When White Isn't Innocent & Black Isn't Dangerous

Baked into the fabric of our social imagination is the manipulative notion that whiteness and light are synonymous with and/or indicative of innocence, purity, righteousness, life, and order, while blackness and darkness represent malice, danger, chaos, mystique, terror, and death.

However, a deeper look at this juxtaposition in our real world reveals that things are not as they seem. The evil of racial inequality relies upon the archaic and asinine belief that individuals possessing darker skin are inherently inferior, inherently less human. Ironically, it is this shallow, condescending, and bigoted worldview that enables those with fairer skin to enable and perpetuate a violent, pervasive, and panoptic system of injustice. White supremacy as an institutionalized strand of America’s DNA is a primary force of evil in the life of the modern U.S. citizen and resident. In contrast, those who bear the burden and gift of blackness find themselves to be the perpetual victims of this injustice. The social narrative tells us that white is good and black is bad, but the public and persistent--albeit subtle--effects of whiteness tell us that no one is clean.

And yet, the oppressed always find themselves at the heart, soul, and nexus of a social imagination that fixates on a better tomorrow. It is but poetry that those who have been stepped on and marginalized into the darkness eventually come to possess both the will and the tools to use their pain, power, and aggression productively in service of setting the world right--or at least right-er than it was yesterday.