Many people were surprised when President Donald Trump suggested that NFL team owners fire players who quietly choose to sit out the national anthem before games, but I was not one of them.
Even though they thought theyβd solved the anthem problem by blackballing protest starter Colin Kaepernick, the residual insolence displayed by the players roiled white people to no end because their protest was so disrespectfulβnot to a 250-year-old cloth logo or a Francis Scott Key bar song. Taking a knee is disrespectful to whiteness. It is not that white people canβt understand Kaepernickβs point of view; itβs thatβto themβany other point of view is nonexistent.
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For future reference, we have put together this handy-dandy checklist for designing a protest that white people will find inoffensive and respectable.
I have no idea why, but white people hate it when anyone uses the phrase βwhite people,β because, for some reason, they consider it a pejorative. When protesting police brutality, education inequality, unfair housing practices or anything else, you must be careful not to βmake it all about raceββeven if the thing youβre protesting is all about race.
Refer to racism as a βsocial issue.β Instead of slinging the phrase βwhite supremacyβ around all willy-nilly, you can instead refer to it as βstructural inequality.β If your βunderprivilegedβ child has been fenced into a poorly funded educational system, call it an βinner-city school.β
Uttering the words βwhite peopleβ only serves as a reminder of their historic ties to oppression, which can only be negated by their instinctual regurgitation of the preamble to all white excuses: βNot all white people ... β Even if you make your protest about a βsocietal issueβ thatβs not about race, you still shouldnβt expect them to join in or approve.
They already heard you say βwhite people.β
When protesting, you must not only refrain from lumping Caucasians together, but you must also be careful not to remind them of your blackness. Again, the word conjures the imagery of oppression and makes everything about race.
Plus, it is divisive. Any mention of race is divisive because it overlooks the fact that every color and creed has problems. Some people have to worry about the leader of the free world trying to deport their children, vilifying their religion or referring to their mothers as bitches, while others have to live with the terrible burden of people constantly belittling their chicken seasoning and potato-salad-making.
We all have a struggle.
If there is one thing white people outer-city people hate, itβs being left out. If you watch the nation unite in empathy and mourning for the single Caucasian victim of white supremacy, while ignoring the fact that the same supremacists have terrorized people of color for more than a century; when you see Justine Damondβs death change the leadership of an entire police force while streets run red with black blood spilled by acquitted police officers, you still shouldnβt say, βBlack lives matter.β
Even if there has never been a nanosecond in the long history of America during which anyone questioned the worth of white lives, you must still include them. You should also be inclusive enough to make up an entirely new category of human being and announce that blue lives matter, too.
Unless you hate cops ...
... and smurfs.
White people The average American doesnβt mind protest ... as long as he or she canβt see it. You absolutely have the constitutional right to feel a little morose whenever your son, neighbor or fellow citizen is shot, choked, beaten or discriminated againstβas long as you donβt obstruct the weekend Caucasian commute to the mall to purchase yoga pants. Why should they have to think about the disproportionate, continual murder of black people when theyβre trying to get half-price cargo shorts at the Gap? Thatβs just un-American.
You can object to inequality as much as youβd like, as long as it isnβt at sporting events. No one wants to think about politics at sporting events. Or at political rallies. Or inaugurations. Or on social media. Or at schools. Or at actual protests.
Everywhere else is fine.
If you miraculously find a place to protest, find an inoffensive phrase and include people from all groups, you should still be mindful that there is a list of things that white people the overprivileged value more than your life, freedom, equality or happiness. Your civil disobedience must not offend or disparage any of the following: flags that represent America, flags that represent traitors to America, monuments, names of buildings, statues, stained-glass windows, cats, American flags, 150-year-old songs, freedom of speech (but only their freedom of speech, not yours), bathrooms, dogs, the children (not children, but βthe childrenβ), the Founding Fathers, first responders, blue lives, religious freedom (Christian only), traffic and troops.
Especially troops. Wypipo love troops. They can watch a cop shoot an unarmed person in the head and see the brain matter splatter on his or her baby in the back seat and feel no empathy, but burst into tears when someone shows them a clip of a dog licking a soldierβs face when he comes home from killing brown people somewhere in the world protecting their freedom.
In fact, if you wrap a puppy in an American flag and put it on top of a pumpkin-spice gift certificate to Starbucks and tell a white woman youβre giving it to a soldier, she will spontaneously orgasm.
Real talk.*
*I donβt actually know what βreal talkβ means, but I know thatβaccording to Section 3, paragraph 5, of the Uniform Negro Codeβaffixing βreal talkβ to the end of a sentence automatically makes it true.
One of the surest ways to engender respect from white people the unmelanated is to die. If you donβt feel like dying and have white-enough teeth, you can alternately outlive their vitriol and wait for them to embrace you.
Muhammad Ali was considered a traitor when he stood up for his rights and refused to fight in Vietnam. Tommie Smith and John Carlos were vilified. Gallup polling recounts Martin Luther King Jr.βs favorability this way:
In 1963, King had a 41 percent positive and a 37 percent negative rating; in 1964, it was 43 percent positive and 39 percent negative; in 1965, his rating was 45 percent positive and 45 percent negative; and in 1966βthe last Gallup measure of King using this scalometer procedureβit was 32 percent positive and 63 percent negative.
Five months before the March on Washington, 60 percent of the country had a negative view of the event and 57 percent thought that peaceful sit-ins hurt the civil rights movement. Even a year later, in 1964, 73 percent of Americans believed βNegroes should stop mass demonstrations,β according to Gallup (pdf).
There has never been a movement for the freedom or equality of people of color that has gained white approval. Not the abolitionist movement. Not the anti-lynching movement. Not the Black Power movement. Not the civil rights struggle.
Looking for respectability and approval from white people will always be as fruitless a task as a chickenβs attempt to convince a fox to respect the boundaries of the henhouse.
In fact, historical, anecdotal and empirical evidence shows that there is only one way to protest without offending white people:
Donβt.
Straight From
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