One Hate Fits All

 I have, over the last few weeks, been watching YouTube videos of people of Asian (and I mean all of Asia) and mestizo (i. e. a person of white Spanish and Indigenous ancestry) call each other out for antiblackness. Of course, for me this was no attempt to learn "what goes on" since I'd long known all this, but to see what these folks had to say about it themselves--what they thought about the antiblackness and how they thought about it. It has been...fascinating...bewildering, entertaining, silly-sad, and somewhat boring. It is interesting how much anti-black racism is a universally a one-size-fits-all formula. The typical preoccupation/obsession with sex (specifically with black men--of course) and the want to always to be in the favor of white people. The majority of the folks I listened to seem to be aware of the model-minority myth and they all are frustrated with the stubborn prejudice of their parents and community. Some folks had this on their mind for the first time, some folks had this on their mind for awhile and BLM II has given them the chance to publicly say something , and then there are a very few who were about that anti-racism thing long before George Floyd & Breonna Taylor's death. I really got tired of hearing the same excuse of  "don't like conflict in our culture" thing (no one does). It was interesting to see what seems to be a key rule of antiblackness that assumes that people of African descent don't know nothing. It was interesting to see that a lot of the South Asian videos that I kept running-across came from the UK. I also am taking note of the age-range as the people in these videos definitely run towards the younger-end of the scale (though these are a few older 30+ speakers). Some of the videos made by the Mestizos addressed the fact that not only does their antiblackness contribute to hostility towards African Americans, but also leads to the erasure of Afrolatinos (something that all of the videos with Afrolatinos mentioned). I can't say I am sure that these confessionals and call-outs will lead to any real action though. The acknowledgement of cultural appropriation and colorism is very "about time."

In my opinion, only two paths can truly help any real progress. I call these the John Brown and Grace Lee Boggs options, respectively. One can give and spill blood for black people in spectacular fashion and become a John Brown-style warrior. This is a very quick way to go about it. Or one can embed themselves and their families into black communities, send their kids to majority-black schools, and share their wealth with their black neighborhood by investing in black businesses and institutions and people. This approach is a lot longer and intimate and requires a true dedication to black people in the way of a Grace Lee Boggs did with Black Detroit. Anything besides those two options is just performative bullshit. We have to simply sleep with each other, but live with each other, go to school with each other, go to each other's functions, places of worship, stores. We must do this to the point where "each other" becomes "ours"--only then will progress possibly be made. It is interesting to see the different ways that antiblackness and colorism were introduced to these communities, but it is interesting how much it does not differ at all from white people. Meanwhile, Breonna Taylor's killers are still free, 5 black children in Colombia have been brutally lynched, and the world has gone back to normal. These are my concluding thoughts on BLM II.

For a different but similar context, I would check-out this essay by James Baldwin on the strife between African Americans and white Jewish-Americans: https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/03/29/specials/baldwin-antisem.html