  so called evolved man. I lived there another 15 years among people who loved me, hated me and had mixed emotions about my race. Trusting people to get over the racial profiling...trusting them for the ones who weren't so ignorant...for the Hawaiian family that took me in and loved me through all kinds of madness...through a lot of years. Loved me like family, treated me as kin...I lived there so long because there were also people like me there, people for which skin color was not about your soul, good folks who knew things based in the Kumulipo, and of Kundalini, who knew that where breath flows in and out... there is a spirit and that, that *Spirit* is what is more important than the color your skin wears.

As in... What's shining out from within your spirit? What are you made of? What are your talents?
What have you "brought to the table" with Heart?

I stayed on that island for both my Hawaiian and my Filipino family, (who were friendly, together, being neighbors for some years). Surrogates are often as good as the real thing no? Sometimes even better. Ask the gay, transgendered and lesbian community who they feel most accepted hanging out with and sometimes they are gonna say my family, and mostly they will mean the surrogate one they have accepted, and been accepted into, not the nuclear one. and anyone who travels will understand what I mean too...One gets to have have different sets of "family" when you travel and live in various places.. You have different sets of friends, too when you find yourself cut off from the original sets. I have not been any real part of my "Original Clan", my family in Tennessee, have not seen me (only a few have seen me a time or two) since 1979, when I moved away.
My finances did not allow for travel after i married at 21 and began to have babies, with my Tongan husband.

Anyway I just wanted to begin a letter, to say what i am feeling on this topic. Racism, having become something I have been surrounded by, studied, partaken of, spat out, despised, heralded as satanic, and not minced my words about. there may be some opportunity in my life today to (once again0 take a stand against it...and if so i will stand against the idea that man is different based on the hue of our skin, what we eat, where we were born, or how our parents skin tones affect us. What is topmost is spirit in a person, what is of import is the mind and heart. What shines from within or glows is what sets us apart from one another. What shows in us by the ways we do things, the people we spend time with, the places we go to to be social, the places we go to live, are what you might want to look at to determine is someone is racially biased...or ask them outright. If you see / hear the spillage of foul racism, maybe you too, will try to make a point about these things. I welcome you today to become the change that needs to be...we need racially healing moments...I am just sick right now from thinking about this topic. So here i will close with just this.

A military experiment was endorsed by the American govt, during the time we were fighting at Pearl Harbor,  and somewhere around late 1942 early 1943, there were three months of experiments on an Island, where 24  American ( who were also "Japanese") ...soldiers...were called to duty, on Cat Island to become bait for dogs being trained to attack Japanese based on a theory that these men (from various points in America) would have a different odor, that they would "smell" Japanese. Now while we as people may have different odors based on what we eat and on our DNA, I believe that to have an odor as a race was pretty far fetched even during that time. The three month long experiment failed miserably...needless to say, and our boys, those young men ready and trained to fight against other Japanese persons "we" were in combat with at that time for America, were sent back to duty in other areas.

Video About Military Experimenting With Dogs

http://video.pbs.org/video/1579336059/#



FURTHER~ also about
Jemima Wilkenson,  Universal Friend

http://video.pbs.org/video/1579336059/

No comments:

Post a Comment