To be clear race is not a card. Race may be the first thing you see when you see me; it may be a significant part of who I am; it may even have informed how I was raised and how I move through the world, but it is not some lever (or 'card') that we use to ease our way in the world. That shouldn't need to be said but there, I said it.
The question must be asked, when a claim is made that a POC is 'playing the race card' what is it that is actually meant? What is it that you think I/we am/are doing? Is it that we're not sufficiently self-effacing about our race and your awareness of our difference is somehow our fault? Perhaps it means that we are shining the light of truth into the darkness of your understanding, and your discomfort with that is our fault?
Here's the thing with the race card, history will attest to the fact that it is not POC who typically play it. Rather, it is the majority who wield it with alarming regularity. The majority has been wielding the race of the minority as a weapon for 21 generations. Native land theft? The Trail of Tears? Wounded Knee? Native genocide? Buffalo slaughter of the 1800s? Enslavement? Jim Crow? Lynching? Redlining? COINTELPRO? The War on Drugs? Mass incarceration? Police brutality? And on, and on the list goes. Yeah, somebody's been playing the race card alright, but it ain't who you've been taught to think it is.
In an online conversation not too long ago, a gentleman offered that Obama had divided this nation by suggesting that racism was everywhere. (Because apparently before Obama the nation was whole. Apparently. ) Obama had, in effect, played the race card. Repeatedly and jin so doing, HE had divided the nation.
Loosely translated, what he was saying was that calling Whiteness out on its documented history of using race as a weapon to destroy Black and brown communities is playing the race card. [Subtext: actually writing legislation or encouraging behaviors that harm POC isn't.] Er, OK. Got it.
So when Carolyn Donham Bryant lied and claimed that Emmett Till had sexually assaulted her, whistled at her, said sexually explicit things to her, what was that? Wasn't that her using the race card (and tapping into ugly racist tropes) to cause fatal harm to a fourteen year old child?
Bryant's use of the presumptions of virtuous White womanhood as a sledgehammer was a particularly deft use of the race card. And it worked, as she knew it would. Young Master Till didn't see the end of his fourteenth summer and she has seen eighty of them.
Bryant's husband's and brother-in-law's immediate application of violent White manhood and righteous anger to deliver swift 'justice', and the jury's eventual acceptance of same, was absolutely the playing of the race card.
When the all-White jury, despite evidence, found Milam and Bryant innocent of all charges, the jurors participated gleefully in a game of White Guys Always Get The Trump Cards.
When 2017's Carolyn Bryant Briana Brochu used her bodily fluids to infect her roommate Chennel Rowe, Brochu started a new game of I'm White, I Win.
When the 45th resident of these United States (the pee is in St. PEEtersburg) can use an event commemorating the contributions of Native American code talkers to cast aspersions on a woman who claims Native heritage, who is it exactly that's playing the race card?
The question must be asked, when a claim is made that a POC is 'playing the race card' what is it that is actually meant? What is it that you think I/we am/are doing? Is it that we're not sufficiently self-effacing about our race and your awareness of our difference is somehow our fault? Perhaps it means that we are shining the light of truth into the darkness of your understanding, and your discomfort with that is our fault?
Here's the thing with the race card, history will attest to the fact that it is not POC who typically play it. Rather, it is the majority who wield it with alarming regularity. The majority has been wielding the race of the minority as a weapon for 21 generations. Native land theft? The Trail of Tears? Wounded Knee? Native genocide? Buffalo slaughter of the 1800s? Enslavement? Jim Crow? Lynching? Redlining? COINTELPRO? The War on Drugs? Mass incarceration? Police brutality? And on, and on the list goes. Yeah, somebody's been playing the race card alright, but it ain't who you've been taught to think it is.
In an online conversation not too long ago, a gentleman offered that Obama had divided this nation by suggesting that racism was everywhere. (Because apparently before Obama the nation was whole. Apparently. ) Obama had, in effect, played the race card. Repeatedly and jin so doing, HE had divided the nation.
Loosely translated, what he was saying was that calling Whiteness out on its documented history of using race as a weapon to destroy Black and brown communities is playing the race card. [Subtext: actually writing legislation or encouraging behaviors that harm POC isn't.] Er, OK. Got it.
So when Carolyn Donham Bryant lied and claimed that Emmett Till had sexually assaulted her, whistled at her, said sexually explicit things to her, what was that? Wasn't that her using the race card (and tapping into ugly racist tropes) to cause fatal harm to a fourteen year old child?
Bryant's use of the presumptions of virtuous White womanhood as a sledgehammer was a particularly deft use of the race card. And it worked, as she knew it would. Young Master Till didn't see the end of his fourteenth summer and she has seen eighty of them.
Bryant's husband's and brother-in-law's immediate application of violent White manhood and righteous anger to deliver swift 'justice', and the jury's eventual acceptance of same, was absolutely the playing of the race card.
When the all-White jury, despite evidence, found Milam and Bryant innocent of all charges, the jurors participated gleefully in a game of White Guys Always Get The Trump Cards.
When 2017's Carolyn Bryant Briana Brochu used her bodily fluids to infect her roommate Chennel Rowe, Brochu started a new game of I'm White, I Win.
When the 45th resident of these United States (the pee is in St. PEEtersburg) can use an event commemorating the contributions of Native American code talkers to cast aspersions on a woman who claims Native heritage, who is it exactly that's playing the race card?
It's comforting to think that calling white people out is playing the race card I suppose, but - to use a very British idiom - that argument holds no water. As the childrens' song says, "There's a hole in the bucket dear Liza, dear Liza, a hole." Neither Liza's bucket nor that argument is holding any water.
There's an easy (to me) explanation for the 'race card' evaluation of a comment. I suspect that when folk hear shades of things they've done, they recoil in horror.....not at themselves, oh no!, but rather at the speaker for holding a mirror up to their faces. But is it my fault if you ain't like what you see in the mirror? I'm just holding the mirror. This has been America's way for 500 years: when called out on its bad behavior, the majority has blamed those who would do the calling (cf the responses to the men losing their jobs for being pr*cks at work) rather than look at itself and its ugly ways.
The problem doesn't lie in the truth that POC tell, the problem lies in who is shamed by that telling. The anger at Obama and others like him, is at their tearing the veil of plausible deniability to shreds. White America has too long chosen to live behind an Emperor's clothes-esque veil of post-raciality. Sweetie, you're nekkid. Deal with it.
The problem doesn't lie in the truth that POC tell, the problem lies in who is shamed by that telling. The anger at Obama and others like him, is at their tearing the veil of plausible deniability to shreds. White America has too long chosen to live behind an Emperor's clothes-esque veil of post-raciality. Sweetie, you're nekkid. Deal with it.
In typical White fragilismus style, rather than OWN the truth, White America would rather blame the teller than face the truth; folk would rather blame the doctor than face the disease and the difficult course of treatment that lies ahead.
There's too much information out there to excuse the level of ignorance it takes to proffer "You're playing the race card" as a response to a real criticism of this supremacist society. Read a book, preferably one written by someone non-White. Read an essay. I've written plenty myself and I'm late to the writing game. I'm confident that reading can and will cure you of any need to toss this particular red herring into the middle of a discussion.
At this point, ignorance is a choice.
There's too much information out there to excuse the level of ignorance it takes to proffer "You're playing the race card" as a response to a real criticism of this supremacist society. Read a book, preferably one written by someone non-White. Read an essay. I've written plenty myself and I'm late to the writing game. I'm confident that reading can and will cure you of any need to toss this particular red herring into the middle of a discussion.
At this point, ignorance is a choice.
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