I am extremely irritated at the moment

 

I am extremely irritated at the moment 

 

I just read an article about how people are criticizing Paw Patrol because the character Chase (a puppy German Shepard, a cartoon mind you) is portrayed as a good lovable cop who helps get kittens out of trees, which is terrible because everyone knows a cartoon dog cop would never ever do anything but eat those kittens and then smear their blood on the road. That’s just what puppy cops do. I’m not actually that dismayed about people attacking a kids’ cartoon over their hatred of cops, because let’s be honest, whoever writes an article like that and the people who inspired them to, are nothing short of idiots. What bothers me so much is that some simplistic part in the back of my brain still held out hope that people just didn’t see the true mechanism that helps make sure the ‘black man as subhuman’ thought-pattern persisted. That somehow it was overlooked in our culturally simpleminded ignorance. But this article made it so I could live in denial and ignorance no longer, because people ARE looking right at it, and are committed to not seeing it, or worse, committed to letting it continue to strip my humanity away.

You know, throughout the years, my greatest lament with these types of situations was that whenever race became an issue, everyone looked under every rock to find someone to blame other than who I thought was the obvious culprit, the one with the big flashy neon sign and an entire hill dedicated to spelling out its name. HOLLYWOOD. We blame cops, we blame training, we blame “the system,” we blame privilege, we blame slavery, we blame presidents, we blame everything under the sun. But what I rhetorically ask is this, “where do we get the idea, in 2020 that blacks aren’t quite capable, aren’t quite safe, aren’t quite sober, aren’t quite human? The President doesn’t say it, schools don’t teach it, and still why do whites get disappointed in me when I don’t have the weed they are looking to score? Why are they surprised that I can devastate them in both a spelling B and a math contest for that matter? What makes them come to me when they have questions about how the prison system works or how to sign up to get a welfare check? Especially those who don’t know many (or any) blacks to begin with? Do you think their racist grandma told them stories about how she used to buy her marijuana from the neighborhood black guy when she was a little girl? Do you think the cop teaching the DARE program in their class also added the pro tip that most of the people he knows on food stamps are black? Maybe Trump himself has a secret twitter account where all he does is post quotes from Boys in the Hood and Friday, and complains about his 99 Problems.

But then I just let it out of the bag didn’t I? Of course, none of that is happening. The reason whites, who have never even seen a black person in their entire life, approach me, and millions of other blacks, everyday, acting as if they know exactly what to expect from us, and that expectation always seems to be that we ought to be a rapper, a drug dealer, and that they would love it if we showed them one of our bullet wounds from when we used to ‘bang.’ It’s because TV, Movies, and Music inform them about what blacks are supposed to be like. Without those things, they would have no idea what to expect. They wouldn’t know to expect us to dance or be loud or be scary or speak ebonics, or be good at basketball, and I guarantee their crazy uncle Ned didn’t teach them to use terms like “crackhead” or “ghetto” when they were kids. It was other kids, who learned it from media. So, I don’t ever want to hear anything about how awful it is that cop shows “humanize” cops when we should all know that they are evil, when nobody is criticizing the endless barrage of media teaching whites that no matter how pressed his suit is, a black man is still a dangerous animal underneath it all; 3/5 a man. Yes I know it’s sexy. Yes I know it sells tickets. Yes I know there’s some sort of fascination with the danger and exotic appeal of this fictitious ‘thug life’ that somehow couples diamond studded grills, hydraulic cars, and the strangely oxymoronic juxtaposition of abject poverty and making it rain, but if you want to pretend for one second, that portraying cops as good guys is socially irresponsible, and yet you don’t bat an eye at the disgusting legacy of millions and millions of white kids AND black kids who grew up learning what it meant to be black from the likes of Jay-Z, Beyonce, shows like Empire, movies like Friday, and countless other media juggernauts that made whites millions and millions of dollars while they exploited and trashed the collective reputation of a whole people group, and lined the pockets of the blacks who allowed their likeness to sell their own brothers and sisters out for a buck, then you are either the most simplistically ignorant person on the planet or, more likely, you couldn’t care less about humanizing your neighbor, black or not. All you care about is making a tool of this moment in time to strike a blow against those who represent authority, because you hate authority for hating authority’s sake, and you would likely step right over a black man if he was dying on the sidewalk right in front of you, because he’s not human. He’s your animalistic court jester on tv. Why would you give that up. It entertains you, or you think it’s sexy, or if you’re black you use that image to give you social power in certain select circumstances. The widespread effects of dehumanizing an entire race over and over and over again on tv be damned. You simply cannot be taken seriously as any sort of reformer or one who cares one iota about minorities, or the stranger, or your brother, or your neighbor if you support the way Hollywood and the music industry strips blacks bear of their personhood and humanity, in front of young whites before they ever even dream of joining a police academy. By the time they ever even put on the badge for the first time, they’ve had 2 decades of programming on who is human, and who is not. Do you really think any sort of training they do at that point in their lives will short circuit what Dr. Dre and In Too Deep hard-wired into their subconscious years ago?