Source: EMILI_VISION / Getty
Black people, here’s a harsh reality we need to face once and for all: We waste our collective breath trying to explain systemic racism to white people.
Some may think that’s a bit of an overstatement—there are white people who appear to get it for the most part, after all—but, by and large, trying to explain the nuance, the implicit and explicit ways in which systemic racism operates, is like tossing balls of styrofoam at a brick wall hoping to have an eventual breakthrough.
That’s the only way to explain why Greg Kelly, a host at Newsmax (aka Bargain Basement Fox News), thinks the existence of interracial relationships disproves the existence of white supremacy.
According to Greg Kelly, systemic racism doesn’t exist because some Black people are married to white people pic.twitter.com/ZoVBGsVLj6
— Jason Campbell (@JasonSCampbell) April 27, 2022
Kelly cited the interracial marriages and domestic partnerships of prominent figures like Ketanji Brown Jackson, Kamala Harris, and others as proof that systemic racism isn’t real.
“By the way, I think this is interesting, I also think it’s great, they’re all…in committed relationships and love is love and it’s beautiful they all found partners, I don’t care what race they are…” Kelly said. (First of all, let’s just acknowledge how long and awkward that disclaimer was. All those extra words just to say, “I’m not racist but…”)
“But it does undermine the whole idea that this is a systemically racist country with white supremacists everywhere,” Kelly continued.
It might blow Kelly’s mind to know that interracial relations have existed throughout America’s history. Mixed race people who existed during slavery and Jim Crow weren’t cloned in some miscegenation lab, they existed because, at a time when systemic racism couldn’t plausibly be denied, Black people and white people were having relations (also slavers were raping slaves, but that’s another post for another day). So, Kelly thinks white supremacy is all a lie because negroes aren’t regularly getting lynched for hunching with the whites—but that only shows his understanding of systemic racism is as remedial as his understanding of race in general. (This is the guy who recently included Ben Shapiro among a list of Black conservatives. I mean, sometimes I struggle to differentiate the Blacky-lackeys from their white overseers too, but damn.)
Again, there’s no point in continuing to explain it because we’ve spent decades explaining it to death, but I’ll explain it anyway because, whatever, I’m at work. Systemic racism will exist as long as whiteness is the default for social and cultural normalcy in America. It will exist for as long as lawmakers and law enforcers are overwhelmingly white. It will exist as long as white people continue to dominate nearly every aspect of pop culture from TV and film to broadcasting, and while they continue to be the main profiteers of the aspects Black people dominate (the music and sports industries, for example). It will exist as long as white history dominates our school curriculums while Black history is sanitized for white consumption.
Right now Florida is seeking to redistrict its electoral map to give Black citizens less voting power. That’s systemic racism. Republicans across the country are banning unfiltered Black history into oblivion through actual legislation by falsely calling it critical race theory (which also shouldn’t be banned) just to protect white feelings from what they call “divisiveness.” That’s systemic racism. Redlining, housing discrimination, corporate discrimination, under-resourced schools in urban areas, racial profiling and police brutality, racial disparities in arrests and sentencing—all of these are products of systemic racism.
Hell, Newsmax is one of the main networks that wilfully parroted “stop the steal” propaganda and if Donald Trump was successful in overturning legally cast votes to stay in power, it would have been votes from largely Black and non-white voting precincts that would have been tossed. That’s. Systemic. Racism.
But, again, explaining all of this to white people like Kelly is like explaining to fire that some things shouldn’t be burned.
Newsmax should definitely be burned though.
SEE ALSO:
Misogynoir Guru Kevin Samuels Says Women Who Are 35 And Unmarried Are ‘Leftover’
Black Male Professor Thinks More Black Women Should Marry White Men. What Do Y’all Think?
window.addEventListener(‘interaction’, function () {
setTimeout(function () {
var s = document.createElement(‘script’), el = document.getElementsByTagName(‘script’)[ 0 ];
s.async = true;
s.src = ‘https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js’;
el.parentNode.insertBefore(s, el);
}, 1000)
});
