From All Lives Matter to WhiteGirlsBreakTheInternet from Slavery
Why do white people see black joy and immediately try to dismiss it?
I’ll answer: Because they don’t think we deserve joy or to be able to see the beauty in ourselves. Our lives don’t matter.
There are real life slavery apologists alive and well today. The actual belief held by white people that slavery ‘wasn’t so bad’ is proof of that. White people who prey upon black people’s insecurities whether it be our heritage, the way we speak, how black we are, who buys false hair, our very culture that is a mixture of what they forced on us, remixes from West Africa, or our own original creations are all a result of an America who has not answered for its sins.
Nothing is post racial unless there is a resolution to why us of indigenous African descent are classified in the first place. Why did white people feel the need to make a negro/nigger?
Slavery echoes through the halls of buildings I walk in, roads I travel on, it’s even in my name. It’s the way my mother says ‘she’s black’ not ‘african’. It’s the way the joking notions of ‘I’m something mixed with black’, the fixation on ‘good hair’, and yellabones. It’s me thinking my lips are too big, my hair needs to be straighter. It’s the brightness filter on my camera. It is my life, a daily reminder. The language I’ll never know. I’m only here because someone on that slave vessel survived. It’s bonafide for me.
Slavery DESTROYED the way Africans thought about themselves. Before you say ‘Africans sold other Africans’, But they all knew who they were. Africans were not selling other Africans because they were black. But white people enslaved Africans because they were black. This is a fact. This isn’t debatable.
But the core at why white people get defensive of slavery and apologetic for it’s abuses is because blackness isn’t something they are required to respect. I’ve experienced this first hand.
From a casual meeting with a white person I didn’t know, a teacher, another teacher, former white friends, the dismissal of a struggle that I go through everyday that was not my own fault. ‘Africans enslaved other africans, the war wasn’t about slavery, my ancestors were Irish (so is my last name. NEXT) and it goes on. There is a blatant disrespect for black life that astounds me at times.
Race is very much a political power. A caste. You could be extremely wealthy and if visibly black you are denied things white people get.
In Charles Chestnut’s The House Behind the Cedars, he chronicles the life of a light skinned black woman and her white passing children. While the darker skinned black people struggle to recognized as human, the son of the woman John Walden passes and becomes a Lawyer, even marries a white daughter of a plantation owner. But it all falls apart if ‘the old story’ is discovered.
These narratives of blackness as inferior have not went away. I don’t know if I’ll be alive to see it go away either.
But black joy is always a dig at white superiority. Why are they so happy? They don’t deserve to be this happy. The need for white people to control black people still exists. Exerting control over someone means you believe yourself to be their superior.
Microagressions at me speaking aave, rapping, using the n-word in front of white friends shocked me at first then I remembered who i was to them. What my skin, my hair, what it all meant to them and I stopped being surprised.
Well that’s just my take on it. Black people share and discuss. Sorry if I rambled.
‘Why do white people dismiss black joy?’
