How Writing Saved My Sanity From The Evil Attacks Of Racism!
My boss said to me, “You are smart!” He said it in surprise. I responded that I was not smart. I am, in fact, ordinary, and where I come from, most people are like me. He said, “No, you are special.” I reiterated the negative. I invited him to visit where I was from and spend some time so he would see many intelligent people everywhere.
My boss at the time was a racist white man who could not fathom that there were black people more intelligent than him. He needed to make me unique or extraordinary in his head because he could still feel superior if he thought most black people were ignorant but for a few. It was one of those racist “nice compliments” you were supposed to accept and be grateful that a white person thought you were worthy of anything.
My experience with this man, plus the microaggressions I got from so many others, including one of my white catholic colleagues who told me one day out of the blue to “shut the fuck up,” was, to say the least, traumatizing. I will explain the context later. At first, I dreaded going to work.
For my therapy, I started writing everything that was happening to me, how I felt, and the reactions of others when I told them what was transpiring. I also fought. I rejected and counter-attacked any racist aggression once I realized what it was. I did not care about losing a job that I loved, but one with incompetent and racist bosses. I would never grow in the organization anyway, as one frustrated black boss told me while trembling in anger one day. He grew up in America and could not understand why I would not just bow my head and absorb the racist attacks as he did to survive. “Stop causing trouble!” Right then, I recall the late Congressman John Lewis telling me in a parking lot one day, “Don’t be afraid to cause trouble for your rights!”
My writings years later developed into a book called “Economic Racism – Memoir of a Heroic Nonconformist.” Writing this forced me to research American and global history that would lead to such a socially and economically destructive system.
I learned about the Roman Papal Doctrine of Discovery, something the Roman Catholic church apologizes for recently after 600 years of global human suffering. I learned about the true nature of colonialism. I revealed education and land policies, genocide by Europeans of native people everywhere, and the continued economic racism of European descendants toward anyone who was not white and Christian, all down to the ultimate aim of hoarding resources.
But a friend of mine said, with all these problems, what are the solutions? So, I came up with a non-exhaustive list of resolutions. They are radical, but we need to undo the mess of racism and improve it.
There are many mental and social problems caused by racism, but I wanted to tackle it from an economic point of view, believing that we need to incentivize racism out of people. Appealing to white people’s good nature and expecting the concept of “whiteness” to disappear cannot occur without motivation. I will share snippets of my book and join the discussion on racism via this blog. Stay tuned.
