Microaggressions, Colorblindness and Trying Harder

I decided not to post anything on Monday, not necessarily to honor anybody, but just because I wasn't up to figuring out how to best address Sarah Palin's race card in the hole, or the pile-on of a black athlete who made the PR mistake of enthusiastically addressing his skills in an interview, like that never happens, with respects to a day honoring Dr. King. That was my silence. I don't like it. I wish I always knew what to say.

Sometimes the silence of allies is to make room for other people to speak. Sometimes I know I don't have the right understanding or experiences to address something, and so help me, I hold back for fear of doing it wrong. Maybe I shouldn't. Maybe I need to be more prepared to stand corrected so long as I'm speaking out. I'm still working on that. And also, this post could have a fuck of a lot less to do with my process than what is wrong the world today--and don't tell me there isn't something, still

So I think I will take on what Palin said--and does anyone think she doesn't have a bead by now on how what she said would be judged when responses to her "blood libel" comments or "debt is slavery" comment went totally batshit in social media coverage? Does one snarkily suggest that the president is somehow throwing down the "race card" without any idea how wrong it would be, even now, if the first black president never addressed race at all when real discrimination was still a quantifiable thing in terms of arrests, sentencing, employment, opportunity, treatment by law enforcement and so on? Trying to create the conditions where all citizens get equal treatment under the law is kind of this Constitutional thing he and Eric Holder have been working on. It is a real tragedy that Sarah Palin does not get that. I blame the schools she went to and her environment, though.



There is a screwed-up idea of what justice could be called "color-blindness" that I guess I understand but I think I don't find useful. When someone like Palin posts the idea that:

“‘I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.’ – Martin Luther King, Jr.

I think she gets it wrong in thinking that King was envisioning a world that did not see color.  He is imagining a world were it is seen but does not matter in term of judging people, like his own children. She is saying that Obama says things like "Trayvon Martin would look like my son" or whatever, based on race. He isn't saying see Trayvon Martin's race. He's saying "see his humanity first".  See what he could achieve. See the lost potential. Whether talking about convicted pot smokers or disenfranchised African-Amercans, we have a system that is not colorblind in practice. When we talk about a lot of things, the numbers aren't reflecting a colorblind result. So race has to be discussed, even still. The results of race bias is real. Yes, a white person is foolish for not still knowing that. 

And also, I don't even see why the Sherman thing is thing. I thought athletes trash-talked all the time. Also, Richard Sherman is actually kind of the ideal athelete narrative of someone who thrives because of their committment to excellence, and then gives back because he just is that kind of person.  Maybe he has a right to be proud.  And that answers for itself on the field and in his personal life all the time.