Dark Racism 2021
Dark Racism is combining in-groups through linguistics and economics. It’s the understanding that economic oppression due to race is real oppression and linguistics or slurs only further, perpetuate, and justify that oppression. The following is how we have to reconstruct racism between blacks and whites in America to be mutually beneficial in the new millennium.
It’s important to know sociologically that race doesn’t exist, it’s socially constructed. The difference in the skin comes because black people have more melanin. Hating someone for black skin is just as arbitrary as hating someone for their eye color. A good example of this is Jane Elliot’s Color Blind Experiment. If you hate another “race” you just show your ignorance.
You can get kids not to like certain foods by saying “yuck” when they put it in their mouth. You can actively mold a toddler’s diet if you’re persistent enough. The same thing is with racism. If you teach that arbitrary distinctions (i.e. race) make people subservient to you (i.e. less of people) then you are indoctrinated, biased, and can’t have an accurate view of the world.
In Malcolm Gladwell’s “Blink,” he takes the test about black and white faces and he tests positive for bias against blacks, but he’s not white, Malcolm is Hawaiian. The experiment in the book “Blink” shows everyone is inherently a little racist against black people. The question is, what are we to do about it?
Institutionalized Racism
Black people do have it worse off. The cards are not stacked in their favor. There is the percentage of black people in the population, 11%, and the disproportionate population in prison is 50%. Black people have to deal with DWB, driving while black. Then we have the real problem of institutionalized racism where blacks are less likely to get a loan. Blacks are likely to get inadequate health care, experience job discrimination, housing discrimination, or racial profiling in their lifetime.
The statistics to make it to adulthood are so bad that a high percentage of blacks don’t make it past 25. 25 is a magic number in criminal justice. If you don’t have a criminal record by 25 you’re likely never to have one. The same goes for surviving.
History of Racism
You cannot understand the history of America without understanding it’s racism. It’s inherent and woven into the very fabric of society. Some may believe that slavery ended with the Emancipation Proclamation but the truth is slavery hasn’t ended, it’s just evolved. The 13th amendment says you may not have slavery unless it’s punishment for a crime. This is a loophole and all that is required to enslave black people is to charge them with a crime, and that’s exactly what has happened.
We didn’t outlaw slavery. We just made it so that you had to be criminalized and charged with a crime. If you want slaves out of black people all you have to do is change the law to charge them with a crime. This tactic was used right after the 13 amendments and still continues today. Slavery in the 13th amendment is a loophole that is exploited.
Criminalizing Blacks
Blacks were arrested in mass for extremely minor crimes like loitering or vagrancy. The movie “Birth of a Nation” created another wave of terrorism against blacks in the form of the KKK and portrayed blacks as animals and savages. They depicted the negro as being out of control and after white women. It was the “menacing negro male evil that had to be banished.” Between reconstruction and WW2 there were rampant lynchings. “Gone with the Wind” was the biggest movie at the time and is now considered racist for its depictions of black people.
When it became unacceptable for mobs to terrorize blacks segregation and Jim Crow laws were introduced which relegated blacks to permanent second-class status. Blacks were experimented on, lied to, and given syphilis in the Tuskegee study by the government. Civil rights leaders were seen as criminals intentionally violating segregation laws. The FBI killed the black panthers and Dr. King was seen as a criminal by the media and FBI. Black people were systematically discriminated against legally by the government and people.
The War on Minorities
After the civil rights act was passed, mass incarceration took off with Nixon and the war on drugs. America decided to criminalize the activity instead of treating it as a healthcare issue like it should be. America’s racially motivated double standards were evident. Marijuana was used for Mexican repatriation and cocaine was made illegal because it was seen as making black men aggressive and sexually attracted to young white women. The CIA flooded black streets with drugs. They made much harsher penalties for crack cocaine because blacks had it and made powder cocaine ‘a slap on the wrist’ because it was used by wealthy white businessmen.
The Nixon campaign in 1968 and the Nixon white house after that had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities we could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about drugs? Of course, we did. - John Ehrlichman
How do you get an unjust system? You make cocaine illegal then flood the streets with it. Then you send people to prison instead of rehabilitation and charge them with a crime. The result is that you get a slave out of it. Corporations are the ones most benefiting from prison labor.
