What does freedom mean to you?
In America, the word freedom is counterfeit kindness, because we can talk the talk better than anyone in the world. Who doesn’t know Americans are free? Meanwhile, you’re trapped as a minority or when you’re poor. You cannot fix your minority status with money in all cases. In the words of Chris Rock, “Clarence Thomas in a jogging suit can’t even get a cab in DC.” The horrible thing is that Clarence Thomas doesn’t have a problem with this. He does not want to show anything about him that makes him different. He wants to be the white, cis, straight, male ideal by dismantling all the racial protections around him, and he’s been bitter about Affirmative Action since college, because no one treated him like he got into school on his own merit.
I am FURIOUS at Thomas because of this, but I also cannot place blame on him, either. Wanting to uphold the system is borne of ENORMOUS pain. Just enormous. Just imagine it. “You’re not that smart. You’re only here because you’re black.” Jesus H. Christ on a pogo stick you have GOT to be kidding me. White people fucked him up long before he graduated from college. It’s hard to imagine Thomas as a kid, but if you stand in that pain and really feel it, you can see why he’s such a mess today. Clarence Thomas didn’t go crazy all by himself. White people helped tremendously. If you cannot understand why that dude is COMPLETELY messed up, it’s because he’s trying to uphold a system not built for him AND saying that it doesn’t have to change because it was good enough to make him a Supreme Court judge. It’s the equivalent of being spanked.
You don’t realize as a child when you’re being spanked that it sets up how you’re going to treat other children for life……….. If you don’t go to a MOUNTAIN of therapy. As in, if you were spanked as a child, you probably think it’s okay to hit your kids, too. I mean, you turned out all right, right? The last time my mother spanked me was when I realized being hit was bullshit and I was bigger than her. I didn’t hit her back, or strike first. I was just strong enough to wriggle out of her grasp. My father spanked me, too, but that’s only when I was really little. As I got older and he could reason with me, this changed to deep discussions about behavior and consequences. Neither of them spanked me again. But was it abnormal of them? Of course not. It was like, 1981 or something. Different times, different prevailing attitude on discipline from experts.
Corporal punishment is the only institutional pain I can think of that transcends race and money. In Texas, my favorite way this is expressed is “boy, I am gon’ slap the white right off if you don’t behave.” I would never say that to a child now, but I heard it in the grocery store growing up…… Therefore, if the prevailing attitudes toward corporal punishment hadn’t changed and I’d become a parent, I probably would have spanked my kids, too. It didn’t start with me, it wouldn’t end with me. Culture changed around me.
And that’s what’s happening now. The institutional cycle of parents and children learning what it’s like to punish and be punished is something universal that just might explain the pain of institutional racism to white people. What white people don’t realize is that their hate toward minorities teaches minorities how to act amongst themselves. It takes a mountain of work to have self esteem when minorities just aren’t as good as white people and homosexuality is a sin and trans people don’t exist.
But we’re “free.”
Stories That Are All True 