28 Apr What You Don’t Know: Message to Pseudo-supremacy Believers
“Knowing what you don’t know is more useful than being brilliant.” - Charlie Munger
I See…
Minds imprinted and scarred by the illegitimate Birth of a Nation.
Veils over minds so complete you can’t think beyond what you think you know.
Scales on eyes so thick you can’t see beyond what you think you see.
Plugs embedded in ears so deeply you can’t hear the outcry of fellow citizens.
There comes a time when you have to willingly put aside self-proclaimed brillance and analytical thinking in the name of balanced arguments and debates to realize the space of this conversation doesn’t lie in your brilliance, analytical arguments, or debate skills.
This conversation lies in acknowledging you don’t know (or refuse to know) what you don’t know about those whose experiences are housed in a social matrix radically different from your own.
I Hear…
The narrative of lived experiences reframed to fit your needs:
The attempts to retrofit the enormity of racialized experiences into bite-size chunks of ill-defined “reverse” discrimination is an insult.
It’s an insult to the truth of lived experiences in a deeply racialized society. The refusal to simply acknowledge that you don’t know what you don’t know—that someone different from yourself may be the key to what you don’t know; that is the deeper insult.
Rather than digging in to know what lurks below the surface, do you opt-in to maintain the status of pseudo-supremacy?
I Smell…
I Feel…
The invisible truth that lies in a deep desire to simply be left alone to design and walk in their own shoes: Like the shoes of those who designed and walked in their own Greenwood community in Tulsa OK; or the landowners who designed and walked in their own footsteps at Seneca Village in Manhattan; or those who designed and walked in their own pulled-up bootstraps on the streets of Rosewood Florida.
Rising up out of their own collective strength, determination, creativity, productivity, and bootstraps: proving they don’t need to steal somebody else’s shoes when they can design and produce their own; all while operating in the presence of roadblocks strewn across their path.
What they want is to be left alone to thrive on their own.
It takes fire and brimstone, laws and legislation originating from your shoes to bring about destruction.
(Yet still we rise.)
So much of what you stand on is couched in the name of war—the bygone era of the original civil war giving rise to the contemporary era of woke wars, culture wars, political wars, economic wars, environmental wars, and wars raging in classrooms over which children should be taught (or not taught) which information.
You warring seems to never stop.
(Yet still we rise.)
I Ask…
How can we live like this?
How can we live in the name of the pseudo notion of freedom and liberty without personal responsibility and accountability?
How can we live while sleeping on the bedrock of America’s triple threat: fear, racism, and guns?
The shining city upon a hill—its light is dimming, slowly extinguishing from the darkness originating from within.
“They pick the most dangerous enemy they can find and it’s themselves.”
Twilight Zone, 1960 Season 1 Episode 22: The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street
“For while fear might keep us vigilant, it also tears us apart.”
Twilight Zone, 2003 Season 1 Episode 31: The Monsters Are on Maple Street
The Time for Transformation Is Now…
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