Dismantling Racist Establishments At Dawn - Negating Ongoing Unfair Hate Themed Speech, may seem like a bulky, somewhat silly, title forced to be an acronym for DREADNOUGHTS. However, each word has significance.
Dismantling
Racism is a course I am currently taking. Part of the reason for this blog is to brainstorm and attempt to realize the full extent, cause, and potential downfall of racism. The project I chose for this course is to create and distribute a survey comparing racial exposure and racial sensitivity. I am currently waiting on feedback on the first draft of this survey from my professors, but once it is approved I will share it here.
Establishments refers to the systematic racism that has breached our society. Stop and Search laws, the apprehension of a white girl walking down the road and seeing a black man, and the achievement gap are all pieces of the puzzle that establishments use to validate and propagate racist practices.
At
Dawn I hesitated to include. At Dawn is poetic, fluffy, borderline silly and nonchalant. I do not mean to take this issue lightly. Racism is not flowery language, it is fear and societal-depreciation and power beyond control or restraint. How can flowery language hold a candle to such a monster? Flowery language is hope. At the risk of being cheesy, I claim that there is a dawn coming when the infection of racism will be purged from our schools, our business, our homes, our culture.
Negating is not merely to disagree, to speak against, to weaken. To negate is to fully undo, to make zero, to reduce to nothing, to prevent any remnant from propagating. It is not enough do a "diversity hire" or create a college scholarship for African Americans. Such solutions misinterpret the problem and may even support it indirectly.
Ongoing is the part of the equation I am most frustrated by. Why is there still racism? Human adaptability and compassion put us ahead of animals. We are clever; we communicate; we pass on our ideals and hopes to our children; we aid our neighbors. Yet we fear the unexplainable, the otherness, the outsiders. We buy into the systematic denegration of the majority, and many do not even see the full extent and impact it has to this day.
Unfair, of all the words here, means the most to me personally. This word shattered and rebuilt my world view as a child. One little letter word in a three word sentence, explained only by a short pamphlet. At eleven, I was diagnosed with Cancer. Do not worry; the doctor's were wrong. But before they figured that out I was given a pamphlet entitled "Life Isn't Fair". The pamphlet explained that I wasn't a bad person. That the reason I had Cancer was complicated, random even, and that I had done nothing to deserve this. This notion got me thinking. If life is not fair, if life is random, if it is chaos, uncontrolable and unthinking, then that is okay. Life does not hate me; life does not think of me as lesser or wrong; life does not intend anything. This realization consoled me even after the Cancer mistake was cleared up and other problems and dramas came and went. This realization did not account for racism. Racism hates you; racism thinks you are lesser and disgusting, racism intends to keep you in your place, seperated and humiliated. How can we as the human race sign up so quickly to an immoral irrational social construct that devastates and dehumanize vast numbers of unique and beautiful individuals? This downtrodden and raw individuals are members of our own human race, and yet we turn on them as though they were terrifying monsters stalking us in the night and darkness created by our own ignorance.
Global frustrates me almost as much as ongoing. How is it that with such diversity in climate, religion, culture, abilities, etc. that there is no corner of the Earth free of racist preconceptions? As humans we generalize the world around us in an attempt to understand it and control it. Yet in doing so we reduce the truth, we limit potential, we stifle the beautiful chaos of individuality.
Hate
Themed
Speech is a fascination of mine. The Communication of Hate by Waltman and Haas (2011) was my first introduction to 'the hate stratagem', a fallacy-ridden four step process that details how hate-speech is made effective. Hate-speech is part of the cycle that immortalizes racism and stabalizes its ongoing global throne. I will save the details for another time.
What right do I have to do this? How does racism work? How am I going to stop racism? These questions I will attempt to reason through in following posts. I am still learning, still trying to understand exactly what kind of monster racism is and what weaknesses we might exploit. One thing I do know, is that a great way to figure something out is to talk about it, to recieve feedback, to have your ideas questioned, to question others' ideas, to dialogue. So that is what I will do, and I hope you will help me on my way.
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