Secret’s misunderstood
“Secrets’ secret is that it is a club making money playing black music, while it excludes black people.”
This article details a night spent in Ocean City where Gabrielle Beckles and her party were rejected from entering a nightclub due to one of the members not possessing proper ID. This sort of attitude is common, and I don’t mean the attitude of not allowing blacks to enter nightclubs. What the author of this post is failing to realize is that the member in her party was rejected not because of the color of her skin, but because she did not have the proper credentials required to enter.
A member of any other race would have also been rejected. The bouncer was doing his job and following company policy. The fact that the bouncer denied Gabrielle’s friend special treatment is not evidence of racism. This sort of attitude is a product of the current self-centered perspective of our generation, otherwise known as entitlement.
The author also betrays her own racist sentiments by characterizing what I assume to be rap and hip-hop as “black music.” While these two styles of music certainly have their roots in black culture, a forward thinking perspective highlights the growing diversity within this form of music and the need for it to be recognized as a medium shared by all, not a particular ethnic group.
Sorry, Gabrielle, you’re not entitled to be admitted to 21 and over nightclubs without proper identification, and you’re also a bit racist.
Irrelevant arguments set back actual race discussions in blog
This article essentially argues that the creation of the word “race” is fundamental to racism, and without it’s usage and inception into language, racism would… well, he doesn’t really leave us with what potential alternative benefits would be gained from the nonexistence of the word racism, however I suppose it is assumed that things would be better. Unfortunately, this article is another example of false racism, a phenomenon I am finding quite prevalent in blogs discussing the subject. William Cook gives us the flaw in his argument himself:
“Until the word “race” came into existence, people defined themselves by ethnicity.”
Can you see the gap in his logic? He is disassociating the idea that people have always defined themselves by ethnicity with the creation of the word race. This is not the case, following Occam’s Razor, rather than the term race being a loaded word created with a conspiracy to demean members of our community, it seems more likely that the term race came into use in order to easily identify the difference in ethnicity. The problem of racism is not with words, rather the ideas behind them. Attempting to blame a word is creating an ancillary conflict that does not address racism and is mainly in the author’s own head.
