This is such a petty and ugly sentiment. Whenever I talk about my book (about the black/white wealth gap), it's shocked me that the most vociferous outrage I get is from other people of color (I get gross/racist emails from white men too, but that's more troll-y so diff category)
People think that if you are pointing out the unique injustice of slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, etc, then you are somehow diminishing what happened to other groups. And they get really mad.
At my last talk, an Indian man yelled at me and stormed out b/c he thought I didn't understand how colonization hurt India. Are you kidding? I slept in the basement for most of my childhood thanks to Saddam's chemical weapons purchased from US. Then we escaped. I GET colonization
The migrant crisis keeps me up at night as does the perpetual war machines, etc. BUT, the original sin of the US was SLAVERY and the anti-BLACKNESS it was based on. Every other racism was filtered through that--arguably, worldwide. The Nazis learned from Jim Crow
In other words, there is a black/white binary in America. That's how everything else is filtered. That is not to say that there aren't groups within each race that are more or less discriminated than than those from another race. It is to say that anti-blackness is the lens.
All the races can argue against each other about who got it worse or we can have solidarity and fight against the systems of colonization and racial hierarchy that manifest in multiple ways with multiple victim groups
Fighting racism is not zero-sum. It is my belief that reparations to African Americans must come first because that process will help heal the original sin from which all other racisms come.
I also think that former and present empires need to deal with their subjects worldwide and that might mean reparations for India too. A great argument here:
Solidarity means fighting for other people's claims for justice. Not resenting attention paid to them. Don't punch down and across. Punch up. Why fight against the Black community when you can go after corporations and govts that are still causing these harms?
(big caveat: I think the Native American genocide at the hands of the colonizers does not fit into this metric because it preceded the nation and was ongoing. To me, that fits into the atrocities of empire and also must be reckoned with).
In sum, start here: nytimes.com/interactive/20… @nhannahjones
Share this Scrolly Tale with your friends.
A Scrolly Tale is a new way to read Twitter threads with a more visually immersive experience.
Discover more beautiful Scrolly Tales like this.