(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .
Don't hear... but listen [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-04-26
It may seem rude to you and some of you might feel those telling you “It’s not your place to speak up” are shutting you up… and mostly we are, we need you to hush up because we need you to start listening. Listening, not merely hearing.
I know it goes against every fiber of your being, I know you feel like you’re being shut out of the conversation, that you should have a voice, that you have opinions and advice and whitever (not a typo)…. And you do, we’ve been listening to them for decades and the results have been slow and painful often backsliding “progress”. So much backsliding that now you are removing minorities from the archives of institutions, banning anti-discrimination, criminalizing DEI… And that’s because you do not listen, some have been speaking since the birth of this country and haven’t heard a word we’ve said.
And before some of you come with the regular chorus of “not all white people” the answer in this particular case is yes, all white people, the exceptions are too few to mean anything. No matter where you stand, allies, friends, foes, spouses, red, blue, progressives, liberals, right wingers, there are mistakes that all of you make and the most prevalent one is that you hear but you don’t listen. For example, every time someone says the phrase “this is going to affect Black and Brown people the most” it’s with good intentions, however what the 77 million hear? It’s not my problem it’s only those N words and they cheer! Just like that Kushner guy who shelved a plan during covid after hearing that very phrase! Yet people keep on saying it.
Before you even read or listen, you’re ready to defend yourselves against what you consider “accusations”, you’re preparing your counter arguments or you exemption passes, distancing yourselves from your fellow whites “I’m not like them” “I have a Black spouse, biracial child, friend, lover, etc… I’m one of the good whites!” Problem is it’s not a matter of good vs bad white people. It’s a matter of culture.
You have a lot of mannerism, clichés, sayings, way of talking that you’ve inherited from your culture and parents, and they’ve inherited that from their own and so forth. You do not even realize most times how you speak differently to white people than you do to Black folks, sometimes even when using the same words and phrases, the inflection differs. Online there are responses that you ONLY give to Black folks and some are in “support” of us. It’s condescending as hell.
This is how most of you enter other folks conversations: “not me, I blablabla” “not all of us, we blablabla” “if you did x maybe that would work” “well maybe if you weren’t so angry, loud, bossy etc…” when it’s not like some avenging savior descending on your fellow whites, to show you’re one of the good ones. Believe me, we know which ones are the good ones.
White people it’s time for you to listen…. And I mean listen to us. It’s obvious that you don’t, the evidence lays in your own praise of speeches spoken by your peers when the contents are the same as spoken by Black folks. It’s suddenly like you never heard that before, revolutionary speeches you say, this one gets it you say, why can’t dems speak like that you say, but how many Black dems have stated the exact same things? Even when a Black speech goes viral, it’s not for the substance of the content, it’s for some quip or meaningless sound bite within.
We have tried people, we have tried your ways and your ideas, it hasn’t worked. We have changed everything we could about ourselves, from our clothing to our very skin, to putting cancer causing chemicals in our children’s head, not to mention at one time on another even our culture to fit in your world, nothing has worked, we’ve never gone past “progress” and never gotten more than crumbs. We’ve never reached the dream let alone equality.
And that’s the crux of the problem right there… all efforts have been concentrated on changing us, the others… telling us to adapt, integrate, etc… but it is not us that need the change… it is YOU. For it is your attitude that has created, bred, nurtured and cultured the problem. It is you who refuses to let go of your ways that are destructive to other communities, the only change that will bring results must be yours. And for you to change you need to listen, something that does not come easy when culture and tradition has always centered you as the savior, the hero, the center of the universe.
The lack of conformity to your ways is deemed as weird, abnormal, eccentric, you unconsciously view us as lacking even defective when you don’t view us with pity.
We do not need you to lift us out of poverty… we need you to stop placing us in poverty with your laws and other systemic practices. We don’t need you to educate us, we need you to stop blocking our path to education, we don’t need you to uplift us, we need you to stop jumping on top of us and pinning us down. We need you to remove the obstacles you’ve placed in our way to impede our rise. We need you to rid yourselves of your prejudices and biases. Because progress shouldn’t be the whole of our destiny, it’s high time we reached the goal and lived the dream.
You need to stop seeing the world through your eyes only… a lot of you, even “allies” were offended by a black mermaid, some of you kept saying how your children will not see themselves in her, how you related to the old white mermaid… and you said those phrases without even noticing the point… YOU yourself were making…. That you saw yourself represented and it mattered to you to be able to make that connection. But you would deny others that feeling. Out of dozens of Little Mermaid movies out there… ONE was a Black girl. ONE.
So the next time a marginalized group tells you “it’s not about you” “it’s not your place to speak up”… do yourself a favor, instead of getting up and leaving in a huff of anger… sit down, hush up, and listen. It is our turn to speak up.
And without listening to a word I’ve said here, some will tell me there are other more important things to talk about right now because this is not for them, they already know all this, etc…
#TheAmericanHaitianPoet
#Woke #SocialPoetry
paypal.me/murielvieux to help Haitians families 10$ x donors can go a long way.
#ThePoet - Muriel Vieux – April 26th, 2025, ©All rights reserved
[END]
---
[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/4/26/2318928/-Don-t-hear-but-listen?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=latest_community&pm_medium=web
Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.
via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/
