Really with the Racism: an examination of modern day Slavery

Really....racism? it's 2014...........YES REALLY, BITCH. 

I hate when people try to tell me racism is a thing of the past & try to perpetuate this fallacy of a "color blind" society. like what? we aren't too far removed from slavery. share cropping persisted for YEARS in the south after the 13th amendment was ratified. our grandparents experienced segregation. our president was born into a world where half of his identity was considered "less than" & half of his family were oppressed. 

racism didn't die out; it's evolved & become institutionalized through the Prison Industrial Complex

"[Prison] relieves us of the responsibility of seriously engaging with the problems of our society, especially those produced by racism & increasingly,global capitalism. When Obama was elected president, a prisoner said “one black man in the White House doesn’t make up for a million black men in the big house. One of the reasons that so many people of color & poor people are in prison is that the de-industrialization of the economy has led to the creation of new economies & the expansion of some old ones – I have already mentioned the drug trade & the market for sexual services.At the same time though, there are any number of communities that more than welcome prisons as a source of employment. Communities even compete with one another to be the site where new prisons will be constructed because prisons create a significant number of relatively good jobs for their residents.' 

Chevron, Bank of America, AT&T, Starbucks, Victoria's Secret, HP, and walmart ALL USE PRISON LABOR

Understand Your Privilege

a lot of white people don't conceptualize with the fact that white privilege even exists ESPECIALLY

poor white people. until people start examining the world through a historical & sociological scope & see that poverty has a color & isn't an accident, but was systemic oppression, they won't ever realize. white people LOVE to invalidate experiences of people of color. like no, white people can't dictate the language & what falls under the category of what can be considered racist or what is racism because whiteness negates experiences that allow people to gauge discrimination on that same level & in that same regard. white people may be able to conceptualize with racism but will NEVER know the full scope of its affects. i'm sorry but you don't have the right to tell me something "isn't racist" or that racism is perpetuated by me calling you out on your ignorance when i've spent time learning my history; a history that your people hid from me. so many people want to rejoice over a black president as if he isn't biracial & as though he isn't privileged & token. he went to fucking Harvard....like that isn't a reality for almost any black people & the ones that it is a reality for are always ones of a measurable amount of wealth or of an athletic scholarship. people few & far between experience upward socioeconomic mobility & it's FAR worse for people of color who are consistently & historically overlooked in society. if you have a broken arm will not treating it heal it? no. your arm

may heal but it won't heal correctly or work like it once had. ignoring racism only perpetuates it. when we don't address something it doesn't mean it goes away; it just means it goes into the shadows, just as black history has.  when you're white you don't have to walk around thinking about your race. you don't get followed in stores and it isn't assumed that you're stealing. you can wear clothes you found at the thrift store & be considered "chic" & not "poor." you can have long hair & people won't question it's length or whether or not it grew from your head. you don't get pulled over in the city you live in & get asked if your car is your car. yes bitch i'm driving this car & you'll probably get off duty only to sashay towards a beat down toyota pick up. which also leads me to wonder, did i get pulled over for actually breaking the law or were you just wondering if a luxury car filled with kids of color was stolen? you don't have to wonder if people see you as qualified or write you off as an affirmative action hire & attribute your success to your race because you're "one of the successful ones of your kind." I've even had my step-dad make the assertion that it's "easier" for minorities to get into college. affirmative action only helps minorities of privilege; so 'easier' for what minorities? because it certainly isn't all. you don't have to worry that your sons will be looked at as criminals simply because of the pigment of their skin. you don't have people making the justification that because someone who looked like you had a hood on in the rain that he was "suspicious" & it was okay for someone to gun him down on the sidewalk. you don't have to worry about being judged based on your race, so why do you feel you get to tell me i'm "overreacting" or something "isn't racist" or "racism exists because of me" really, racism is perpetuated because i choose to let you know about your overwhelming & willful ignorance?

Although public commentary describes the United States as "post-racial", racism continues to exert a very real and pervasive influence on institutional policies and processes, interpersonal interactions, neighborhood infrastructure, socioeconomic opportunities, media imagery, and more. RISE is a project designed to illuminate some of the ways in which racism operates in this country. RISE (Racism Still Exists) is an anonymous artist group putting up powerful posters in Bed-Stuy in Brooklyn. It’s a very long time black neighborhood and is now rapidly gentrifying. examples of billboards: