Transcription
White people invented race to justify their oppression of the African people and their descendants, as well as to justify their mistreatment of the indigenous American tribes. So, racism is always the aggressor. Race-based violence starts and ends with white people. Entirely different is bias. It's possible for a black person to be biased against a white person. It's defensive bias though, because again, white people started and continued it to present day. So, a black person not liking a white person or not trusting a white person on the basis that they're white is not racism. It's defensive bias based on 400 years of dehumanization and history and trauma that has not been atoned for. No reparations have been made. No apologies have been given by the majority of white people. Most white people will tell you, "I didn't do it, so I'm not responsible. I've never been racist to a black person. Why do they hate me on the basis of my skin color? That's racist." No, that's smart. Every time black people have tried to create their own communities, white people have come in and ruined it and destroyed it. We've stolen everything they've ever tried to build for themselves. Black creativity and culture is the most plagiarized and least accredited phenomenon in the world. To this day, everyone steals from the black community and their creativity and their artists. It's not Tik Tok slang, it's AAVE, it's Ebonics. You look stupid. It's not yours. It's not ours. It's theirs. It's not ours. It's theirs.
One of the things that I do is I try to help people get a picture of what I mean by racism. So, tell me how it is. I'm going to first category is white racism, then we'll deal with black racism. So, white racism. Tell me the ways in which white racism adversely impacts the lives of black people. Just what are the ways that white racism can adversely impact the lives of black people as a group? What are some of those ways? Power. I'm sorry? Power, but how is that defined specifically? Discrimination. Education, okay. I'm sorry? Economically, employment. What else? Housing, what else? Policing. Why are we here today? Healthcare, okay. Now, we could actually kind of grow that list. Now, we're going to move over to black racism. Tell me the ways in which black racism adversely impacts the lives of white people as an entire group. Thank you. The reason why you become silent is one that always comes up, and that's fear. White people are afraid of black people. They are afraid of us, and it's a very interesting thing is black people know it. We know white people are afraid, but you have to start getting into the psychology, what are you afraid of? Why are you afraid? But it's an interesting dynamic. Now, also, you see the difference in what racism is, do you not? Racism implies you have not just prejudice, but the power to do something with that prejudice. Now, I don't like you, not only that, but I'm going to control whether you can get You know, I may say I hate you. I hate white people. I hate them. I hate them. It's not going to change you getting that, you know, loan when you go to the bank. They could go You could hate I could hate you all the way to the bank. Not going to change. You see the difference? That whereas white racism says, not only do I not like you, but I'm going to change the the impact of where you can live. I'm going to determine with that racism where where your powers are. Are you following me? And I'm talking about as a group, not an individual, cuz people say, "I remember when my uncle didn't I'm not talking about your uncle. I'm talking about the whole group. I'm not talking about an incident. That's the difference.
Now, before we dive deeper into this particular video, I just want to spoke curiosity by asking maybe two questions. And the first one being, can a black person or can black people generally be racist towards white people? Is it really possible from your take, from maybe your experience or your understanding of racism? And maybe the second question is in as much as these are said to have ended on paper, did slavery really end? Or has colonialism, which is also another form of slavery, or both of them are forms of white supremacy, did they really end? Now, you'll go ahead and share with me your thoughts maybe in the comment section below, but before that and before I give you my take on this, let's continue watching this video and I'll be back with a good analysis and breakdown of it. Anything that robs us of our humanity is a danger to everyone. And that is what's going on with people of African descent all over the world because not only did it get done here, but who do we tell? The entire world, we told these people don't deserve any value. Everyone wants to be American. Not y'all. But when we go, I mean, I literally go to countries all over the world, America sets the standard and thank God for what happened later. Let's move forward. So, a lot of people start saying, "Well, y'all got free, right? Y'all are free, everything's fine." Cuz I say that see, whatever you talk about post-traumatic slave syndrome, people get locked there. So, there's a myth that after slavery ended, the playing field was leveled. Was it? Remember all the lynchings occurred after slavery. That wasn't during, after slavery. So, you had black sharecropping. Now, we didn't get a lot of black history in our schooling. I have four degrees and three advanced degrees. Never did I get black history. I got about two pages of black history and one of them what page was a picture? And it was a picture of little folks with the cabin. You probably saw the same picture. It's a little cabin. The little guy on the porch with the banjo. Little children running frolicking about eating watermelon. Right? Everybody