I was hoping that was irony. Was that not irony? Wait, don’t tell me if @kevinharris611 was being serious. I don’t want to know.
Personally, I like to focus on ending systems that victimize groups that are not racially defined, but include disproportionate numbers of minorities. Groups such as the poor, and the poorly educated, for example. I want to move on to a post-racialist society, and I feel like I’m working against that goal if I accede to targeting reparative actions by ethnicity or skin color. If, just for one example, we were to shut down the school-to-prison pipeline (kind of surprising BB didn’t cover this) we’d be ending something that primarily harms people of color, and we wouldn’t have to become racist ourselves in order to do so - we’d help all children in the system, by reforming a system that is essentially cruel and counterproductive as well as racially discriminatory in practice. That’s the kind of action I prefer, action that doesn’t assign a stigmatizing “victim role” by race, action that recognizes bad policies and situations and attacks those things regardless of the race of anyone involved. If you find the problem by recognizing systemic racism that’s fine - I just don’t want to fix problems using the tool of racist discrimination.
Other people might not have my concerns, though. I don’t ever want to rhetorically split my family into dark-skinned victims and light-skinned oppressors, I want us to be one family and I will oppose any attempt to set us against each other. Language is powerful! Which I hope is the point of the report, although I haven’t read it yet… it’s definitely the point of the Jay Smooth video.
