Identity: What you see and what is…The Color White

(Don Allen in photo) ” I’m a walking nightmare, an arsenal of doom
I kill conversation as I walk into the room
I’m a three line whip, I’m the sort of thing they ban
I’m a walking disaster, I’m a demolition man.”
(Lyrics from Demolition Man by the Police.)

“Don’t get caught sleeping. I know all you see is a black man – someone that you were told is less than you and that you were better than. Don’t be fooled by the color of my skin – I just look like this and for my ancestors, I will make everything you took mine; I will right each wrong one-at-a-time, you will not beat me, or lynch me for I am a man, a man just like you – who will multiply an overtake your color of white. Soon, you to will feel like they,” (Don Allen from The Color White).

by Donald Allen, OurBlackNews.com (Scholars Corner)

White privilege is not having to be told that you aren’t making friends at a predominantly white college campus because you are “scary looking”. It’s not having to walk around with a “yes Massa” attitude and a shit-eating grin on your face to be considered approachable.

White privilege is being able to be as ignorant or as educated on racial and social justice issues as you please and never having to feel truly ostracized for it. In a system built to benefit white folks those of us who speak up against injustice are slammed and insulted by racist jokes, most of the time behind our backs. Its never having to be told you’re being too sensitive, that you’re playing into a paradigm of angry black man, that slavery and blah blah, blah happened forever ago so its time to move on, or being accused of always “pulling the race card.”

In October 2007 Fox News reported “DNA Discoverer: Blacks Less Intelligent Than Whites.” James D. Watson, 79, co-discoverer of the DNA helix and winner of the 1962 Nobel Prize in medicine, told the Sunday Times of London that he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours — whereas all the testing says not really.” He recognized that the prevailing belief was that all human groups are equal, but that “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true.”

There is a problem within America. It started a very long time ago. European intellectuals who held power, wealth and fame deemed a person with black or a darker pigmentation in their skin was considered less than a human being or a lower form of life. The European mindset can be seen today in American politics, education, economic development and the criminal “just-us” system.

To show definite evidence of racial divide in America – look no future than a cornucopia full of common day facts that seem the affect people with a darker skin color then those with lighter, or white skin. Black Americans are prone to have the highest rates of health disparities, inadequate health care and a lack of knowledge about preventative medicine. Our life expectancies are not even close to being proportionate to whites.

Race also plays a major role in America’s systematic mass incarceration of dark-skinned people. The Salon reports the U.S. imprisons around 730 in every 100,000 people — the highest incarcerated population in the world (mostly people of color), according to the Department of Justice. Once again, the U.S. has beaten any other nation in terms of its number of prisoners and prisons. There are currently around 2.2 million people behind bars, “equal to a city the size of Houston.” There are 4,575 prisons in operation in the U.S. – more than four times the number of second-place Russia at 1,029.

From the times before the Harlem Renaissance to the present day, prominent Negroes can be observed whiten themselves to be accepted in the mainstream. Celebrities purposely lightening their skin tones, mannerisms and language send the wrong message to America’s black youth: To be right, you have to be white.

This cultural-epidermis conflict™ has delayed social-environmental development to a point where the mainstream only sees “black skin” and in most cases, unless they (whites) know you personally, they will identify you, or blacks as bad, untrustworthy and unequal to a lighter shade of skin color.

This is not the first time, nor the last time skin color has conflicted with identity.

African psychiatrist, philosopher and revolutionary Frantz Fanon wrote, “In an attempt to escape the association of blackness with evil, the black man dons a white mask, or thinks of himself as a universal subject equally participating in a society that advocates an equality supposedly abstracted from personal appearance. Cultural values are internalized, or “epidermalized” into consciousness, creating a fundamental disjuncture between the black man’s consciousness and his body. Under these conditions, the black man is necessarily alienated from himself,” (Black Skin, White Masks).

In 2013, white privilege and the black persons escapism from his cultural-epidermis is killing the American black.