happy? And we certainly need little Mary and little Johnny to believe that they were happy. The slaves were happy people. And they had nice place to live. Because we couldn't have them feeling cognitive what? Not little Mary. She can't start questioning what grandpa did. So, I want you to see this because those are leftover slave quarters. He's a sharecropper. So, now let's go back and take a look at sharecropping. Now, these are folks that were slaves, no longer slaves. Decided I'm going back to be a sharecropper on the same plantation that I was a slave. Why would you do that? Let's move forward. Here's why, because when you did try to leave and you go to north cuz you're free. I want you to go north now. I live in Oregon, right? That's where I live. Here we go. No free negro mulatto not residing in this state at the time of the adoption of this constitution shall come reside or be within this state or hold any real real estate or make any contracts or maintain any suit therein. And the legislative assembly shall provide by penal laws for the removal by public officers of all such negros and mulattos and for their effectual exclusion from the state. And for the punishment of persons who shall bring them into the state or employ or harbor them. This was repealed November 3rd, 1926. My father was alive. Section 6 said if any free negro mulatto shall fail to quit the country as required by this act, if guilty upon trial shall receive upon his or her back not less than 20 no more than 39. We'll beat you. That if any free negro or mulatto shall fail to quit the country within the term of 6 months after receiving such stripes, he or she shall again receive the same punishment over once every 6 months until he or she shall quit the country. We going to beat you till you leave. But you're free. The playing field is leveled. Pull yourself up from your bootstraps. Are you following me? So he went back to the plantation. Let's go back. He went back to the plantation to be a sharecropper because that's the only place he can live. But he can't read or write because it was illegal to educate a slave. So I'm illiterate. I go back and I say to the slave owner who past slave owner, "Okay, now I'm coming back to work for a fair wage cuz I'm free." And the slave owner says, "Sure, you can come back." So here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to advance you seed, tools, and a mule. In other words, you know, I am going to give you that grant that you want. And we going to let you work with that. And at the end of the year, we'll settle up. Well, the grant's never enough, is it? And so you at the end of the year, he's found owing. And what must he do to pay off that debt? He's got to work it off, yes? And his children have to work it off, yes? That's called debt servitude or another form of slavery. But you all are free. What are you whining about? Let's move forward. Move forward. So well, can we lease them? Now, you everybody wants to know big issue. You have overrepresentation here. Guess how I know. Overrepresentation criminal justice system as its ideology. It was big business then. It's big business now. You're going to get free labor one way or another. New slavery is imprisonment. Well, let's see. Why was this? It was so successful. By the mid-1898, nearly 3/4 of Alabama's total state revenue came directly from this institution. Well, of course, I wanted to do research on what they did. Cuz they're free. But now we're arresting them at alarming rates. And for what? 12 years for vagrancy, loitering, startling a white woman, looking menacingly at a white woman. That's what they got 10, 12, 15 years for. And many of them, 25% died under convict lease, more than during slavery, cuz there were no protections because now we have another label to justify our behavior towards them. And what's their new label? Well, after all, they're convicts. They're criminals. Don't they deserve it? Do you see what I'm saying? So, when did it end? Is the question. Move forward. You all heard about Katrina, yes? Yeah. See, I was there. My family's from Louisiana. I went to the Ninth Ward. Sometimes you can't pay attention to what the news says. It's important actually go eyeball what's going on. Which was very interesting, cuz it was one of the most horrific events I'd ever seen and probably will ever see in my life. Well, black folks were just simply treated differently. Did you notice that? Here's the good news about Katrina. Everybody noticed it. So, all the rest of the world where we learn send us your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, your democracy, your equality. They said, "What happened with that Katrina thing?" All that stuff y'all talked about. Well, let me read this. This is from Associated Press, taken straight from the newspaper. The front Actually, the top part here is actually a woman, but they think it's a man. Anyway, it says a young man walks through chest-deep floodwater after looting a grocery store in New Orleans on Tuesday, August 30th, 2005. Same body of water down here, excuse me. Two residents wade through chest-deep water after finding bread and soda from a local grocery store. Now, same event, same water. White people, black people. We've told you what you see now. That removes your what? This is because these people can't be perceived as looting. They're white people. White people don't loot. Now, the truth of the matter is I don't care what any of them are doing. It doesn't matter, but I'm going to steal the social conscience by letting you know, don't forget. This is a looter. Matter of fact, what you last heard was that they were looters and rapists. Did you not? So, don't they deserve it? That wasn't back in Oh, I don't know, slavery though, was it?