Blacks became approving of their criminality. We have educated the public over years to accept that black men in particular and black people, in general, are criminals. Today, the prison population has exploded due to three-strike laws. Black people in the US are being arrested and imprisoned at more than 5 times the rate of white people. Police profile and arrest blacks to the point where the black population is ten percent and the prison population is 50%. A system that produces this outcome is inherently racist.
Due to drug laws, America has 5% of the world’s population and holds 25% of the world’s prisoners. 1 out of 100 people will end up in prison, that’s a lot. 3 out of 100 people were dying during the Corona pandemic and we shut everything down. Should we really be housing 3 million prisoners?
White Privilege
Today, besides the overall judicial system, blacks are disadvantaged throughout society. To help people understand the black struggle it important to recognize white privilege. For example, black people are less likely to get a job and are more likely to have to assimilate at work. If you’re white and you do nothing wrong, nothing happens, but if you’re black you’re likely to get harassed; that’s your white privilege. For example, it’s common for white people to call the cops on black people to scare, deter, or incriminate blacks for doing nothing wrong.
Humans are like dogs in that if they have been raised wrong or abused they are more aggressive and antisocial. You have to shelter, feed, and love the dog back to normalcy, or to their loving self. In the same respect, black people are abused dogs. When a black man is selling crack in the streets it’s not looked on as a helpless puppy that’s trying to make his way. It’s looked on as a deserving reprimand and punishment.
The truth is society makes this behavior profitable with the war on drugs which drives up prices and focuses on punishment instead of rehabilitation for addicts. We don’t give citizens, let alone blacks, the necessary tools for independence when they get out of being institutionalized. With for-profit prisons, capitalists make money from keeping blacks criminals and imprisoned. Especially with the most expensive military in the world, the criticism is America has become a society of punishment and not a culture of care due to racism.
The whole society has become disadvantaged due to America’s racism but blacks are still most affected. Due to America never giving proper reparations and institutionalized racism, blacks are still disproportionately poor. Affirmative action helps to correct this but it’s still not good enough. John Stewart put it this way, black people have been fighting for equality while white people have been building equity. There are historic examples. Blacks faced racism in the homestead acts, the New Deal excluded black people, and black wall street was destroyed.
In the 21st century, blacks experienced housing discrimination. It is hard for them to create equity due to discrimination on loans and blacks are more likely to get a higher interest rate. Due to this blacks have been unable to build wealth over generations as whites have.
Black Lives Matter
In response to all this discrimination and blacks being killed by the police at a disproportionately higher rate, the Black Lives Matter movement was born. It is very likely that you’ll be charged, entrapped, or harassed by the police if you are black. For an example of this please listen to Amber Ruffin’s stories about her encounters with police. Some stories to look into include the death of Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, Laquan McDonald, Tamir Rice, Alton Sterling, Breonna Taylor, Freddie Gray, Rekia Boyd, Walter Scott, and George Floyd.
With the death of George Floyd, we can no longer say that real racism is just economic racism because racism cost a man his life. Dark racism recognizes this tragedy but it’s almost as if this type of racism will take care of itself. We know it’s wrong, we see it, but have to ask the question, does this happen to wealthy black men? Maybe if we isolate being black we find it’s a combination of being black and poor (instead of just black) that you’re more likely to go to prison.
Still, the police have a dark history in America. Some argue that due to America’s history with slavery the police have always been a tool of oppression for the negro by the naturally racist state. Police racism is institutionalized racism.
The American state was born in racism subjecting blacks to slavery. The police were used to round up slaves. Then the police were used to enforce Jim Crow laws. Now the judicial system is racist with half the prison population being black while only making up ten percent of the general population. Today Blacks are killed at a higher rate or per capita than whites.
The system is racist and it seems to come down to policing communities. There are no national databases on (for example) how many shootings by cops there are. There is no registry for cops that have been fired due to misconduct. It seems there needs to be better data collection and policing policies. The American police are not addressing their training that is enabling a racist system.
In response, Black Lives Matter has called to “defund the police.” Basically, the movement recognizes the need for police, they are not saying abolish the police, but rather reallocate resources to other services. Defunding the police means taking money away from a fundamentally oppressive system that is doing the over-policing of black communities. Take many of the problems and resources that are in police hands and budget and give it to other community services.
