We missed all the shows about black and Asian families,” Dan says, referring to ABC’s Black-ish and Fresh Off the Boat.

“They’re just like us,” Roseanne responds. “There, now you’re all caught up.” There just like us should have been a moment of awareness, but the shows us against them depiction, never gave lines like that a chance. But as it turns out, it did not matter, because Roseanne had a different platform all together.

RACISM –thingification 

A term coined by Martin Luther King and given a reboot by Charles Blow during his remarkable response to an otherwise blah blah blah Anderson Cooper 360 CNN panel.  “Thingification – reducing a person so they are not human on the same level that another person is, and if you are able to do that, you can do anything to that person, that short changes their humanity.” The depiction of Africans as monkeys made it much easier to justify slavery, for the soul does not allow human beings – in a wholesale type of way –  to treat other human beings in a demonistic sort of way  – but monkeys were free game.

original color piece by @Magnifique_Queen  

Rather Roseanne just stumbled upon one of the most racist, demeaning and historically demoralizing insults imaginable or her reboot is her gearing up for another Presidential run matters, for if it’s the latter, she decided to take a page from President Donald Trump’s day one  winning strategy “When Mexico sends its people…. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”

We try to pretend the circle of life is just a silly song. That people are not connected and the earth is not God’s song. But he is the President and she is by far not his most impressionable constituent. Racism is America’s sickness. It permeates everything and everywhere and even when we are not looking for it – in fact do not want it – it is there. But we cannot look the other way. With wars and marches and laws and love, racism has endured since the foundation of our nation, and no one is happy about how it affects their of state of mind. To hate for the sake of or to be hated for the same sake, should make even the staunchest hater bow their head in shamee, for they are not an absolute or so many mixed Americans could not have arisen from slavery.

[How White Supremist Respond When Their DNA Says Their Not White, PBS Newshour]

∞∞∞

The Butterfly Strikes Back.

When Alabama voters banded together, in a cross section of demographics, to defeat a man accused of unspeakable acts, it was not so much for the Democrat but to maintain decency in the United States Senate and to stop a free fall into societal madness. When Starbucks and ABC sprung into action, it demonstrated that the wave of anger and bitterness that caught us so off guard, is in for a fight. It becomes disheartening to see the talking heads concerned more about their self righteousness of being right and less about healing the nation – and racism is too overpowering to be tolerated. Or lest we forget, that the Civil War killed 3% of the population and 20% of the Black soldiers¹.

But I imagine, that if the Confederacy had won, even the monkey illusion would have worked no longer, for either side. The superiority/inferiority complex it would have taken to justify that fighting and dying men, were doing so to become slaves  in the richest nation the world had ever created, is more than the mind could have taken. But it has culminated  into a President that does not give a damn about anyone but he and his oldest daughter. It was not free.

However for the good of America, it is necessary to refute the idea that the dominant ideology in our country, even today, is freedom and equality while racism is just an occasional departure from the norm on the part of a few bigoted extremists. Racism can well be, that corrosive evil that will bring down the curtain on western civilization. – Martin Luther King, Jr. AUG 1967