Sorry That I’m White? in Current Events

You know that scene in Mean Girls when Gretchen Weiners, during the trust fall exercise, apologizes for people being so jealous of her because she can’t help it that she’s so popular? To me, as a person of colour, that’s what posts look like that say “I am ashamed and I apologize and take responsibility for my white privilege”. It’s a little condescending and patronizing but I’m not actually offended because it is not their fault. Do you remember who you were before society told you who you are? Black people were dark brown and white people were light orange to me. There was an experiment where a father showed his white son a picture of two kids. One was black and one was white. He asked his son to describe what he notices in that picture. They’re both smiling the kid answered. Race and racism are taught and it starts in school. We learn that white is right, brown is alright, yellow is mellow and black stay back. I never applied myself much in school because I made the mistake of believing that I was deeply inferior and that I would have to work twice as hard compared to the white kids and I never saw the point of trying hard. I developed an inferiority complex that created a victim mentality that I cleaved to for three decades. I was very committed to that and I do not blame white people. I blame the education system and the media for cherry-picking what we are exposed to. Does the education system really need to maintain that white people are superior because there would be nothing left for them if they stopped believing that the colour of their skin makes them perfect? Race was created in 1795 to put white people on top and everyone else separate but spoiler alert, we all came from Africa. We’re only one race.

Education is supposed to lead people out of ignorance but it does not do so. White people did not bring slavery to America, it was already here. There was cannibalism, we were killing children, we were hunting animals into extinction. They then tell us that we were conquered by the white men but 95% of us were wiped out by disease, famine and disaster. We gave as much to white men as we got. They tell us during black history month that black people were only ever slaves and were only ever oppressed. This is all a trick to keep us separate. Black lives matter started in the 60s. It’s 2020 and beyond and nothing has changed? It’s a program designed to keep us separate.

The revolution will not be televised, it will be internalized. We should be protesting the education that is making us all believe that white people created everything, invented everything and defeated everything and own everything. History is his story. It’s not our story. Who were you before society told you who you were? That is the question. We weren’t black, we weren’t white, we weren’t Indian. My protest is that this is bigger than BLM. My protest is that I refuse to live afraid. My protest is refusing to agree to believe that white people have to apologize for being white. My protest is that we all have to take responsibility. Education emanates from the Latin word Educare which means “to lead out of ignorance”. My protest is that we need to educate ourselves, to lead ourselves out of this ignorance that the system created.

Ralph Smart does a better job explaining this but it’s a half-hour long video so I just condensed it to the best of my ability.