#RacisimIsEveryWhereApparently

Hey everybody!!! Yes, I fell off with doing the #31WriteNow challenge and I am sorry for that but I am going to try to finish out the month strong. 

One of my fav past times is watching HuffPost Live.  It is Huffington Post in live news segments.  Along with their segments, they have panels where anybody can join.  They recently had a panel about the new Netflix series, Orange is the New Black.  They discussed the fact that a white woman had to be at the center of the show for the show to even get past the producer's desk.  In the show, not only do we get the main character's story but we get subplots from the other prisoners.  Some folks (black woman that writes for the Daily Beast) were mad that the black prisoners were just subplots and the fact that minorities have to be a part of the series for a prison show to be believable. 

As I was watching this segment, it was apparent that homegirl was reaching for racism.  And this seems to be a recurring theme: find the racism.  Now if you have ever seen Orange is the New Black you will know that it has a more diverse cast than most shows and all characters are treated with respect.  So if you find racism in this show then that is because you are looking for it.  But why have we become the type of society that is always looking for racism?  To be honest, it is exhausting.  Racism is bad and takes you through a lot of emotions.  Who has the time and energy to look for racism everyday?

 By always looking for racism in every situation that does something dangerous: desensitize others to race issues.  I was reading an article called "Is Food A Race Issue?".  In the article, the author tries to make a correlation between the Trayvon Martin case and a lack of healthy foods in minority neighborhoods (side notes: there are a lack of grocery stores in poorer neighborhoods regardless of race.  They are called food deserts.).  Two problems with that: 1.We do not know if there were not grocery stores nearby Trayvon's neighborhood. 2. He was just wanting snacks to watch the game, not needing to go on a full grocery store trip.  The author was really reaching to make this connection.  In the comment section, a lot of people were fixated on the poor connection between Trayvon and lack of grocery stores instead of the issue of the article and thus started to mock the article.  The readers of this articles just see this as another case of "the boy (or girl) that cried racism". 

Yep, I have coined the term, "the boy (or girl) that cried racism".  This is the direction we are going if we do not start picking our race battles.  There is no reason for a March on Washington every time a show has a black character we do not like.  There is no reason for a public apology every time we do not like a Youtube video.  Racially insensitive people are amongst us.  We can't change all of them.  I don't know about you but the world is depressing enough.  Some battles aren't even worth the time.