I never said anything about who you or I were personally responsible for. When I say "we", I mean our society. Our society punished blacks. Our nation enslaved them. Our government pushed them into ghettos and abused them and denied them the same opportunities afforded to whites. These abuses happened openly in the recent past and continue to happen now on a smaller, less overt scale. And even though most of the individuals who committed those acts may have since died off, the organizations under which they worked still exist and the structural systemic problems they created continue to linger.
I'm not saying that you and I are personally responsible for them, but to deny them is silly.
Thank you! This is what I think many people miss. Racism is systemic. You may not personally be responsible for the systems that are in place, you may not personally have ever done anything to discriminate against anyone, but you benefit from the racist systems that are in place. It's been proven that a white man with a felony is more likely to be hired than a black man with out a criminal history. Lending practices, even recently, have targeted minorities, regardless of credit worthiness.
A Racial Penalty? Toyota to Pay Over $20 Million Settlement for Charging Black Customers More Interest for Car Loans - Atlanta Black Star This was 2016 not 1956. Redlining is still going on. The story related in this thread about cops camping out in Mexican area's to harass citizens and non citizens? In Baltimore this was found:
In Baltimore, a city that is 63 percent black, the Justice Department found that 91 percent of those arrested on discretionary offenses like “failure to obey” or “trespassing” were African-American. Blacks make up 60 percent of Baltimore’s drivers but account for 82 percent of traffic stops. Of the 410 pedestrians who were stopped at least 10 times in the five and a half years of data reviewed, 95 percent were black.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/11/us/baltimore-police-bias-report.html
In short, the Baltimore Police Department engaged in a pattern of stopping African-Americans without any real justification. Between 2010 and 2015, there were three hundred thousand police stops, of which less than four per cent resulted in a citation or arrest.
Forty-four per cent of those stops occurred in two small, mostly black neighborhoods, and ninety-five per cent of people who were stopped ten times or more were African-American.
The Ordinary Outrage of the Baltimore Police Report
Most people don't want you to feel guilty or bad, or internalize that. We'd like you to have some compassion and be outraged at injustices that target us, and help work to dismantle the system and abusers who do use it to target and oppress. We'd like to see someone outraged when an innocent black person gets killed, instead of searching their background and using the fact they did something in the fifth grade to justify and disregard the harm done to them present day. Guilt and condemnation, doesn't serve anyone. As Christians we shouldn't be trying to pick up that mantle or place it on anyone either. I'd like to see white folks as interested in seeing that PoC get justice and fair treatment. Keep your guilt. Guilt might make some feel better (I can't be a bad person, I feel guilty about this) but I'd rather see action to stop the injustices.
