We Won’t Treat You Like You Treat Us

Black people are a forgiving, kind, loving, and fun people.

We will not treat you like you have treated us. Acting out over your coming status as

White people in America are afraid. America is no longer the land of the home of the brave, it is the home of the “I am afraid of every nonwhite person in America.”

America is fighting itself.

America is showing other nations that it, like so many of them, is incapable of addressing internal issues. Those issues if left unaddressed, will destroy it.

Black people and other people of color are forced to learn and acquiescence to the majority that is white America. 

The white thought goes, “White Americans are successful, smart, and envied the world over, so Black people should just be like white people and everything will be okay.”

While those words are seldom said or written that way, anyone who attended school in America will understand the sentiment.

As America fumbles through a deadly pandemic that has killed close to two-hundred thousand citizens, and as the country continues to mismanage protests, the country is again looking for leadership from somewhere other than the white house.

White citizens are fractured and many are working to “take their country back.” and the other white people working to “take *their country back.”

America does not have a history of popular white leadership that worked for the betterment of life for all citizens. White popular leadership has been almost exclusively for advancement of and for the white race.

With raging protests due to never-ending Black men and women being murdered by “shoot-first, lie-later” police, and protests in the Pacific Northwest coopted by mostly white people, America is having a summer that will long be remembered.

Now mix in the 2020 presidential election campaign that pits Joe Biden/Kamala Harris against Putin’s lapdog, Donald Trump/Cardboard man, and an electorate that is either hoping for a better America (Biden/Harris voters) or full fascism (Trump/Cardboard man). 

But there is something different about the protests, unrest, and 2020 that separates it from other years of unrest.

The poplar racist insult spit out by white people: “If you don’t like it here, move.”

That insult can itself be studied if one had time to dig into how kidnapped and enslaved people who built a nation for white people can “move” to one of the other two-hundred countries that we have no claim to.

Black Americans do though have claim to this country. In fact, after Native peoples, no one has more claim to this land than Black people.

If anyone can rightfully “Go back to where you came from” we should perhaps start with everyone who arrived here through Ellis Island in the last century – the latecomers.

That group of almost exclusively white people from any number of European countries are the *newest arrivals and, frankly, maybe they’ve overstayed their welcome and haven’t earned their keep or kept up their end of the social bargain.

They certainly haven’t been good citizens since they have arrived. They quickly adapted the racism of earlier arriving whites, and they quickly joined in with political parties using their votes to deny humanity to Black people, to stop us from voting, to put us in their prisons, to limit where we can live, work, and how much money we can make.

Popular white racism is too often centered on the South – hey, they earned it!

But the Ellis Island white people filtered from the East and expanded their way West and North, establishing their newfound racial power and using it against descendants of America’s founders – Black people – with alarming skill, legal manipulation, and with plenty of money they used to buy politicians who enacted laws to the benefit of them and only them.

And as far as I know, the Ellis Island crowd have never even said “Thank you” to Black people specifically for building a country they and their descendants live comfortably in.

But even if that wave of white people, or any other wave of recent white immigrants could be deported, there isn’t anywhere they can go.

America under Trump and a corrupt and inadequate medical establishment have made it so that Americans cannot leave the country right now because America is now the world’s largest leper colony due to how we welcomed in Covid-19.

The irony that a people who for centuries illogically told other races to “love it or leave it” are now shunned by the countries where millions of white people and their ancestors originate is an incredible turn of fortune for white people who long considered themselves the envy of all other global white people and nations.

White Americans, who will soon be the largest minority, have painted themselves into a global corner.

Who will rescue white America? Putin? China? France? Germany? Mother England?

White Americans are faced with what winning sport teams who establish dynasties learn: everyone else wants to beat you, wants you to lose, and celebrate your every loss, mishap, and pandemic.

And now soon to be a minority, the American white dynasty is fighting and fearing the inevitable that all sport dynasties fear: The dreaded rebuilding years.

To prepare to rebuild a better team and a better America, white people should be aware and knowledgeable of who their fellow citizens are since it is us who will be needed to help rebuild.

Instead of learning about us, about who we are, and about our wants, needs, and day to day lives, white people continue to retreat to their all-white neighborhoods, go to their mostly all-white jobs, shop in their all-white stores, watch all-white television and movies, and celebrate holidays with their all-white friends and family.

But if that “plan” fails, white people will have to learn to get along with all the rest of us.

But can white people learn to get along with everyone who isn’t white?

There are plenty of global examples of white people not getting along with, well, anyone, but can they get along with Black Americans who basically share the same self-interests?

We already know that Black people can get along with white people. Our very survival depends on it. We’ve had to get along with white people for over four hundred years and, despite white people’s best effort to make us hate them in small and large ways, we still work for them, occupy public spaces with them, tend to their every need in every service industry, and give them almost all of our money just so we can live in their imaginary white’s only country.

White people will have to change their ways and learn to trust their fellow citizens and know that despite the hell that white people have put us in, that we will not do the same to them.

Listen, white people: Black people will not treat you like you’ve treated us. We won’t enslave you. We won’t set up Jimmy Crow. We won’t redline or suppress your votes. We won’t shoot your kids who hold toy guns. We won’t run freeways through your neighborhood or dump toxic waste near your schools.

Speaking of schools, we will fully fund public schools.

We will ensure that medical studies include impacts to white people so that new medicine and drugs work for you as well as they work for us.

Black people have humanity, we forgive, and we will not genocide our fellow white citizens.

I know it is a time of uncertainly, white people. But I want you to know that during times of uncertainty it is good to find comfort and familiarity.

And there’s nothing more familiar than your country mates who have lived here with you all these years – in separate neighborhoods, but you get the point.

© 2020 by Myron J. Clifton. All Rights Reserved.