Have you ever overheard a television broadcast and thought, Hey, you’re manipulating me and I don’t like it!
I had that feeling last night. As my readers know, I live with my racial consciousness switch off in life. Off is my default position. Sure, I love black history with an emphasis on the word “history.” And yet I live in the here and now. I am happiest free of dogma and slogan words. Slapping a label “systemic racism” on reality guarantees I will be annoyed. Why am I annoyed? Because I am a sentient being with the power to leave my racial consciousness switch off in life if I am so constituted. If one’s dogmatic mission in life is to change “America’s infestation with systemic racism,” my mission in life is to be a Protestant. The Dogma of Racial Consciousness
And my Protestantism against the dogma of racial consciousness leads me to last night. I was minding my own business and thinking about William Babbitt Haynes’ demise. Stepping into the living room, my wife had on MSNBC. We have reached an enlightened level of detente in our home. My wife controls the television from 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. I can binge out on The Outer Limits and The Twilight Zone from 9:00 p.m. until sleep beckons. Anyway, my guard was up since I am primed for a bombardment of dogma and slogan words these days.
The news story was racial. Ugh! Isn’t there more to life than race? I avoid regular television due to the fantasy land depictions of the real. No, dear readers, the world is not 30% to 40% black despite commercials and advertisements. San Diego is only 6% black. The world is not aflush with racism. I could easily live my life and never hear the word “racism” again. Remember, I invented the idea of slavery blockers/smile. Now that the kids are gone, instruments of black cultural transmission in my home are nil.
Back to the news story…
The first words I heard were White Woman. Why? Why racialize the story? Why insert a race before woman? Doesn’t one make the story racial in doing so? Why not tell the story of an encounter between a Man and a Woman in Central Park? Tell the facts of what happened. Tell the listener what was said. When one inserts the racial adjective, one is framing a story in a race consciousness way. One is imposing race consciousness into the story. Suppose the (no race adjective need) woman and the (no race adjective needed) man are both jerks? Perhaps, that is the deeper story, the collision of two jerks in a park and a dispute over a dog.
We would all be a better society if we expanded the line of slavery blockers to include “White” blockers and “Black” blockers. Imagine how the dial of race consciousness would be turned back if we developed a full line of blockers for the public. Shouldn’t consumers of news have the freedom to consume slavery, systemic racism and White blockers? For those for whom our racial consciousness switch is turned off, the mental health benefits might be glorious.
I must contact the Botswana government about this idea.
Slavery Blockers
On December 22, 1865, William Lloyd Garrison terminated The Liberator. The absolute and unyielding mission of The Liberator was the abolition of slavery. Garrison wrote The object for which the Liberator was commenced—the extermination of chattel slavery—having been gloriously consummated,
As a teen and young adult in the 70's and 80's, I got tired of hearing race mentioned, but only when it was a (black) man or (black) woman and it had nothing to do with race. So anytime someone included in a conversation something like "this black man..., " I would then respond with denoting the race of every person I talked about in conversation. Something like "I was talking to this white lady." Every single time, the other person would be taken aback. Can people see the warts at the end of their noses?
You make a very good point. Am I mistaken, or does it seem like we’ve hyper aware of races recently? Maybe it’s because of the 24/7 news cycle that it seems more intense these days. We’ve always been aware of and concerned with “racial differences,” but now I feel as though there’s some kind of agenda in how it’s reported.