For once, I didn’t know what to say or write…
All I knew was that I felt an overwhelming sense of what I thought was sadness as I consumed the stream of violence filling up my bandwidth. Social media had grabbed my throat and squeezed so tight that I could feel a deep ancestral pain. My solution was to cower, to turn it all off, to unplug from the ‘if it bleeds it leads’ despondency. Flee from the hate. Flee from the violence. It was too painful. It’s too loud. So instead of facing the noise, my instinct was to cower in silence. Unfortunately, this act simply compounded my inner turmoil as I now felt like both a traitor and an ally to my race and cause -- and in some ways by osmosis, a victim. My brothers and sisters were screaming from the mountain tops under siege while I was frozen by my own fears; unsure what to say to make anything better. Without a large platform, I felt like anything I wanted to say to express my frustrations, would simply disappear into the echo chamber -- after all, I would dare not assume a racist person would be in my circle.
My inner dichotomy tore at me, one fang burying itself in guilt -- guilt for not using my voice to support the protesting of systemic racial injustice, economic oppression, police brutality, and reforms -- while the other fang found my fear through the cold dead truth that there are abhorrent people out there who would cause me, my family, my friends, and strangers malice and physical pain upon sight -- and the worst part is these people seem immune to logic, completely detached from their humanity. Part of me felt such seething hate towards blatant racists that I felt I would eagerly enact my anger through hasty physical violence given the chance to confront one. I could not quell my inner peace, and so I knew I was unable to speak from the heart yet. So in my silence, I began to look for the edges of the issues, wanting to rid myself of this confusion by understanding the whole picture. I hoped that I could peek behind the collective cultural veil and decode 400 years of history to have a single coherent epiphany to verbally explain the full depth of my emotions and unique outlook. This never came.
The most prominent recurring emotion I had was this stagnant disappointment, but one that was for the uneducated people who stand filled to the brim with hate in their hearts. I began to dunk my head back into the blinding noise of media, trying to find the nucleus of why this thought stood out to me as a malignant forethought. Why waste my energy on them? The enemy. Shouldn’t my compassion be directed to the victims and their families, to those brave enough to kneel or stand or walk or run or pay for change with their lives? Reflecting on this I began to see the law of polarity rear its head. The law of polarity states that everything has its pair of opposites -- but I kept thinking, how can any sane human with goodness in their heart oppose this international human rights conversation? Why are those with hate not self-aware enough to see through the thick fog of their mentality and free themselves? How can those people fathom that they are standing on the correct side of history, of humanity? Why can’t we change all of their minds? After all, isn't that the goal? I felt as if people who opposed the protests and movement were not matured enough to deal with reality. They’d forgotten what they were, forever lost in their self-delusions and structures of white supremacy which has been indoctrinated into them from birth.
I realized a common thread in these people who were seemingly the root of the problems -- the gatekeepers to love. They are not evil, they are simply unenlightened, their gutters cluttered with generations of cognitive dissonance. Since birth, their humanity has been so misconstrued by the constant false-empowerment symbols they prioritize like skin color and belief. Their psyches so jammed-full of false information and knowledge about their own history, resulting in zero empathy for people who differ from them. They are taught not to listen. They think their understanding of the world is be-all and end-all. That their iconology and traditions are the finish line of humanity. It’s not.
The world is evolving and so is humanity as a whole, there is no excuse for ignorance in our age -- like fuck the internet exists for god's sake. Unfortunately, the people who oppose our healthy movement are dipped in stasis and too lazy to learn. They scream, they plug their ears, and they turn a blind eye to the conversation that ought to be had. They refuse to hear the silent knees for help or blaring alarms of protests and when they are confronted directly, they divert the narrative by superimposing their perspectives and mentalities a layer above our pleas. They boastfully double down on their ignorance, completely unaware and unwilling to hear how others' experiences differ from their own.
The human tongue is a beast that few can master, and now more than ever we are seeing the racists and the ignorant ooze up like blabbering worms after a great flood of truth, poking their loud slimy rhetoric out from their echo chambers of hate to reveal their true nature. They shriek their one dollar words fuelled by frustration — completely void of any sense of self-awareness, mindfulness, or compassion. This international human rights movement is resonating so strongly that those still clutching onto the decomposing traditions of superior race rhetoric are now standing out like abject secretions against the massive wave of change, further highlighting the cancerous areas that have been holding us all back.
Our species has decided as a whole to enter a new enlightened period of humanity, one long overdue where we leave behind prejudice, discrimination, and antagonism over race and belief. We are leaving behind the bad and heading towards the good. We are no longer watching one another suffer. We are saving everything we can, all of life. For example, when the climate negatively affects our lives and health at our own hands, we rise, admit, confront, and correct the trajectory and mistakes. The voice of humanity is louder than ever, so there is no excuse for not hearing it and not listening to it and not learning from it. We have decided that the ugly history we hold must be addressed if we are to move forward together. We must consolidate our love for one another and leave behind the archaic and frankly stupid and wasteful conflicts we’ve been taught from our wasteful less educated ancestors who were still learning themselves.
Every year humanity becomes smarter. And this year we are making a stand that will never again be trampled out. We are making a stand together. It is the new standard, one that is nothing but love. That’s the kicker, it’s the easiest thing to do. All we are asking is that people free themselves of the heavy shackles of bias and shed the ever-present blanket of systemic racism from our shoulders. Let us all breathe with the same breadth of standard compassion. We see a future that removes the gunky race superiority ideologies within society that alienate us as a species.
As author and poet Sonya Renee Taylor said, whiteness and white people are so bereft of humanity that they will have a conversation about whether or not another group of people deserves to live. White people need to stop talking about how hard black people are suffering as if it is in a vacuum, black people are not suffering at some amorphous blob we call the system, we are suffering at the hands of whiteness and white people who live inside the delusions of white supremacy and construct systems and structures to enact the delusions of white supremacy. For example, the conversation isn’t about whether or not black people are struggling in the ghetto, it needs to be about why white people created the ghetto…
White people need to start asking about their whiteness and not debating about if black people deserve to live with their friends and family. The fact that white people can have that conversation is the root of the sickness of white supremacy delusion. Do you really think any human — especially white people who have traditionally been the oppressors — have the right to debate the humanity of other people's existence?
To me it doesn’t matter that I am half white and half black because that’s simply putting up bias disclaimers on issues that are being fought by people who judge by the content of character. We are fighting for humanity now, all of us, and if you can’t see that this is the right direction or that other people’s experiences are something totally different than yours, then you are part of the problem. I apologize if some of this entry is contradictory or not politically correct or comes off to strong — actually I don’t give a fuck cause it’s easy guys, if you mutter or feel any objection to the BLM movement, you are the problem, and you know what, it doesn’t mean you are a bad person if you have the heart to realize that and strive to be part of the solution.
Also in terms of the police brutality shit, it’s insanely sickening. But for those shouting “ALL COPS ARE BASTARDS” and painting millions of men and women of all races and backgrounds with the same brush stroke, then unfortunately you’re a little lost. It’s like me shouting that ALL WHITES ARE RACISTS, which is obviously stupid right… Make sure your energy is pointed in the right direction. I will say that as the son of a black police officer who had to interview six-year-old children who have been raped and sexually abused AND THEN go out and investigate in order to arrest and bring the predators to justice and take them off OUR streets, I find it sad that the racist, sadistic, and evil officers are giving the good ones a bad rep.
I’m gonna stop writing now. Thanks for tuning in.
Black Lives Matter.
-Citizen Shane
Mom, Me, Dad