Now, we're going to kind of move into operationalizing that to look at what is it? How does it? How do we begin to connect that behavior, those that history to what we're dealing with and what you're dealing with right now, and what we're seeing. And very often people say, "Well, is everything post-traumatic slave syndrome?" Obviously, that would trivialize all the work. We cannot lay squarely on the shoulders of post-traumatic all the problems that we see, nor can we place all the problems squarely on the shoulders of white people or any of the above. So hopefully we won't digress into anything that is that foolish in terms of a discussion because you know that's another thing that happens in terms of trying to deal with the pushback around this. Then we move into extremes and it tends to dilute the realities that are going on. So hopefully we're way beyond all that. Well now she's saying everything is post-traumatic. No, I'm not. And most of my work, my background is really in the field doing work in the community and grassroots. That's where my training was in terms of my clinical work. And just, you know, the fact that I've always been this work started on the ground. It didn't start here. Matter of fact, the attention I got the attention of places like Oxford and Harvard and you know, the Ivy League and major institutions, even the FBI. You know, but those were things that happened after I did started doing the work on the grassroots level. And so it's for me, my commitment is to healing. So this is not an exercise in some kind of broad intellectual esoteric. It's really about how do we then take this information and help a person extricate themselves from behavior that they've learned and or been socialized to believe black and white and everyone in the middle that's been affected by this. What do we do? So this is kind of looking at the contemporary kind of reflection of the trauma, which is white supremacy and terrorism. That continues. We see that on a daily basis in the United States as well as here. This book is called Breaking Rank by Norm Stamper. Norm Stamper is a 34-year police veteran. He was the chief of police for the cities of San Diego and Seattle. This is a white man wrote this book. Called Breaking Rank and he really did. So all I can tell you is he broke rank. I've been trying to meet Norm. Norm travels quite a bit and he gets considerable amount of death threats because of what he's done. But he talked about and this is contemporary. And remember that's what we're looking at. How does it reflect itself today? I've heard some police officers refer to prostitute slayings or to the slayings of blacks as misdemeanor murders. Employing an unofficial code for them NHI, which means no human involved. These are on telephone calls. These are on calls that you hear on police officers speaking. Hey, what do you have? Oh, we have an NHI. We have no human involved. It's a black person killed. Do you see what I'm saying? Again, the dehumanization reflecting itself in just their casual involvement with one another. San Diego cops confess to a myriad other acts of discrimination, including additional dehumanizing references to blacks on a radio call, just an 1113. 1113 is a code for an injured animal. How many people think they understand what racism is? Show of hands. Come on. You know you think you know. I'm not suggesting I know. I just have a couple definitions that kind of came to me as I thought about. How many people think they're a white racist? There are white racists out there. How many think they're black racist out there? Okay. Now, this is an interesting thing cuz this becomes important as we begin to define concepts. Now I do that. I usually define concepts all the way. But one of the things that I do is I try to help people get a picture of what I mean by racism. So tell me how it is. I'm going to first category is white racism, then we'll deal with black racism. So, white racism. Tell me the ways in which white racism adversely impacts the lives of black people. Just what are the ways that white racism can adversely impact the lives of black people as a group? What are some of those ways? I'm sorry? Power, but how is