Blasian Perspective: The Atlanta Spa Shootings
I wish I could have saved them. Now they are our ancestors.
I will bring honor to their souls not by directing my anger towards more hate, but instead I will aim my outrage directly at the source:
We learn history in this country through a lens of white supremacy.
Education, that forms the foundation of who we are and how we think, and which we exemplify as the most important means of success, has been weaponized against us. It has allowed white supremacy, like a disease, to infect us all.
It creates self-hate within POC communities, it creates hate amongst POC communities and it propagates and perpetuates white supremacy.
It ingrains in us conditioning that we must opt out of, because our system was founded on it, because our government, our businesses, our educational systems are steeped in it. We must opt out. So we can, in turn, educate the system about itself.
I remember the first time I had the “privilege” to finally learn about my people in the classroom. I remember how the initial joy of feeling seen/represented quickly turned into despair;
The first thing I learned about my African American side was that we were savages whipped and beaten into obedient servitude and were only saved from it by an entity much higher than ourselves, whiteness.
The first thing I learned about my Chinese American side was that we were desperate, illiterate immigrant labor who risked life and limb in the most outrageously dangerous of circumstances in order to execute the vision of something much higher than ourselves, whiteness.
We weren’t human, we were labor.
It is easy for white supremacists to commit these heinous acts of violence because they never had to learn of us as humans, just ornaments that helped “white excellence” be achieved.
So how do we attack white supremacy? We detoxify ourselves of the toxic contaminants that have been injected into us without our permission. By doing so we can then educate ourselves on the true version of history, a diverse inclusionary history that lets our humanity shine, a history that sees us not as pawns but as crucial compatriots whose contributions transformed society.
When we completely eradicate the elements and shadow beliefs of white supremacy inside of us then we can see the solidarity between us that has always existed. We change the world by changing ourselves. White supremacy will not only become irrelevant, it will become obsolete because we will completely rid it of its host.