Written in my diary on 04-06-2020.
Look at the header picture of this post and let it sink in for a bit.
Now on to the US, which is set in fury and flame, as George Floyd had been violently murdered by discriminant police officers. Perhaps, this cruel and immoral deed had ignited a wildfire that was already smoldering for years on end in America. George was black, the police officer in question was white.
Though the most notable until now, in this complicated and confusing matter, is the enormous extensiveness of social media use. Millions of arguments and counter-arguments are floating around on social platforms. Some say black lives matter. Some say all lives matter. The first might be too one-sided, the second too abstract. Today, I saw a protest sign on my news feed, saying that ‘’Privilege is when you think something is not a problem because you aren’t personally affected by it.’’
Although I think that the term stupidity would suit more than privilege, I suppose this message implies that ‘white’ people are privileged. But creating such dichotomies won’t achieve what they intend to do: Inasmuch as we cannot call all black people unprivileged, we cannot call all white people privileged. Privilege is not skin colour determined, just as inferiority is not skin colour determined. There are privileged wealthy black people and poor unprivileged white people, and vice versa.
Discrimination is the mother of racism. Creating disjunctures is discrimination in essence. Racism is a secondary form of discrimination which uses skin colour to make divisions amongst peoples. So calling white people privileged, is a form of racism, too. Remove this dichotomy, and you remove discrimination. Remove the discrimination and you remove racism. Remove the association and you remove separation.
Side-note: Culturism, for example, is another, often overlooked form of unjust discrimination which uses ethnicity to make divisions. It is obviously inextricably connected to economic prejudice: My girlfriend and I are separated only because she is from Russia. Not because she is a bad person. Not because she wants to do harm. But: An immoral person who has the right ethnicity can enter without visa, but a moral person without the right ethnicity needs to move the earth to get a visa, and vice versa. She needs a visa for the Netherlands, people from the US don’t. She needs to prove sufficient funds, Australian people don’t. Remove borders, and you remove separation. Yet, dividing is deeply, stubbornly anchored in our core nature, and it’s nurtured as well: dividing is one of the first things we learn in math class.
Philosophically speaking, attaching certain labels to something as peripheral as skin colour is always surpassing objective truth. Deeds of violence based upon ephemeral standards cannot coexist with reason, what makes them injust. Martin Luther King has said that we need reason and moral in the battle against prejudice. But they’re not equal. Who reasons, knows that moral is fleeting and subject to constant gradual change. Some mores are more unjust than others, and whether something is just, can only be measured by reason.
Reason hovers above moral. Moral can therefore be even dangerous if it falls into the hands of certain powerful men, as Nietzsche remarked. In fact, I believe that under the current US president, (unconscious) public moral had already deformed immensely after succeeding the last one, especially with those who were neutral before. This is the danger of moral. It is not reliable, and (sub) culture specific: the decisions by those murdering police officers seemed moral in their morality, and is seen as immoral by others.
Mores is subjective, and can be individually adjusted and therefore justified according to extreme personal convictions, such as racism. But, as Aurelius emphasizes in his meditations, the reason of justice goes beyond that and reveals that discrimination based on skin colour (or other external characteristics) is something rudimental and beast-like, and can therefore not be tolerated in higher, developed cultures. The highest form of existence is one of union, but it is a long journey towards the dissolution of borders and separation. And the biggest trap is to think we have already arrived.
Lastly. Look again at the header picture of this post. When disjoined from all their associations, we will hopefully once see black and white exactly for what they are: colours.
Photo Credit: Daryan Shamkhali
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