Systemic Oppression Made Clear

In 2020, can you see me now?

The world celebrated the metaphor of clear vision for 2020. We brought the year in with promise and hope. 2020 was going to be the year of breakthrough. Well, as the cliché goes, “be careful what you ask for.”

Sometimes the path to a breakthrough is a breakdown. In that case, we should expect greatness because the breakdown has been upon us since the year began. We see flaws in our systems globally, culturally, and personally.

Clarity Is Not Comfort

While 2020 is delivering on clarity, we are learning that the price of clarity is discomfort. The moral of the story is that you can build wealth from oppression, but not wellness. In the current light, we have to acknowledge that the United States has never been well. All of its systems were designed out of a toxic ideology of oppression.

The danger of being in a toxic system is that our minds have to adapt to the system. We don’t become our authentic selves. We become our survival selves. We try to change the system with a recognition that our efforts may cost us our lives. We ignore the system and become its victim, which also costs us our lives. The third option is to live with a psychological duality of participation and resistance that leaves us distant from our authentic selves.

Gatekeepers

The United States of America is falling apart because it was built on an inhumane system that requires the perpetuation of inhumanity to exist. The desensitization of separating children from their parents and putting them in cages, the ignorance of oppression of native people placed on reservations, and the tolerance for authority killing brown bodies can only happen in a place that is committed to systemic oppression. Moreover, they can’t happen without the majority of white people playing their role as gatekeepers of white supremacy.

Disenfranchised white people have always been used in the United States as gatekeepers to maintain the system of oppression. They have never been privy to the benefits of wealth, only to the promise not to live a life as disempowered as slaves. Even the most disenfranchised white people have always had bodily autonomy, the most significant difference between them and Black people.

White people have always been disenfranchised by circumstances, including poverty, disability, or lack of mastery of the English language. However, Black people have been targeted for disempowerment. No matter how robust their life circumstances, they would never have body autonomy.

Systems of oppression were explicitly designed to maintain control over how Black people navigated the physical world. The harshest retaliation was utilized to maintain control over Black bodies throughout systems of education, justice, and medicine, in particular, long after emancipation.

During and after slavery, right up to today, poor and middle-class white people have maintained a system of oppression that builds white wealth. The path to white wealth has been Black death. Gatekeepers have been permitted to strike the blows so that the wealthy keep their hands clean since slavery.

The World in Black and White

A white body can move about in the United States unencumbered. White men can walk in any room and establish comfort. Bodily autonomy is built in the system and is less noticeable than overt acts of oppression. Yet, it is the most significant privilege. Physical safety and emotional support yield a plethora of advantages that do not require an act of discrimination.

The reason white people could use their bodies as barriers during recent protests was that we all understand the inherent code of white body autonomy. White bodies are free and untouchable; Black bodies are not.

Over 60 million Black bodies were stripped from the continent of Africa. A significant portion died in the middle passage. Many more were castrated, lynched, or beaten to death for their refusal to succumb to slavery. The generations that survived have lived with the constant threat of physical and psychological death as we continuously bury Black bodies at highly disproportionate rates.

Black bodies have been used as medical experiments and placed on the front lines of war. Drugs find their way into Black communities with ease, while prescription pain relief is damn near impossible to acquire. Black bodies are incarcerated, left for dead in hospitals, and murdered in broad daylight by the gatekeepers.

Meanwhile, generations after generations of Europeans have immigrated to America to experience bodily autonomy denied them in their homelands. The price for their and their children’s children’s autonomy was for them to be gatekeepers of white supremacy. So, yes, a white mass murderer can easily be taken into custody alive, but a Black alleged larcenist cannot.

The white supremacy script

Gatekeepers make sure that whiteness remains central as a commodity. So, “all lives matter” and “Make America Great” show solidarity for the gate keepers to maintain their covenant with white supremacy that assures bodily autonomy. Whiteness must remain central for gatekeepers to feel protected, safe, and separated from those targeted for oppression.

Gatekeepers are taught to fear people who don’t look like them and to respond to the fear with control. Fear jobs will be taken, interracial relationships will invade bloodlines, and livelihood will be disrupted by sharing space. Fear prevents gatekeepers from questioning the system. The suspicion remains targeted toward people who don’t look like them.

Gatekeepers could not allow Colin Kaepernick to use his body to protest any more than four police officers could allow George Floyd to breathe. Gatekeepers are hypersensitive to responses to oppression while being wholly habituated to oppression itself.

Breaking the Spell of White Supremacy

White people’s outrage over the public murder of African American George Floyd on May 25, 2020, indicates that a spell is being broken. Generations of white people have witnessed and participated in the lynching of Black bodies without outrage.

The KKK evolved post-slavery to use extreme violence to maintain the system of white supremacy. Every white person doesn’t have to show up to the lynching to benefit from the violence. All gatekeepers have to do is condone it with their silence. But, in the wake of George Floyd’s death, something different happened.

But, in the wake of George Floyd’s death, something different happened.

White people broke their covenant with white supremacy when they used their privilege of body autonomy to protect the bodies of Black protesters. White people holding up signs that stated Black lives matter broke a specific code embedded within the foundation of America.

Black bodies have never mattered. For even a small mass of white people to publicly declare otherwise presents a rebellion similar to the colonial revolt. White people have essentially stated that they no longer want to live under a system that protects them through the use of extreme and unjust violence. That’s the beginning of a revolution.

Now Lean into The Discomfort

The majority of white people never have to be in a room with people who don’t look like them. If people who don’t look like them are in the room, they are typically in a position of no authority and at the mercy of a system not built for them.