that defined specifically? Education, okay. I'm sorry? Economically, employment. What else? Housing. What else? Policing. Why are we here today? Healthcare. Okay. Now, we could actually kind of grow that list. Now, we're going to move over to black racism. Tell me the ways in which black racism adversely impacts the lives of white people as an entire group. Thank you. The reason why you become silent, there's one that always comes up and that's fear. White people are afraid of black people. They are afraid of us and it's a very interesting thing is black people know it. We know white people are afraid, but you have to start getting into the psychology. What are you afraid of? Why are you afraid? But it's an interesting dynamic. Now, also you see the difference in what racism is, do you not? Racism implies you have not just prejudice, but the power to do something with that prejudice. Now, I don't like you. Not only that, but I'm going to control whether you can get You know, I may say I hate you. I hate white people. I hate them. I hate them. It's not going to change you getting that, you know, loan. When you go to bank, you could go You can hate I can hate you all the way to the bank. Not going to change. You see the difference? That whereas white racism says, "Not only do I not like you, but I'm going to change your the impact of where you can live." I'm going to determine with that racism where where your powers are. Are you following me? And I'm talking about it as a group, not an individual cuz people said, "I remember when my uncle didn't" I'm not talking about your uncle. I'm talking about the whole group. I'm not talking about an incident. That's the difference.
But white people are afraid. So, let's get into how this fear impacts criminal justice. Cuz if white people in this room are afraid of black people, guess who else is afraid of afraid of black people? Only they have guns. So, now let's look at what he said. Simply put, white cops are afraid of black men. We don't talk about it. We pretend it doesn't exist. We claim color blindness. We say white officers treat black men the same way they treat white men, but that's a lie. And here's a big one. In fact, the bigger the darker the black man, the greater the fear. Any big black men in here? You got a big old bull's-eye on you, even if you got the suit on. And it's a truth because we statistics bear it out. The African community knows this. Hell, most whites know it. Yet, even though it's essential, if not the defining ingredient in the makeup of police racism, white cops won't admit it to themselves or to others. He goes on to talk about actually learning it in the academy. Norm Stamper, he told on everybody. He had folks indicted. He now lives in a cabin on a mountain somewhere in the San Juan Islands. That's where he lives. Nobody knows where he lives. Cuz he knows they're coming after him, and they have. This is a statement from the book also, "Race and class discrimination are all too real in every phase of the criminal justice system from arrest to sentencing impoverished black defendants and this is going to sound familiar to you are far more likely to wind up on death row than richer middle class whites or the three thousand and of the three thousand seven hundred inmates now waiting execution nationwide forty three percent are African American black defendants are not accorded the same due process rights as whites their cases are not given the same scrutiny and consideration afforded a white defendant not now not ever not in this country." This is what the man said it was dismal but he doesn't believe it's possible in the current system. So what we have to realize is we get need to be realistic about that. So what I have to do is teach my sons how to navigate this do I not? Doesn't matter what I think and no baby we know we are the world no this is real. You do have a bull's eye on you when you when you're in the elevator with the only white woman there and you're the big black man she's clutching her purse and she's worried. That's a reality and if you start over too much it used to mean you get lynched. Matter of fact I think she could scream rape now and you get taken down.
