Baltimore. Located in Maryland, It's
the twenty-sixth largest city in the United States. It's home to the
Oriels and the Ravens. The Wire, one of the most acclaimed television
series ever to grace the tubes takes place there. Both the famous
singer Billie Holiday and the baseball legend Babe Ruth hail from
Baltimore. And unless you've been under a rock or on the moon for the
last few weeks, you would know that the city is in chaos over the
death of Freddie Grey, a man of twenty five who died of spinal cord
injuries while in police custody.
I'll break down what happened, but
we're not going to spend a lot of time on it. Freddie made eye
contact with police officer, then proceeded to flee. The officers
took chase, pinned him down and processed him for carrying a
switchblade. They threw him in the back of a van. When Freddie told
the officers he had sustained injuries, they ignored his pleas. You
can read about the whole thing here. They found out his switchblade
was actually a folding knife, which is not illegal. As for running
from the police, the supreme court has determined this action is not
a crime a while ago. Technically, Freddie Grey was illegally detained.
Now, you didn't come to Mr. Charlton to
hear the facts. No, you came here for an opinion and I'm going to
give you one. There is a race problem and it's mostly white people.
Ouch.
Now, it doesn't have to do so much with
the pigment of white people. If white people were neon green, then
we'd have a neon green people problem. You could argue history has
documented numerous accounts of white people committing atrocities
against other white people, and you would be right. You could also
argue that history has documented numerous accounts of not-white
people committing atrocities against other not-white people, and you
would also be right. Again, it doesn't have as much to do with
pigment as people would have us believe.
It has more to do with what I like to
call 'White-Washing'. The term white-washing is an old one, and it
meant other ethnicities were encouraged to act white, to be more
palatable to a broader audience. I like to use the term differently,
in which history is down played or forgotten to make the history more
palatable to white people. It stems from what I hear all the time
from white people. “Well, all of that is in the past, why can't we
just get along now?”
This is how I was raised when I was
younger. I remember learning in school that racism is bad, and we
should be nice to everyone, no matter what their skin colour was.
People used to mistreat others based on their ethnicity, and that was
bad. I moved to the big city, big ol' small town heart, and I then I
learned that I was actually pretty racist. Coming to that conclusion
was an eye opener, and actually made me more racist in the process.
All of the shit white people did, I
never really learned about. The enslavement of black people in
America, the genocide of aboriginals in Canada, residential schools,
forced sterilization. Christ, it used to be illegal for black and
white people to get married. This all fell under 'mistreatment'. Long
story short, the cruel history of murder, rape and enslavement was a
very long story made short.
Again, this kinda shit has been
happening for almost as long as human beings have been humans. The
issue today is, again, what I term White-Washing. We've made it look
as this part of our past and history isn't that big of deal, or we
pretend it never happened at all. The truth is, it has shaped the
current state of how we view the deaths of young black Americans in
the United States. We don't get upset or pay attention when one of
these people die in the hands of law enforcement, we get upset when
they start to riot because of that death. That's when the cameras
turn to those impoverished communities. Maybe that's a large part of
the reason of why people riot in the first place. If you can't get
attention with a peaceful protest or by pursuing legal action, then
maybe the only way left is the violent approach.
I'm not condoning the riots. What I am
going to say is this sort of thing is going to continue to happen
unless we start having a frank and honest discussion about race, and
what that means to everyone. As white people, we might have to start
being more honest about our own history. I think that kind of
discussion is already taking place, due to the large leaps in
technology in both photography and distribution. It won't happen over
night, but even in the midst of all the chaos, I'm starting to see a
light at the end of the tunnel. Maybe I'll live long enough to step
into it.
I don't know what it's like to be
black. But if you want to know what it's like to be white, I call
tell you that aside from the homicidal urges and the compulsive need
to devour human flesh at the end of the month, it's pretty damn
sweet.
Sincerely,
The Illustrious Mr. Charlton
p.s. The human flesh eating. You guys
all get that too, right?
p.s.s. Seriously, I'm in Golden right
now and the selection of of human meat is pretty weak.
No comments:
Post a Comment