So what are your problems with it?
The most obvious part, after watching this three times now, is that the black guy’s rebuttal is weak as fukk. The white guy spits all of the Breitbart and Bannon talking points, and the black guy cites ... Tupac? Sure, he also does mention how historical structural racism makes him feel, as if he’s living in a “frying pan.” But his overall rebuttal is more “Racism is why I do these bad things” and not “Actually, most of us don’t do those bad things you think we all do.” He basically returned shrapnel fire with a spitball.
Also, it shouldn’t even exist.
The entire video?
Yes.
I thought you just said it was cool.
I did. But it’s cool the same way two bags of Cheetos can alleviate hunger. It’s an empty coolness because the concept—the song and the video—is based on a faulty premise.
What’s that?
That white people’s race-related gripes and black people’s race-related gripes are equal—equally justified and deserving of equal time and attention. They are not. There is no conversation that needs to happen between the races in order to create some measure of truce and racial conciliation. The only conversation that can do that is white people talking to other white people to try to find a way to be less awful to black people. (Also, saying “Hey, stop discriminating against and hating and killing us” is not asking for a truce. Just for them to stop doing what they’re doing so we can breathe.)
Yes, it would be great if whites and blacks came together on some kumbaya shyt. But there’s no meeting in the middle here. There’s no finding a common ground. They have to come where we already are, and they have to recognize, acknowledge and begin to make amends for why the separation exists in the first place.
Let me put it this way: How offensive and absurd would it be if, instead of a black person and a white person having this conversation, it was a Jewish person and a Nazi?
Um, that analogy doesn’t work. No one would dare do something like that.
Actually, the analogy works
specifically because no one in their right mind would dare do something like that. We give the Holocaust the respect it deserves. We recognize the horror of what happened to Jewish people and the evil of the Nazis. (
Well, we generally do these things.)
But America doesn’t give the
centuries-long trans-Atlantic slave trade the same acknowledgment. The analogy doesn’t seem to work because our country doesn’t believe it was as serious and destructive and transformative and evil as the Holocaust was. And we still don’t fully acknowledge the pervasive residue of slavery and the metaphysical construct and constraint of racism still existing today. We haven’t reckoned with that evil and that violence. And because of that, the thought behind videos like “I’m Not Racist” exists.
The message on-screen at the end of the video provides a perfect snapshot of the faultiness of this premise. It states, “We were all humans until race disconnected us, religion separated us, politics divided us, and wealth classified us.” It’s fulfilling and uplifting in the same bag-of-Cheetos way. But this video is dealing specifically with American race relations between black Americans and white Americans. And saying “until race disconnected us” removes the very active role white people had in creating race specifically to disconnect.
We weren’t disconnected by race. We were disconnected by people who deemed themselves white. And that acknowledgment fukking matters, man. It’s not some nonessential detail. It’s the only one that matters.
Damn. Well, anything else?
I actually do appreciate what Joyner Lucas attempted to do here. And I’d appreciate it even more if he read some bell hooks and Kiese Laymon and Kimberlé Crenshaw and Ta-Nehisi Coates and Toni Morrison and Derrick Bell and tried again.
for me
Perhaps He did as well.