It’s not about “no police,” it’s about reallocating resources and responsibility. Most 911 calls are not about uniform crimes. We already have emergency services for fire and health. The police are good to apprehend criminals but they aren’t used to deal with the mentally ill, which is an example of a reallocation of resources to mental health service with have caseworkers instead of officers. This could also be applied to substance abuse. Instead of giving abusers a criminal record from a cop, abusers are treated as a patient. Again, This is what most people see when they say America has become a society of punishment and not a culture of care with a shrinking university system, overblown military, burgeoning prison population, and a racist judicial system.
Behavioral Poverty
This all comes together to make the basis of dark racism. Dark racism is using racism to teach and/or entertain while giving historical context. For it to be “dark racism” you have to recognize the history of the racial group. This writing is the American black people’s story. To get over racism and come together as a community it’s important to make jokes, entertain, or teach in a way that recognizes the past.
Dark racism is also the realization that real oppression is economic oppression. I can understand why black people get so offended by the word nigga if it was used against them negatively as a derogatory slur especially due to modern socio-economic conditions. What I don’t get is why they perpetuate a self-detrimental economic ideology when economics is the real problem with racism. If you have a million dollars as a black man and I call you nigger it’s way less effective than if you’re impoverished.
The black community often reflects behavioral poverty. Ask anybody who is rich and most will say it’s due to financial discipline. Meanwhile, all these black rappers wear chains and flash cash when they should be emulating the opposite of fiscal responsibility to their community. We have popularized and assimilated the disenfranchisement and delegitimization of black people and this is nowhere more evident than hip-hop. The quintessential hip-hop artist is a black male youth that raps about his criminal history.
We already talked about how blacks are disadvantaged, but it seems they don’t recognize the irony of their representation. To be fair, given the odds, blacks celebrate with displays of excess when they become wealthy but there is a big difference between flashing cash, cars, and chains and contributing to your community’s economic and social wellbeing. I don’t love watching black folk trapping. They have to make it as an outlaw because the system failed to legitimize them. I want to create economic conditions so that black people are not disenfranchised and can live and thrive in any community in America.
Whose fault?
Is the “N-word” a self-inflicted, self-deprecating affliction of control? Basically, is the double meaning of the word “nigga” black people thinking they control so little in a white man’s world that what they can control is how white people address them or rather how they can’t address them? I honestly don’t think the word nigga is about race but (rather understandably) about control or power in an otherwise white-centric world.
In this respect, racism is a mental cage with an ingroup morality where whites are not invited into black people’s world. This creates contempt and resentment that results in different “races” like whites and blacks fighting amongst each other. This harboring of discontent is deliberate and purposeful by wealthier interests in America to keep us from focusing on classism which is the real problem in America and why institutionalized racism exists.
Are You In The Ingroup?
If black people could they should just stop saying nigga all together, but that’s never gonna happen. The good part is that the meaning of words change. Like many other words “nigga” no longer has the same meaning. “Punk” used to mean burnt corn and linked is a list of words that changed from positive to negative and vice versa.
I think the fact that white people can’t or shouldn’t say the word nigga is more racist than the use of the word now. It creates an ingroup morality that excludes people based on “race.” The word nigga is positive for blacks but negative for whites. Only white people can’t say “nigga” but it’s also nationalistic because white looking rapper Fat Joe can say it without backlash.
My favorite is when black people don’t think they can’t be racist. They’re just like everyone else that makes arbitrary distinctions and “black people” not only differentiate skin tone (black vs. brown skin) but also a difference between “nigga” and “nigger.” “Nigga” is more friendly where “nigger” is more vindictive. The historical relevance to nigger is prominent in black people’s minds as a racial slur where nigga is traditionally used for endearment.
The Solution
The solution is to change the meaning of the “N-word.” Just imagine, I started referring to all my white friends as “my nigga” to the point my black friends want me to call them “my nigga” but I won’t because they’re black. This can be done by fixing the ingroup/outgroup morality of the word nigga by white people saying it to each other as a term of endearment.
White people need to say “nigga” among their white ingroup/white friends as if the word meant “friend.” This could be done by white people relentlessly calling their white friends “my nigga.” This would dissolve the word “nigga” as a negative racial slur if it came to be known as “friend” and would make it inclusionary instead of being exclusionary. Black and white people would no longer use it in a derogatory sense because it would counteract the intent if it was used pejoratively.
