• 55 Posts
  • 4.42K Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: May 7th, 2024

help-circle

















  • To me, woke isn’t “educated”. It’s more in line with “aware”.

    Give you an example. I’m white. At the time of Rodnry King I would have been about 9 years old. So, my whole outlook of the world is based on the adults around me, and the tv.

    Rodney King was a one of those pivoting points for America. My family was shocked by what they saw. Police? Abusing their authority? That’s unheard of!

    And at the time, most white people had ZERO idea that was a regular occurance. The video tape is what changed that. The woman who filmed it shined the first light onto injustice that had been going on for centuries.

    At the time I went to an all white school. I think there was 1 black kid. He was 2 grades above me, so I never really talked to him.

    The next year, when the Rodney King trial was going on, I had changed schools. I was in a mostly black school now. And it was a TOTAL shift from what I had known.

    I started learning that I saw Rodney King as four corrupt cops who did an outragious, totally out of character set of actions. I saw it as an isolated incident in a rare time of cops being violent against someone.

    What I was then told is story after story from students that never made the news. Stories of their own lives. Stories of our local cops doing similar things. Maybe not as harsh as 4 cops beating one man, but we all know today the types of stories I heard in 3rd grade.

    Point is, yes, I was educated back then on the harsh realities that black families go through, and have gone through, for generations.

    But the difference between being educated, and being aware, is that I told my sister everything I heard back then.

    Two years ago in my apartment building my upstairs neighbor was being absurdly loud.

    I was on the phone with my sister at the time. She suggested I call the cops on them. I said “No. I want them to be quiet. I don’t want them dead.”

    And this is where educated vs aware comes in. My sister had been educated just as I was in the 90s what had been happening. I was aware NOT to call the cops. My sister thought I was being difficult and dramatic.

    Now, I don’t KNOW the cops would have shot my neighbors. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe they would have written a fine and left. But the fact that it’s a very real possibility is still something I’m very aware of. While my sister had been educated, she isn’t aware on a day to day basis that her life is different than others purely because of her background. It’s not something that she’s thinking about, even if she’s been taught.

    Thats educated vs aware.


  • Did they though? 1860s was slavery, and there was a huge war. Bloodiest war still to this day in American history. With the end result being that slavery ended.

    Now, you can say racism didn’t end after that, and you’d be right. Racism never ended to this day. But on the scale of atrocities, racism, then slavery, then mass extermination camps.

    So, if the extermination camps are farther down the line than slavery, and America DID NOT get away with slavery, then your logic does not hold up.

    I’m not defending any of what happened. I’m just saying if Hitler looked at an already failed policy, then he couldn’t possibly use it as justification with what he did.

    A far better line of logic is saying he used Americas killing of Native Americans as the blueprint for his camps. Which he absolutely did, and which America absolutely did get away with. Still to this day Native American population numbers just might be the lowest of all the races, simply because of how very very close to total extermination they came 200 years ago.