Racist Again
Well, Prior Lake, Minnesota did it again. There was yet ANOTHER horribly racist incident that is causing turmoil and trauma within their community. Here’s the most recent video that’s a terrible example of how far we still have to go. Be warned: it’s SUPER racist. Like old-timey racist.
Eeeeee gads.
The girl in the video, which I will not identify here since she is a teenager (but you can find her online if you want) has the usual white person excuse for why she was caught on video being not only racist but harmful to one of her fellow classmates. I’ll let you guess.
Ready?
She’s sorry (only sorry she got caught).
It was from a long time ago (it wasn’t).
She’s not the person anymore (she definitely is still that person).
I am all for giving people a chance to change. I used to be a much more horrible person until I opened my heart and mind to the rest of the world. I still have a lot to atone for. Part of that is coming on here and writing about how confused and unevolved my thinking used to be. I still have a lot of growing to do. And so does this girl.
When the video hit social media, it blew up. This led to groups like Black Lives Matter organizing a protest at the school yesterday. And hey, without all the out-of-town white supremacists showing up, it remained peaceful. Crazy, I know.
Prior Lake has something of a reputation now for being a hotbed of racism. A google search for “prior lake racism” gets more than 20 million hits. This is hardly the first time something has happened in this town, or, in this state for that matter. There are things about the video I want to talk about so if you didn’t/couldn’t watch it, you might want to skip down to the video.
First, notice the glee with which the girl uses the n-word. She knows it’s wrong. You can see it on her face. She looks at her friends as she says it. She covers her mouth like Taylor Swift winning an MTV Award. No one present objects or suggests she not say it. Instead, they all giggle, like the schoolgirls they are. She says it a few times, I mean, heck once you’ve said it you might as well get your money’s worth.
As deplorable as the n-word is, encouraging another student to kill themselves is pretty bad too. With mental health being strained during the pandemic and teenage suicide, specifically girls, on the rise, it’s especially bad timing (not that there is ever a good time to be a racist asshole). Again, her friends delight in her hatred and encourage her. The way this white girl laughs and flips her hair while she traumatizes her classmate is all you need to see to understand her heart and what influenced her. She knew it was wrong and she did it anyway.
OK. Maybe time for a palate cleanser.
It’s honestly exhausting to constantly have to keep writing about white people and racism. And I’m white! I can’t imagine how it feels to face this kind of stuff day in and day out for your entire life. A few students expressed this saying things along the lines of “yeah, this video is obviously bad but so much more has happened than this one thing”. And that’s really what’s at the heart of this. Racism isn’t something we can eradicate (if we even can) by ignoring it. Only through education, compassion, and understanding can we begin to unburden future generations of the past and present.
As we have seen over the last year, many school districts and state legislatures have begun to ban what they call “CRT” or critical race theory. I don’t want to be pedantic about it so I will acknowledge that what they are seeking to do is not to ban the college-level study of a system. No high school is teaching actual CRT. Instead, what these white people (and yeah, it’s almost entirely white people) want to ban is anything that makes them, their children, or their ancestors uncomfortable.
The first step in this process is to ban certain books that might contain inconvenient or uncomfortable facts about racism and white people’s role in it. As it so happens, many of these books are written by people of color. Everyone from Toni Morrison to Michelle Alexander has seen their works restricted. Their crime? Writing about racism and white supremacy. Merely banning books isn’t always enough to satiate these virulent racists though. They want to burn them.
Seems like a well-adjusted and nice person!
I mean, when has book-burning ever gone awry? Oh right.
White are not ones to pass up striking while the iron’s hot. If anything can be labelled as CRT, then everything can. Some other things they want to ban because they’re “CRT”:
Pretty soon they’ll be banning MLK and all kids will learn about civil rights and racial injustice is that some stuff happened and now everyone is equal. It’s ridiculous. And as a white person, this shit is infuriating. What more do we need to see than the video of the teen using the n-word to know that whatever we’ve been doing isn’t working? At what point will white people finally admit that things need to change? Because if everything we’ve seen over the past few years isn’t enough to sway them, then I don’t know what will.