Your article made my heart sad. Apparently, if someone jogs by, you see a jogger, unless it’s a black man, then you see a threat. WTH???
I remember one time I was in NYC and this black man had dropped his crutch and I picked it up and gave it to him and he thanked me. Then he said I was the only person who did that for like 15 minutes. And I’m like — are you kidding me? To me, he was an injured person who needed help picking up his crutch. I was like — how scary is a man with a frickin’ crutch??? Apparently if he’s black, he’s still pretty scary! It’s insane but it’s reality.
You are talking about a reality that most black people have experienced. I’ve experienced it myself when I’m with black friends. I’m not black, I’m Indian, and I also have experienced racism, but it’s at a whole different level than what I’ve seen black friends go through.
Only caveat — George Zimmerman is actually Hispanic, with some black ancestry on his Peruvian mother’s side. Her grandfather was black, so Zimmerman would have been considered black under Jim Crow laws and in apartheid South Africa as well as many other places.
Which is another odd aspect of racism in the world… someone who is half Asian can claim to be either white or Asian, someone who is half Hispanic can do the same. But someone has to be less than 1/32 black to claim to not be black? Weird.
BTW, the racism against blacks is even worse in places like China. Here’s an article from the BBC about how they’re being evicted due to Covid-19 fears; I’d also read how they were being banned from restaurants.
Even in Africa — in Mauritania they only outlawed slavery in 1981. Prior to that, Muslim lighter-skinned people held dark skinned African pagans as slaves. But even after they legally outlawed it, because most of the ex-slaves are illiterate, they were not freed for decades.
Yet humanity originated in Africa. The first great civilizations were African. Anyone who’s been to a black church knows just how “scary” black people are. My elderly mom, when she needed help at the store, the guy who treated her with the most courtesy and kindness was black. Some of the kindest, most loving people I’ve known are black. Yet somehow they are scary? It’s all insanity.
Here is a NYTimes timeline… it’s really just unbelievable.