Now this is interesting cuz this has to do with women. You know my father used to say if a white man has a cold a black man has pneumonia. And if a black man has pneumonia a black woman has cancer. It just kind of figures out that way. In 1986 on duty California Highway Patrol officer Craig Peyer strangled a San Diego State University student named Cara Knott and threw her body off a 70 foot bridge motive she'd resisted his sexual advances. Now let's go back and understand that and this is interesting thing I worked with adolescent adult male and female prostitutes for five years. I don't want you to get that confused I'm not an ex-ho. I've actually had people say gosh she's come along you know she used to be she's done so well. So somehow when I say that people think I've never been in the life. Okay, I work with adolescent adult male and female prostitutes as a case manager counselor. Okay. And during that time that I worked with folks, it was very interesting to see the perspectives and the behaviors and the attitudes that people had about about prostitutes. I mean, when folks want to be if you want to start off as a serial killer just go kill the prostitutes. Nobody cares. They don't even invest CSI don't investigate the prostitute slayings, right? But when we begin to see what's been happening with particularly women of color, you know, just historically women of color have been fodder for white men. Now what started in the backwoods or in the cabin with the slaves, it never went away, you know. And I want to speak to this cuz this is a tough one to swallow, too. But imagine they did a study back in the '80s and they asked men, cross the board, cross races, "If you could get away with sexually assaulting a woman, raping a woman, other words, and there's no possible way that you'll get penalized for it. Do you ever get Would Would how many of you would consider doing it?" This is just regular Joe, go to work with the kids. 70% 70 said do it I would do it. Imagine being able to do that for couple hundred years with impunity. Imagine you don't have to worry about, you know, you talk about pedophilia and all that. Imagine being able to buy that. And then you can beat it to death, too, and get another one. I know it's tough to wrap your head around, but what happens to an appetite created like that? Where you could rape a black woman anytime you wanted to and it wasn't considered rape because she was promiscuous. Hundreds of years. We're not talking about a few years, hundreds of years protected by the law. No moral You could go to church. It was all good. Where do you think that went after slavery ended? It didn't go away cuz guess who's the number one? You got folks who are pimping the women and then you got the ones that are buying them. And who's buying them? Same middle-aged white males between 35 and 60, married with children. All right, 5 years I work with them. These are the Johns. Still are the Johns. And still are getting hold of some of that black body. Are you following me? This is really important to know. It just mutated into something else. So now we have to figure out a way within the legal perspective to deal with these women who are out of control. My cautious guess is that 5% of America's cops are on the prowl for women. Women, you need to get concerned. 5% of any police department. In other words, there are folks who become police officers because they're predatory. That's why. Think about it. We know where pedophiles go, don't we? You go where there are children. Thank you. So we got to understand police officers, plenty of them are twisted. And I've worked for the last 20 years with police officers. Trust me. I'm always concerned about someone that deliberately wants a gun aside from the short man. In a department the size of Seattle's, that's 63 police officers. In San Diego, 145. In New York City, 2,000. The average patrol cop makes anywhere from 10 to 20 unsupervised contacts a shift. If he's on the make, chances are predatory cop will find you or your wife, your partner, your daughter, your sister, your mother, your friend. That's in general. And you see you get a freebie when you have a person of color cuz they have no rights. It is not hard to understand why people of color, the poor, and younger Americans did not and do not look upon the police as theirs. Compare and contrast, are the police as an institution known for their protection of the innocent against deception, or do they deceive the innocent? Do the police protect the weak against oppression or intimidation, or do they oppress and intimidate the very people they've sworn to protect? Again, we're not talking about anybody that just fell off a truck. We're talking about a 34-year police veteran who went back, by the way, to get his PhD.
