It’s All Greek To Me: The Paradox of White Privilege and Immigration
Omar Mateen killed 49 people in the Pulse Nightclub. Trump stated after that he would throw him out.
“And frankly, the Muslims have to help us, because they see what’s going on in their community,” he said, according to a transcript, adding: “And if they’re not going to help us, they’re to blame also.”
“Well, I think profiling is something that we’re going to have to start thinking about as a country,” Trump told CBS News. “Other countries do it. You look at Israel and you look at others — they do it, and they do it successfully. And I hate the concept of profiling, but we have to start using common sense, and we have to use our heads.”
After the terrorist attack in New York City in Manhattan that Sayfullo Habibullaevic Saipov, an Uzbek national who entered the U.S. in 2010 committed, Trump asked for “extreme vetting” for people coming into the United States.
Recently, Dimitrios Pagourtzis killed ten people in a school at Santa Fe, Texas and injured many people. We learned that his father is a Greek immigrant. From abortion, doors, violent video games and movies, and bad parenting, not once did the media blame his “Greek-ness” on the tragedy. I’m not sure what religion he is either, but I haven’t heard it come up once in the media.
Why?
Yesterday, I was watching The View, and Meghan McCain stated that this is an issue happening with young men but she didn’t state that it is an issue that is happening with WHITE young men. I wonder why in America does race count when the perpetrators of the crime are non-white but when the perpetrators are White, then that is not an issue worth discussing?
We hear story after story about how BLACK men are responsible for the majority of homicides, especially in places like Baltimore and Chicago. However, is it “black-ness” that causes these homicides? Is there something inherently wrong with black people? Racists and Fox News analysts like to make this argument often. However, “white-ness” is never discussed when it comes to mass shootings in this country, which is almost always White men. Is there something inherently wrong with White people then?
Arabs and White-Ness
In the 19th century, an evil law was passed called the Chinese Exclusion Act. Thanks to blatant racism from our legislators, this excluded Asians from coming to this country, allowing only White people to immigrate. Arab Americans fought to come here and were designated as “white” on Census and immigration papers. This was an important designation to allow them to work freely and not be discriminated against. For those of you that don’t believe in privilege, then why would a group of people “fight” to be White? I wonder if that comes with some great priviliges…guess I’ll never know.
Terrorism was not the face of Arabs. It was actually the Irish when you thought of that word in the 60s and 70s. However, after the PLO planned Black September, the world began to see the Arab world as something entirely different. They were once seen as invisible but no longer.
They have something in common with people of color. They are often blamed for the actions of other people. Now some members of the Arab American community are working to change their “White-ness”. They want a special box to check on the census to distinguish them. This is important for many reasons. If Arab Americans are counted as a special category, then we can find out how many live in our country. They could possibly qualify for Affirmative Action programs, and are counted in hate crime statistics. The downside to this is that the U.S. used these numbers of Japanese Americans to round them up during World War II. Due to the outright prejudice that they face just walking down the street, and with this current administration, we can’t rule this out. When the president of the United States has actually let a “ban on Muslims coming into the country”, you know that this could be a possibility.
The party of the Constitution rips every thing up except for the 2nd Amendment, which it seems they would like to expand the definition of.
I digress.
So if we can call for more doors in our schools and other ridiculous things, why not call to stop Greeks from coming into this country?
Greek Americans have made incredible contributions to this country. From Betty White, Ariana Huffington, Tina Fey, George Stephanopoulous, and Bob Costas, they’ve done some incredible things in this country. However, we should put this aside and decide to end Greek immigration here. Or at least get a list of all Greek Americans that live here now. I’m sure that Tina Fey wouldn’t mind this at all. Right after she guest stars on SNL, a truck can pick her up and take her off into the night. John Stamos can save her a seat next to him.
This won’t happen. It wasn’t brought up. It was swept under the rug with the other shootings. Unless the shooters are black or Latino, then race simply doesn’t matter in this country. If you are Black or Latino, then race is fair game to get ready to blame. When race is used to segregate members of a community, we can’t talk about those things. We can only talk about blackness in the space of how “bad” black culture supposedly is. But we can’t talk in racial terms how these people were forced to live in relative concentrated poverty. That we can’t talk about. Let’s focus on how the government isn’t responsible for an entire group of Citizens of this country.
White people haven’t figured out how to stop mass shootings and violence in their neighborhoods but somehow blacks people are supposed to figure this out without help from its own state and federal government? And this is okay?
It’s nonsense. It’s a joke. If the government put these people in these neighborhoods then they need to take responsibility and do something to help them out.
But that’s exactly what white privilege is. The ability to believe that blacks are responsible for themselves while White people get the help they need. Farmers. White drug addicts. These are groups that get help. Black and Latino people need not apply. Fix it yourselves.
Wake up people.
