I used to believe racism in the United States was overstated.
Sure, it existed. But it's not something widespread. Common. The claim americans are racists is ridiculous.
Well...I was wrong.
"Zohran Mamdani is a terrorist"
"Mamdani supports ISIS and HAMAS"
"New York City faces sharia law"
"Mamdani wants to MURDER jews"
The amount of shit published about this guy is absolutely insane.
He recently attended the 9/11 memorial ceremony.
At some point, he greeted congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and smiled for 5 seconds.
Immediatly, politicians went wild
Senator Ted Cruz:
Congresswoman Mary Miller :
Speaker Mike Johnson:
Here is the video. You can clearly see that he was stoic. He hugged her. Then he immediatly went back to being stoic.
Dude smiled 5 SECONDS in a 5 hour ceremony and they accuse him of celebrating 9/11
At the same ceremony, JD Vance and Howard Lutnick laughed and joked.
No one cares. They are white.
The US is more racist than I ever imagined.
racism is also an action and a belief. you do acts of racisms, like stereotypes of pOCs in media, that is an act of racism, hate crimes, racist media messaging.
I prefer to separate the racism from the action, but I will agree that racism is a belief structure that predicates an action.
If you have racism in you, and you treat people of other races exactly the same as other people, each time you do it, it is a voluntary choice to override your intrinsic racism rather than an abnegation of your racism itself.
If you have racism and you choose to capitalize on that racism and treat people of other races differently than you would treat people of the same race, then that racism is a voluntary choice to act in a different way than you normally would.
Just like with my choice to speak in AAVE to black people, I was doing that out of racism.
And since I have made the realization that it was a racist thing that I was doing, I have managed to stop doing it completely to the point where I don't even think about doing it, so in that tiny one little section of whatever racisms I may be carrying, I have managed to eliminate the racism by identifying it and changing myself rather than choosing to act in a new way specifically for specific people.
It is, to me, my own personal validation of the phrase, "the first step to fixing a problem is admitting that you have a problem".