I don't know how old you are, but in my mid 40s I grew up when Apartheid still existed, and the… | by Abe Rainer | Medium

Abe RainerFollow3 min read·Feb 28, 2021 --

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I don't know how old you are, but in my mid 40s I grew up when Apartheid still existed, and the Rodney King riots which was a response to extremely brutal images of several cops beating him

with batons, and he wasn't already dying from a fentanyl overdose. It was still a LOT worse than it is now, and I was ultra passionate about "integration not segregation", and the goal was

not to judge each other by skin colour, because it's stupid. What's going on now is the opposite of what MLK fought for, and he would probably feel dismayed at the way it's gone. This CRT

thing you're taking part in is a con mainly left leaning politicians like the Democrats use to cynically divide people, and by buying into it you don't seem to notice you're being

infantilized, and the message is you're supposed to see yourself as a victim in need of saving by them, to keep you voting for them and divided against people who are more like you than they

are. You've bought into it, so you're not considering that maybe some of those reactions are more related to this relentless campaign where all anyone talks about now is race, and the

differences none of us can change. It's not white fragility to point this out, it's because the MLK dream felt like the right way, and it felt to me in my generation like we were really

getting there. We finally got the first black US president, and in 2008 I cried when it happened. But it didn't go as planned. He wasn't the messiah we all hoped, it was more of the same,

and instead of broadcasting the message that your skin colour no longer mattered, so that black kids could even aspire to be president now, it seemed to go in the opposite direction and

picked open a scab of resentment and for some reason resulted in this weird, stupid idea that it's now a good thing to judge people by skin colour, by changing which colour. And generations

younger than mine seem to know nothing about history, and how much better things had become, and how much progress had been made, and with these impossible zero-sum no-win scenarios where

every possible action a white person can take is somehow racist, you're undoing it all, because you've been sold a cynical lie. Don't waste your time and energy looking for slights that

probably aren't there. What really matters is what's in people's hearts, what they intend, and their actions. Not imagining what that might be based on 60 seconds of perceived body language.

We humans are really good at seeing what we expect to see, and can end up creating it in the process. But white people are constantly under attack now because of all these stupid ideas, and

it's those of us who are dirt poor who are most affected, and we have real problems too that might make us feel insecure, so some of this perceived behaviour might just be because we feel

like you're going to assume a lot of things about us, and accuse us of things we don't feel guilty of, like you have here, and there's no hate, just uncertainty and anxiety about bein

g seen wrongly. The people fuelling this are not poor, they are setting us against each other so we don't focus on them. Don't be conned. MLK's way was way better. I much preferred it when

we just saw each other as humans. Judging people by skin colour is moronic, and calling it "anti-racism" or Critical race theory, or whatever doesn't make it less moronic, it's just a trick

others have stirred up to divide us so they can rule. There will never be progress while this continues. Please stop.