The majority of white people don’t have to spend the majority of their money outside of their communities. They never have to leave their community, and, consequently, have immunity to discomfort. On the occasion that the world does not reflect their immediate interest, they feel oppressed because they are used to the system working in their favor.

So, now the difficult work begins. As white people recognize their systemic disconnection from humanity, we can work together to raise the vibration of humanity and make life better for everyone.

Balance the Narrative

No problem exists in the lives of people who have been systemically oppressed that doesn’t exist for white people. Systemic oppression doesn’t stop at race. It harms all of humanity. The narrative about the experiences differ, but the experiences do not.

In fact, in the United States, the manifestation of oppression is predictable. If the gatekeepers want to know their near future, all they have to do is look at the lives of the people whose necks they are stepping on. Several examples follow.

• Single-parent families. One of the first “dysfunctions” identified in Black America by White America post desegregation was having “broken families.” A decade later, the same system of oppression that created family instability in Black America manifested in white families. The experiences that evolve out of systemic oppression are narrated as pathological in Black communities and normalized for the gatekeepers. Thus, as white families became increasingly disrupted the term “single-parent families” took the place of broken families.
• Male-female relationship issues. Scholarly papers and research have been conducted on Black male-female relationships. Black men separated from their families were pathologized without considering the impact of slavery and Jim Crow systems. Once white men began abandoning their families, we normalized online dating. We don’t have a plethora of research on why white men abandon their families.
• Special needs children. For decades, school systems referred to Black children as “retarded.” Now that classrooms are packed with white children who have difficulty learning within an oppressive environment, we label children with compassion. “Special needs” students sound like people who deserve to have needs met. Retarded children deserve to be displaced.
• Drug addiction. When drugs infiltrated Black communities, we labeled people junkies and sent them to prison. When drugs infiltrated white communities, we treated “addiction.”
• Crime. We only use the term “Black on Black crime,” never white on white crime. All races perpetrate intra-racial crimes. All races have significant crime rates in America. Yet, only Black crime is identified by race.

The point is that whatever goes wrong in the white community is normalized rather than analyzed. Yet, nothing happens in the lives of Black people that won’t cross zip codes.

Mental dis-ease has been on the rise for decades throughout the United States. Divorce, addiction, depression, anxiety, and collective dread are cultural infestations in the United States of America.

Direct Your Attention

The most effective tool the oppressor uses is the ability to direct attention where it serves white supremacy. There are no objective media projections. Most are propaganda motivations for the gatekeepers.

Gatekeepers don’t think twice about their tendency and desire to immediately respond to something that creates pathology out of anything Black. If only they could compare their hyper reaction to Black negative images to their deafening silence on anything that supports Black humanity.

Sharing negative news and images of the Black experience is how many white people participate as gatekeepers while claiming to be nonracist. Giving voice to the response to racism without ever giving voice to dismantle racism is classic gatekeeping. Attention is directed precisely where intended.

You cannot contain oppression

The painful reality for gatekeepers to accept is that dismantling the system that placed them as gatekeepers of white supremacy is the only way out of this mess. Displacing anger and frustration on people of color will never free white people. Denying racism and defending inequality will never free white people. Even killing Black people will never free white people.

You cannot contain oppression. Education is unaffordable, and consumer debt is skyrocketing. Quality childcare is difficult to access; white women face glass ceilings; sexual assault and domestic violence occur at alarming rates. Systemic oppression is not good for anyone. The role of gatekeeper of white wealth is shitty. You are required to guard the gates while wealthy rule-makers live their lives on the golf course and determine stock prices.

Unguarding the Gates

The universe is intelligent enough to accommodate free people, and world views that do not cause harm. No lack of resources exists in the world, and certainly not in the United States. People of color do not hold enough resources or wealth to assume that they have more than their share. Releasing the lies of white supremacy is critical to building the truth of humanity and justice.

Ignorance is deadly in the system of white supremacy. To combat it, place yourself in diverse spaces from the learner perspective and without judgment. Your ego may urge you to use your privilege to return to a state of comfort. It will tell you the reasons why your way of living is better. Don’t listen. Elevate your mind and unguard the gates.

Variety is key to human survival. Species that have the most diversity are the least vulnerable to extinction. Human diversity has probably kept us alive this long. Diversity can exist without harsh and violent boundaries of hierarchy. Even the “survival of the fittest” ideology evolved out of a white supremacy paradigm.

A different way of knowing

Invest in understanding the values you hold. Know the differences between individualistic and collectivist ideas, African epistemology, Eastern philosophies, and Western thought. Instead of judging ideas as right and wrong, consider their influence. See people and yourself within a broad context and make sure your ideas about people do not serve as gatekeeping.

Allow yourself to be wrong and be willing to make adjustments that respect people’s humanity. Look for evidence to refute your negative assumptions rather than confirm them. As Eckhart Tolle says, the need to be right is the greatest form of violence there is.

Hindsight is 2020

Check your biases, implicit, and explicit. Make your unconscious conscious by accepting the fact that you have been groomed as a gatekeeper. You have not been trained to see former slaves as human beings. You must study and understand the history that has brought us to this point in time.

Reciprocity, cooperation, and caring are human evolutionary characteristics. Our minds are equipped to provide justice for all of our fellow human beings, not just the ones who look and act like us.

The year has brought us clarity beyond our expectations. We must sit with the discomfort rather than seek to pacify it. Within the chaos are hope and enlightenment. But, you must open your eyes to see it. The moral of the story is that you can build wealth from oppression, but not wellness.

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