# Living while black in America

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/living-while-black-in-america/817611>\
**Category:** The BBQ Pit\
**Created:** [July 9, 2018, 9:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/living-while-black-in-america/817611 "2018-07-09T21:17:23Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 1899

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**Author:** ![Kimstu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/ecd19e/32.png) [@Kimstu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kimstu)\
**Post date:** [January 11, 2021, 3:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/living-while-black-in-america/817611/1899 "2021-01-11T03:33:44Z")

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> [@split\_p\_j](#):
>
> I was born into a upper middle class family and have maintained that status through my life. I never really thought anyone was holding me down, always thought it was up to me to do my thing. I never really had dealings with the racisim on that level. You can see in my posts I was against BLM as an organization but agreed with the message that the police are too brutal. I literally said its not open season on black people.
> 
> I was wrong. The confederate flag was flown in the US capital, and the the police did nothing. I don’t think we can pretend that it is about law and order anymore, which I used to actually believe. Law enforcement is actually on the other side. BLM was right.
> 
> I feel ashamed that I was so naïve.

As someone who has IIRC argued with you on these issues before, I sympathize. I still feel very embarrassed that even for me, a lifelong self-identified liberal, it wasn’t till the shooting of Philando Castile in 2016 that it actually hit me “wow, black people in the US have serious cause to worry about being arbitrarily SHOT STONE DEAD BY POLICE OFFICERS, to a far greater extent than people like me have ever had to worry about it”.

Duh, right?

While I respect and honor the people who didn’t take as long as I did to get hit upside the head with that clue stick, I don’t think the slower people like you and me should feel personally ashamed about our naïvete. Naïvete among people of good faith and good intentions is a huge part of what systemic racism is meant to create.

Systemic racism is constantly deluging us with the messages “this is normal, this was an isolated incident, the individual victim should have behaved differently, few bad apples”, and so on and so forth. We are always being told, on multiple different levels, that denying the problem means that we’re actually overcoming the problem, putting it behind us, getting closer to the goal of colorblindness. And that recognizing the problem, on the other hand, is actually creating the problem, conjuring up racism where none really existed.

That’s why so many people who’ve internalized the messages get so angry on hearing that systemic racism is still a problem. They think that they’re the ones actually moving forward, and the “woke” people are trying to hold them back.

The opposite of “woke” is not “unconscious”: the opposite of “woke” is “dreaming”.

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