Erick Perez
Brochures, I have always thought that they were for travel destinations and the like, but this homework assignment says otherwise. The goal is to brain storm current pressing issues to inform the masses of. As a social justice advocate, picking three out of the many issues existing within the country...it's just so cruel, so I guess I'll roll with the top three that come to mind, with those being:
Black Lives Matter vs All Lives Matter/Police Brutality
Privilege and Racism/The Impossibility for Reverse Racism
Gentrification
Black Lives Matter, a movement that seeks justice in the form of reformation of laws and policies to protect people of color, sparked by the murders and abuse of black men and women by authoritative figures, while the murderers in question are often left off the hook with minimal consequences. This is something that has our country divided between people who are aware of systematic/institutional racial injustices and those that believe that those on the other side are hellbent on bringing up the past to cast blame.
Black Lives Matter is a movement that demands for equality, yet to those that don’t make an effort to understand what is being said, Black Lives Matter is a movement that pushes for Black Supremacy. The movement is often ridiculed and not taken seriously. In short people of color are crying out to stop being killed, yet people are responding with “but…”
A counter movement that was raised to Black Lives Matter was All Lives Matter. Despite how true all lives do matter, it is used to mitigate the message behind Black Lives Matter. With more fatalities of young Black and Brown being openly reported, and the charges being dropped, it reflects how to most of society black lives, brown lives, my life does not matter.
Terminology such as Reverse Racism soon began to be popular. Reverse racism is what it sounds like, people of color being racist towards “white people.” The truth is, there is no such thing as reverse racism. Racism is often used to describe an individual but the reality is that it is meant as an overarching description of a systematic means of securing the status of a group while oppressing the rest which ties into recent talks of various kinds of privilege. Individuals can have their own prejudices towards any particular race, but systematically people of color are never put into a position of societal dominance in the United States.
To help put things into perspective. I am a native to the Dominican Republic, over the summer of 2015 there was a lot of media coverage on the Dominican Republic because of the extreme deportation, local vigilantism and violence against Haitians which connects to the typical denial of black ancestry. That country and its values were strongly shaped by the European Conquistadors and by the former President-Dictator Trujillo who emphasized on the importance of being light. In that society, I as a light skinned dominican can be considered racist only because I am supported by a system that places me over a marginalized group of darker skinned Haitian refugees.
Lastly there’s gentrification, the phenomenon of a populace moving into a community while displacing the locals. It often happens with attempts to revitalize communities, which leads to new businesses, and overall quality of life for some. For the locals, it means struggling to keep a home due to the rise in rent, slum lord landlords doing anything possible to evict residents, to work on negotiations with new potential renters with a much higher rent. After a while the community changes to a point that it is unrecognizable. The culture changes drastically as the remnants of the people are being wiped clean.
Bushwick Brooklyn is a prime example. It used to be an area that was predominantly Black and Latino, with “affordable” rent compared to the rest of New York City. Lately there has been new movement into the community, and the change in aesthetic and culture is very apparent. It becomes more shocking to see these establishments after coming back for vacation once every few months for vacation. What I see there borders closer towards a cultural genocide as you see little to no remnant of the people who lived there, and the soul of the community dies along with it.
