The other day, as I was scrolling through my Facebook feed, I was unfortunate enough to come across some not so comical content shared by the Comical Conservative. This happens every now and again, and usually I just shake my head and keep scrolling. This time, however, I could not just keep scrolling.
The Comical Conservative shared an image listing some of the Black organizations designed to promote integration and give people of color a platform on which to showcase their talents and bring justice and fairness to their communities. That’s not, of course, how they saw it. The image, which was obviously designed to peddle the fiction that white privilege does not exist, somehow tried to convey that it was, in fact, Blacks who had privilege in society.
The NAACP and Ebony Magazine were a couple of the examples of “black privilege” used in the image.
So, I’d like to take the folks at the Comical Conservative on a little history field trip to revisit why some of these institutions were created and why they are necessary.
The National Urban League was founded in after Plessy v. Ferguson legitimized segregation as an institution. Blacks left the South and migrated to the North in hope of a better life, but even though their chances of getting lynched had been reduced, they still faced discrimination, poverty, and little hope of economic mobility in the city. The National Urban League (then called the Committee on Urban Conditions Among Negroes) was founded to bring education and employment opportunities to Blacks.
Ebony Magazine was first published in 1945, when Life magazine was sweeping the streets of America. Life, however, offered no representation for blacks- all of their cover models were white until 1969, when Naomi Sims became the first Black woman on the cover of the mag. In 1945, when discrimination was still rampant in both the South and in Northern cities, Ebony magazine brought celebrated Black culture and accomplishments- something that its white counterpart (Life) did not.
Black Entertainment Television (BET) started as a segment on Nickelodeon, and quickly became its own network (though it should tell you something that it was necessary to create a whole special bloc on a popular TV channel for people of color to see some representation on the screen). It showed black TV shows and movies, as well as music videos, and had the first news segment that was directed toward a black audience. Haters might say, “what about the white audience?” Well, that would be literally everything else.
The National Action Network was founded in 1991 in response to racial profiling and police brutality. They rallied for Trayvon Martin when he was killed by “neighborhood watchman” George Zimmerman, and demanded justice when Amadou Diallo and Sean Bell were killed by police. They have mobilized people to ensure complete suffrage for minorities in the wake of the catastrophic revisions to the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
The NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) was formed the early 1900s in response to race riots and an epidemic of blacks being lynched, and its self-described mission is "to ensure the political, educational, social, and economic equality of rights of all persons and to eliminate racial hatred and racial discrimination." So basically, black people were dying.
They still are.
But creating an organization to combat discrimination and inequality is privilege? What privilege really is, is being able to grow up in this country, to learn about slavery, about segregation and Jim Crow, about mass incarceration and police brutality, and still be able to look at a list of the organizations created to combat these lethal and unjust practices, and say, “I don’t have white privilege.”
Just in case it’s still unclear, I’d like to add one more organization to the list that the Comical Conservative might not know about: the Black Student Alliance at American University. American University’s Black students make up a mere 6.2% of the student population, compared to 55% white students. Today, in 2016, at my school, on my campus, Black women are getting bananas thrown at them by White students. Their property is being vandalized and they are victims of some of the same intimidation tactics that were used against blacks to keep them from voting and integrating in the past. Last year, as well, social media forum Yik Yak was teeming with racist sentiments against black AU students, calling for a “slave auction” so they will “go back to Africa.”
But racism is over, right?
American University needs to step up. Administration and students alike, need to show these racist sacks of crap who think it’s funny to target and harass students of color that there is no place for them at our school, and to show black AU students that we can, and will, stand with them against injustice and discrimination. Because for every person who is committed to standing in solidarity with our fellow students, there is another one throwing a damn banana.