Now, this was a study I did. The research I did. Now, let me explain kind of the fake basis of this research. 200 African-American male youth, 100 of whom are incarcerated. Right? 100 of whom are not, but are from the same neighborhood. That was my group that I was working with. So, one of the things that I wanted to do, over here on the right side, what you see is my dependent variable. What I'm trying to predict. And what I'm trying to predict is the use of violence. So, what I discovered was the most significant predictor of African-American adolescent violence when I did the multiple In other words, I put all the variables together to see out what was most significant. The baseline variables of witnessing and victimization, we already know they're going to fall out cuz they're baseline. We already know that. Was respect. The most important predictor, respect. Think about that. How do you get respect as African-American male, period, but a male youth 16 in your society? How does he get respect? Got to get it though, cuz he's not going to roll up in a corner and ball and die somewhere. He needs to get respect. And as black people, I say this all the time out in here, that we can ill afford to swallow whole what is called cultural. We can ill afford to swallow that because there's poison in the cookies. And the only way to get the poison out of the cookies is not someone from the outside looking in, but those who are living in this to be able to look at themselves and assess it with a level of dignity, a level of safety that perpetuates a sense of well-being and healing. Thank you so much. All right. Now, according to Dr. Joy DeGruy, the lady we've just been watching in this video, she explains that black sharecropping, and that is exactly where I want to focus on, black sharecropping, was essentially slavery wearing a different coat. I think we understand really that, you know, after slavery officially ended, many formally enslaved black people or black families were then pushed to work on white-owned land in exchange for small share of crops or food. But, because they had no land, no wealth, and almost no legal protection, you know, they were trapped in that endless debt and dependency cycle, you know? Freedom existed on paper in that slavery has ended on paper, while economic control still remained very intact and very real in that sense of black sharecropping. The whip in an effort the whip might have been replaced with contracts, with intimidations, with segregation, and generally with poverty, you know? And this connects directly to the conversation about racism. How, you might ask. Racism is not just a personal dislike or prejudice. You know, it's not one person to another. Racism is prejudice backed by institutional power. Now, I often say racism is an equation that has power in it, almost equivalent to power. It is the ability for one group's bias to shape another group's opportunities, safety, freedom, and generally or the overall life outcome. This is why many scholars actually, and this is where I tend to lie in my thinking myself, they argue that black people, especially in societies that have been historically dominated by white institutional power, can absolutely hold prejudice against white people. But, but and this is the kickback, they are not in the same structural position as white people to enforce that prejudice into systems like policing, like the judiciary system, like banks, like houses, like education, or even government or government protection. So, it's not about holding a prejudice or holding a bias. It's not about you hating me and me not liking you back because sometimes I might not like you or you don't like this video, you don't like the person behind this video, but I might never know you or you might never know that I don't like you and so it doesn't affect the outcomes of your life. It doesn't affect your life. You continue to live your life as comfortably as you would do, you know? So, a black person can dislike someone. They can stereotype someone, but historically, the point here is they have not possessed the institutional machinery capable of systematically controlling white people's lives in the same way we can say white supremacy historically controlled black lives through slavery, through segregation, through sharecropping, redlining, mass incarcerations, discrimination, and colonialism generally, you know? And the that's why we often say the damage caused by white supremacy is too big that nothing nothing black people have ever done that comes close to that savagery of white supremacy. We don't have cases documented cases where black people have enslaved another people for 400 years in that extent, to that manner of damage that we have we see, we have seen in the history of the United States of America. We don't have cases where Africans left the continent, went to other people's land, grabbed those lands, put those people into concentration camps like how Europe did to Africa, subdivided those people. You know, disenfranchised them totally, governed them in a very horrific manner. You know, we don't have black people doing that to other peoples anywhere. In fact, they welcomed these people to their lands only to be met by the kind of treatment that ensued that welcoming. So, that difference is really crucial, you know? And so, when Dr. DiGrae here talks about systems like sharecropping, she's showing how racism operates beyond individual feelings. You know, it's not man-to-man or woman-to-woman. It's societal or beyond. It's structural in this case, you know? It shapes the society in economic terms, in justice terms, opportunity, and general outcomes, generational outcomes as well, you know? And that's why the discussion of racism is fundamentally in my perspective and that of many scholars is tied to power and not merely emotion or emotional biases and prejudices and not personal, at least not personal prejudice. Yeah. So, I believe that at the end of it all, a black person cannot be racist towards a white person because they are not in that position of power to determine the life outcomes of that person. You know, you can hate, you can prejudice. Even black people hate other black people. Even white people hate amongst themselves. But as long as you don't control my life, you can barely hate yourself and that's okay. But if it gets to a point where you can control what I do, control how, where, what I think and live and I get my justice and my food and everything then that is very, very different. Yeah. So, really that's my take. That's my opinion. Let me know what you think. Share with me your opinions. If you agree or if you would disagree in the comment section below. And if you like this video, you give it a thumbs up. Share it and subscribe to the channel and I'll see you in the next video.