Just had to share this with you.
I came across this in the Comments section of another blog.
As a foreign Born black its especially funny when people from all sides say theres no racism. In college one of my professors was so sure most minorities didn't face actual overt acts that he made us all write a paper on it.
Mine dealt with the difference between coming from a mostly Black society where all from the local skid row bum to the president were Black and learning at a young age that ones deficiencies or attributes were not tied up in ones skin color .
Then i came to America.Its more the little hurts that get to you. Its the sound of door locks snapping as you wait for a bus near a red light.Its the storeowner following you around the store.Its the clubs that become "members only" when you know all your co-workers go there and their not members.Its the two or three forms of ID you need to use a credit card. Its the cops stopping you as you take a walk one block from your house and asking you where your going because you've worked hard and moved into the "nice" part of town. Its people not getting into an elevator if you are the only one in it. Its women crossing the street at dusk if you approach them . Its the person clutching her purse tightly if she sees you. And yes its the NY cabbies making you late for that business meeting . But we adapt and we survive but it doesn't mean it doesn't still hurt.Hell,Oprah couldn't get into some store a while back and shes a billionaire!!
There are worse acts that don't happen to most (guy dragged in Texas, Rodney King).But for me its the little cuts that last the longest.
His signature fit right in with the theme of my previous diary entry: A hungry man is an angry man.
posted by Pen @ 1:17 AM
1 comments
1 Comments:
Someone once explained it to me in a way that has stuck with me ever since. He explained that all human beings have a way of classifying things that inadvertantly leads to certain flaws in their logic. He called them the Three Laws.
The First Law was the Law of Identities. That said that X was always X and only X. A nail is a nail, not a bird or a sink. X=X.
That's fine for defining simple concepts like nails and birds and sinks. But where the human logic circuits of the mind get fouled up is when you make a decision like "A person is evil who leaves an injured man to die." In this case, "leaving an injured man to die" = Evil. But unfortunately, the real world won't allow such flawed logic as this. By that definition, many doctors in times of war or rescue workers during crises would be evil. They have to make life and death decisions and there isn't always a "right" answer.
So we develop judgemental opinions based upon a flawed logical assumption.
His Second Law was the Law of Non-Identities. This is the idea that X is all things NOT Y. Dead is not alive. Happy is not sad. Good things are not bad. And this one REALLY gets humans into trouble. Because it makes logical sense but once again, the real world is more complicated than that. What might normally be a bad thing can be good in real life. Things happen in context and if you take them out of context you can't judge them. But people do anyways because it seems so clear cut to them due to the Law of Non-Identities.
But what really is bad about this law is that once you decide that a thing is good, then whatever doesn't fit into that class becomes bad. Like other races. Whites are not blacks. False logic, because both are just as decent, just as wicked, just as trustworthy, just as likely to stab a friend in the back. But if you buy into Whites are not blacks or Blacks are not Koreans, or whatever, then it's only a hop, skip and a jump to buying into We are good (law of identities) and We are not Them (Law of Non-Identities) therefore, they are bad, or We are better than Them.
Now, when you read what people say online, look for them to use this flawed logic without even realizing it. People do it all the time.
To get back to my entry, the Civil War Never Ended, how this comes into play is that there was an aristocratic caste system in the south that lived day in, day out, convincing themselves that what they were doing was good to hide from the guilt and reality of what they were doing was evil. They did this by clinging to the two laws I just spoke of.
They got themselves so believing in their idea that slavery was GOOD that they envisioned it spanning the globe. They intended to expand slavery to the territories. Texas left Mexico just to get in on it.
When that dream seemed to be crushed in the Civil War, the losers licked their wounds and went underground.
How they evolved into the conservative movement of today and how they've fooled people who are otherwise good, decent folk into believing in their nonsense, is the story I will be telling when I post The Civil War Never Ended Part II.
As soon as I get back from vacation.
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