By: Vanessa Rivers
I recently stumbled upon an article, with a video of a black families encounter with a family of racists, while they were vacationing in Florida, and staying at the Omni Orlando resort. The video was taken by the resort pool, and shows a younger white woman, an older white man and woman cursing and calling these black women, one who, by the way is a doctor, “nigger’s”, “bitches”, and then tries to grab the phone away, to stop her behavior from being videotaped. When the older white woman tries to grab the phone away, she gets a “boo boo scratch” on her arm, and then the drunken man yells at them that “THEY” have committed “assault” against “THEM”. When the black family calls the police on the “white racist family”, you’ll never guess in a million years what happened next, we ALL know what happened; the cops took the side of the racist. They immediately took the statement from the white people, (I’ve had this situation happen to me and my family), and told the black family, to “wait over there while I talk to them, and when the other cop shows up, they’ll talk with you”, isn’t that special?
To make a long, familiar, hurtful, and possibly life ending encounter short, the cops threaten the black family with arrest for “assault”, since the “aggressor” has a “boo boo scratch” on her arm. In Florida, this “dispute” is considered a “domestic disturbance” which would require them to arrest both families. The hotel tweeted the usual, “we gonna say whatever we need to, so that we don’t end up on the news like Starbucks”, apology and that “they value all customers, blah, blah, blah.” You would think after this attack which required a response from the cops, that the hotel would tell the “racist” to leave, nah, they apparently stayed two additional nights, as I suspect, to the end of their planned stay at the resort.
This country’s original sin of “slavery”, and the mind set of “white supremacy”, which was needed to maintain this abomination, never left, it was like an “open sore” that never healed, sure there was a “scab”, but you could tell that the slightest “bump” could rip it wide open. The “sore” began to fester and become noticeably and openly painful again, when then candidate Obama ran for the presidency in 2008, and throughout his entire eight years as president. Now, with the current racist occupant of the oval office, it’s oozing, and bleeding all over the place.
Lately, we’ve seen the average white person, go out of their way to showcase to the world their racist ways. People think that to be a racist, you would have to have been the person who cut off “Toby’s foot”, or, have a “clean and pressed white sheet” hanging in their closet, or a fresh “cross”, just itching to be set ablaze in some unsuspecting black persons yard. This behavior, like the harassment and terrorization of this black family, is what racism looks like in 2018, and it’s still just as dangerous. We’ve seen #WeaponizedWhitePpl calling the cops on black people at Starbucks, Waffle House, public parks, studying, walking, talking, sitting, and standing, you get the picture, just #LivingWhileBlack , and the cops are responding like these are actual crimes being committed.
Black folks never thought that “RACISM” would completely end, but I think we fooled ourselves into the belief that generally, white folks were willing to keep themselves in check. Sure, they would keep their prejudices and bigotry, but they would keep them somewhat undercover, saving their comments for Thanksgiving dinners and the drunken family BBQ’s. This solution wasn’t ideal for us, but I think generally it was acceptable, so that we could go on about our lives. Black people had no illusion that the country was “cured”, but we were willing to “go along, to get along”, but they’ve proven that the seduction of “racism & white supremacy” is just too strong to let go.
Legalizing Blackness 