White Supremacy

 

                                                            

                         White Supremacy

On Wednesday, responding to the murders in Atlanta of eight people, six of whom were Asian, a writer for The Root who also is a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times asserted that “whiteness is a public health crisis.”

Damon Young wrote, “It shortens life expectancies, it pollutes air, it constricts equilibrium, it devastates forests, it melts ice caps, it sparks (and funds) wars, it flattens dialects, it infests consciousnesses, and it kills people—white people and people who are not white, my mom included. There will be people who die, in 2050, because of white supremacy-induced decisions from 1850.”

He concluded, “White supremacy is a virus that, like other viruses, will not die until there are no bodies left for it to infect. Which means the only way to stop it is to locate it, isolate it, extract it, and kill it. I guess a vaccine could work, too. But we’ve had 400 years to develop one, so I won’t hold my breath.”

Last October, Young penned an article in Esquire in which he blamed white society for the death of his mother, who died of lung cancer. He wrote:

"When she was a terminal cancer patient, that status was her primary identity when receiving care, superseding race, gender, and class. She was considered vulnerable. Defenseless. Worthy. Of protection. Of pain relief. Of treatment. Of effort. But when she was just another Black woman, she was just another Black woman and treated as such. Of course, I have no hard proof of this."

Young quoted a report from Pittsburgh’s Gender Equity Commission saying the city was “arguably the most unlivable” city in the country for black women. He wrote, “There are few better places on earth to be sick than in Pittsburgh. And few worse places in the country to be sick if you’re a Black woman.”

Young said that the reason Pittsburgh is “so livable for white people and so unlivable for Black men and Black teens and Black children and Black babies and, specifically, Black women” was that Pittsburgh “used eminent domain to displace hundreds of businesses and thousands of residents from the predominantly Black Lower Hill District” in the mid-1950s and that “Pittsburgh is a city in the same America that owes its vastness, power, and wealth to its plundering of Native people and its centuries of free labor from enslaved Africans.”

Young asserted, “I know why Vivienne Leigh Young died. She existed in the least livable body in America’s most livable city.”

The culture has become incredibly unreflective and stupid. Of course, I have no hard proof of this.