If I say the word “nigga” and blacks are offended, I’m not saying black people can’t be upset, I’m asking that they forgive me. If you like how the word nigga divides black and white people by all means hate me for what I’m trying to do here but if you wanna help bridge the divide understand what I’m saying and help to transform how everybody sees this word then I would seriously consider a societal effort to change the meaning of the word “nigga.”
Pay to Play
Dark Racism is about prioritizing racism and focusing on and fixing the result of historic, institutionalized discrimination. I’m okay with types of prejudice like racist jokes or using the N-word (as a term of endearment). Prejudice should be tolerated and encouraged to be expressed. This helps us identify racism and address it. There should be a verbal backlash. But discrimination, treating people differently and badly due to the color of their skin, should be abolished, reprimanded, and shamed. Dark racism allows for prejudice but not discrimination.
Dark Racism couldn’t be more relevant in this time of “cancel culture.” People are too sensitive and you do one thing wrong and you’re gone. We’re human, we all make mistakes. It’s to the point ignorance is called racism and we can’t even discuss, grow, and learn. Dark racism is still racism but it’s used as a tool to bridge the divide and ultimately bring people together.
Dark Racism is like having a swear jar where you use racial slurs and give the money to those bigoted groups at the end of each week; or the use of racial slurs strategically to constructively change their meaning, as discussed. If you did a racist jokes stand-up special (e.g.) and donated the proceeds to charities that support those marginalized groups, I would argue that it’s not racist, it’s merely theater. It’s dark racism when you add history to give context to those groups’ oppression.
A good example of this would be the holiday special of “Weekend Update” with Micheal Che and Colin Jost. For the holiday special, Colin and Micheal exchange jokes that they have never seen before. Micheal (who is black) makes Colin (who is white) say some racist jokes that Colin jokes will get him hurt. The jokes do however bring light to real racism in America.
Reparations
Dark Racism is essentially treating others with respect and dignity using traditional racial slurs with the ultimate goal of repurposing the word from a negative to a positive connotation. Besides having white people say it to change the meaning to “friend,” we could also institute a reparations program that recognizes America’s racist history and pays to fix it. The American government needs to address its history of institutionalized racism. It’s necessary as a people to be considerate if not intentionally better to blacks because of the racism they face, their disenfranchisement, and historic economic opportunities.
Another way to change the definition and use of the word nigger would be to make it the name of a government reparations program. The government could change the definition of the word nigger by intentionally making it the name of a reparations gift. “National Intergenerational Grievance Gift and Education Reparation” or N.I.G.G.E.R. would be reparations where the recipient gets free college and land. This would effectively change the definition of “nigger,” and would dissolve the ingroup morality because it would also act as an apology recognizing the history of their oppression.
In reality, if this were pushed this would probably end up in everyone receiving free college as Abraham Lincoln intended. Lincoln started many free colleges but they started to charge after segregation ended.
Long Way To Go
If Dark Racism works we will successfully change the definition of racial slurs. It’d be like having your black friend over for his birthday, you got him an awesome gift, so you tell him “happy birthday nigger” when he goes to thank you. It’d be like your black friend got out of debt so you said “congratulation nigga.” It flips the meaning on its head.
It’d be like your friend winning the strategy game and saying “You won because you’re a nigger,” meaning smart. It’d be like giving a black person the best interest rate you’ve ever given anybody as a salesman and saying “that’s because you’re a nigger.” Again, giving a positive connotation and, I know, we have a long way to go to fix institutional racism before we could say things like that as a culture. Again black people use the word nigga as a term of endearment while white people automatically say it negatively. We need to correct the linguistics so it’s always positive and it doesn’t even have a negative connotation.
Conclusion
To conclude, laws are put in place by the rich to control the poor with the consent of the citizenry who are usually preoccupied with their own lives. The real point of dark racism is to realize what really divides us is economic inequality and the poor and middle class, no matter what your color, have more in common than two black people of vastly different wealth. I would rather black people get called the N-word with wealth than live in poverty and people act like that’s the way it’s supposed to be. Getting blacks their 40 acres is more important than the guy on the street saying the N-word.
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