So this morning I googled the word segregation and of course the first few links that came up were around racial segregation in America.  Jim Crow, Brown VS Board of Ed, a story about a return to segregated schools in America on PBS.org.  In fact when we think about segregation, racial segregation as originally instituted by racist whites in America is the first thing that comes to mind. At least it does to mine.  I’m not even going to insult your intelligence by asking if you know the answer to the question I asked yesterday. We’re all smart people here. There is only one group of people who benefit from segregation and racism both at the time it was implemented and to this very day.  Let’s just get to my point and talk about how segregated experiences work right now and how it could have worked then. And when I say work, I mean succeeded. What you have to keep in mind though, is that in so many ways, the sickness and self-hating psychology of white racism which is essentially racism itself, the same way that segregation is essentially defined as racial is such that any attempt to organize separate services, resources, job opportunities, education and cultural institutes more based on the needs of people of color which are vastly difference from those of us who identify as white is always classified by whites as “reverse racism.”

Let me be clear on my position here.

REVERSE RACISM DOES NOT EXIST

BLACK PEOPLE DO NOT HAVE THE POWER TO BE RACIST

Bard College, circa 1990s. I was a part of the Black Bard Student Organization there and friends with the Vice President of the organization. I’ll call him Malcolm which was incidentally the name of the president of the organization. I was also friends with a Jewish girl who was incessantly clingy with me because she thought my “Blackness” was so cool. I have to say that she didn’t know from “Blackness” if I was her example. The Black people I hung out with had no love for her or any of the other white people I hung out with.  Because of my upbringing, I’ve always had crossover appeal but I never tried to get my Black friend and white friends in a Kumbaya circle because I knew that shit was just not realistic. That is what College Campus student organizations are for. That’s why Black colleges, Fraternities and Sororities exist.

You cannot take a person of color who has been in the “minority” all their lives and who has been taught the history of White America, and if they are lucky some post Slavery Black history, is flooded with media which posits that the only standard of beauty, femininity, intelligence, masculinity, self-worth and love is represented ideally by white faces and throw them together with White people and think everything is going to be lovely. People of color continue to be lied to and kept from the truth about the richness, wealth, brilliance and beauty of their vast culture. White racism has made that a certainty.  The sad truth we all know is that there is very little in American Culture that is actually American. The majority of it was stolen. But back to Bard College and BBSO.

So my Black obsessed Jewish friend doesn’t understand why she can’t be a part of the Black Bard Student Organization and I have to say she was not the only White person who felt this way. There were several other white students who thought their saggy pants, backwards baseball caps and appropriated slang and socialization with people of color (some for the first time ever) should give them access to this world because they weren’t “White like that.” But according to “Dear White People”  Whites already have a club. It’s called Mass Media.  But I wasn’t so racially minded in those days. I actually never did think so much about race until I was at Bard College and a minority in a school for the first time in my life.  Even then I was more of a “we are all human first” kind of gal.

That was my first mistake.