Reading The New Jim Crow has been hard. I felt very upset at what I was reading and I realized that this entire semester of race and ethnicity has brought up some feelings that as a person of color I have experienced before but not to this depth. Every day I have to reconcile immense feelings of rage towards the man oppressor with feelings of love for humankind. Every day this struggle becomes increasingly harder as I see the ignorance and hatred of others as injustice reigns supreme. Oh and oppressors is just a nice codeword for white people, I won’t lie. However that’s an unfair generalization, so I don’t make it. White people are not inherently oppressive.
On a related note, Rick Santorum is going to be at the hotel I work at. I’m very glad I won’t be there. Which leads me to think and ask, what has the Republican party and conservative America ever done for people of color? Easy answer, you’re thinking they ended slavery. However, I would argue that to compare the modern Republican party with the historical one would be inaccurate. This is also true for the modern Democratic party. The modern parties are not better or worse but different. I would also argue that ending slavery was primarily a political move aimed at crippling the southern confederates, not an ethical move to end a human rights injustice. I honestly feel that the poor white voter might be the most brainwashed person in America. Race has been used to create a dynamic in which the poor White American sees the poor Black American as an other. The reality? They both are facing the same plight, however the socioeconomic elite have convinced the poor White demographic that simply being White makes them better than Blacks of the similar situation. This, in my opinion, results in people who vote against their best interest simply because they still feel that the Democratic party is a Black party for their previous support of the Civil Rights Movement.