Let's move on from racial flaps that don't matter
OPINION - We need to stop concerning ourselves as much about how other people feel about us and start caring more about how we feel about ourselves and about what we are doing to change our plight towards the prize...
Once again, the Internet is abuzz with outrage over yet another white person making racist comments about blacks.
Jerry Hough, a professor at Duke University, wrote a six paragraph rant in the comments section of the New York Times in response to the May 9 editorial “How Racism Doomed Baltimore.”
In his comments, Hough referred to African-Americans as “the blacks” and makes the case that blacks have not responded to racism in America as well as “the Asians.”
In response to growing criticism, Hough wrote an email to several media outlets where he doubled down on his comments by saying, “In writing me, no one has said I was wrong, just racist.”
There will be throngs of people, especially blacks, calling for Hough to disciplined or fired by Duke.
It shouldn’t really matter what Hough or any other non-black person says about us. We would be better served if we used the energy that we expend trying to get someone fired for saying something racist to instead try to get more of us hired.
Unfortunately, this is just another case of us majoring in the minors.
Much of the attention has moved away from Baltimore in the wake of state attorney Marilyn Mosby charging six police officers with crimes and misconduct associated with the death of Freddie Gray. With some feeling of resolution, most of us have gone back to our everyday lives, while many in Baltimore return to an existence that is worse than before the unrest.
The national spotlight and a lot of the momentum has been lost. While these charges and an attempt to bring some semblance of justice to the Gray family are definitely a step in the right direction, we can’t lose sight of the big picture. We have to keep our eyes on the prize.
The prize for us has not changed since slavery – it is freedom and equality for all blacks in this country. Not unlike the Civil Rights Movement of over 50 years ago, we need to re-mobilize our efforts.
We need to marshal the forces and the resources of the black community towards this overall goal. There are three main areas in which we should concentrate – education, economic empowerment and the criminal justice system.
In the age of the Internet, information is key. There are four weapons that we can use in the fight to make strides in those areas – our prayers, our votes, our time and our money.
We need to collectively develop a concentric platform and agenda (individual, local, regional and national) that is focused on informing individuals on how to effectively mobilize and utilize these four weapons in those three areas.
Things are so bad for so many us that we simply can’t afford to continue to waste our precious resources and energy on things that don’t move us closer to our goal.
We need to stop concerning ourselves as much about how other people feel about us and start caring more about how we feel about ourselves and about what we are doing to change our plight and work towards the prize.
Andre Kimo Stone Guess is a contributing writer for theGrio.com and cultural critic. Follow him on Twitter @aeducatedguess, Like his Facebook page and visit his blog at aeducatedguess.com
