The Drought of Deference

Deference . . . is ‘awarded’ by ‘race’ in this society and worldwide . . . but not in the way you might think.

Deference is supposed to mean that your unique perspective on the topic at hand WILL BE The Authority that others look to in order to imbibe or be educated on an experience or an event

It means to have how you see things uncontroversially unassailable in terms of ‘bankable’ veracity on an experience or an event

It also means ceding an informational discussion or argument to one’s professional experience. Like say a discussion about macroeconomics should hinge on the knowledge of the Nobel Prize winning participant across from you. One should have the attitude of . . .

“I defer to your expertise . . . so am I right or what about the economic stimulus value of trickle-down tax policy?”

It is also an expected social grace or overture to commonly maligned groups — women, LGBTQ. For example, no man would dare tell a woman that she is ‘making too much’ of a fuss about say the pain of childbirth. You’re with your wife in hospital and she’s moaning or screaming delivering your first child . . .

“Honey could you quiet down!? It can’t be that painful! Now quiet and focus!”

You’d be, how to put it, a gigantic douche who’s wife would, even during her labor contractions, kick your misogynistic ass all over the delivery room!

No man can tell a woman how to be a woman because . . . you aren’t one. You ‘defer’ to her identity, her life as a woman

Racial experiences are worthy of the same sort of ‘deference’ but in this society and in fact worldwide that isn’t the case. Cognitive dissonance on this abounds and it is seen through racial lenses but obliviously so it seems because people can’t seem to see the blatant moral contradictions inherent in their knee-jerk assertions or reactions when people of color express or protest about racial injustices or even the recounting of daily or minor occurrences or micro-aggressions.

Let’s jump right into the disparity that I’m hinting at by using two examples:

1) Jews are allowed to talk openly and publicly within society without much ‘umbrage’ about the attempted genocide they suffered at the hands of Germany

2) Armenians can openly talk, with venom at times, about the horrific attempted extermination at the hands of the Turks that the allied powers did NOTHING to stop . . .!

No one doubts that these two occurrences were horrific and no one dares try to muzzle these groups airing out their collective pain . . .

They receive . . . Deference as defined earlier

But let Blacks (or any member of the African Diaspora) and the Indigenous do the same . . .

“That was so long ago!”

“There you go playing the Race Card!”

“Race Baiter!”

“There they go with the Hate Whitey Party!”

“Conquered people just need to accept and assimilate . . .”

. . . folks know this shit is true!

The previous two examples of humanitarian grotesqueries are definitively NOT occurring right now. They are over. However Jews and Armenians suffer no debilitating collective discrimination from society now despite their traumatic relatively-recent histories

But for the Indigenous and the Person of African descent . . . their ‘holocaust’ hasn’t really stopped and they are still living with some easily-noticeable vestiges socially, economically, culturally and even physically of that sad legacy.

And it’s still impolitic and politically-nuclear to embrace their pain or allow voicing of the same into the mainstream ‘media body’ of all types.

People of color — The African Diaspora and the Indigenous — apparently aren’t ‘worthy’ of the same level of ‘deference’ that the previous two groups are imbued with almost ‘absently’.

Let’s point out the obvious for the willfully obtuse:

Armenians and Jews in this society have been granted the mantle of ‘white’ within the last few decades . . . just like Italians, Greeks and the Irish were a few decades earlier.

People of color can NEVER claim this ‘mask’.

No one wants to admit or talk about the fact that whiteness carries with it tons of benefits psychologically, societally and even goes so far as to insulate one physically to a certain point against state and government level abuse or excesses.

People of color don’t receive ‘Deference’ from the larger society no matter where in the world they are on the matter of their pain or collective racial catastrophes. We alone know beyond a shadow of a doubt what it is like to be oppressed by our tormentors. If we follow the logic at the beginning at this piece, it would dictate that we be the final arbiters of any comprehensive assessment of our own racial experiences.

But no.

Our ‘oppressors’ think nothing to define and choose FOR those who suffer under their ‘fist’ all the parameters that would inform any attempt to understand our experience.

How obscene IS that? But there it is . . .

Our ‘oppressors’ for centuries now and even to this day have and still try to ‘dictate to People of color . . .

1) If we’re even allowed to express it under any circumstance

2) How or what form to express it and to what extent

3) When to express it and for how long

These three criteria have been true since they brought us over here in chains and from since they decided the indigenous weren’t human. All of these criteria are hewing to an unmistakably supremacist bent interring people of color at the base of all social stratum.

Sadly even many of these ‘newly imbued’ with ‘this precious biologically-insignificant’ ‘armor’ have joined the Old Guard in denying us . . . Deference as well.

And that denial of our basic humanity has been and still continues to be lethal in so many ways . . .

But we still aren’t allowed to speak out and defend ourselves from a holocaust that is still occurring . . . when others, who’s wholesale sufferings have ended decisively decades ago, are allowed full-throated, ‘center of the arena’, righteous lamentations with the honorable goal of making sure society never forgets what happened.

Don’t we deserve that too?

Or is the addiction to racial cognitive dissonance so great that treating us with such basic and obvious legitimacy and decency would cause a moral aneurysm that pierces through the generations?

Treating us with legitimacy on our feelings and experiences living under the boot of racism . . . does it cause a malfunction in the national moral ‘operating system' that is fused to the mythology of this country’s founding?

Barrack Obama seemed to have sensed/known this:

Our first Black POTUS had to pretzel himself, to a sometimes frustrating degree to those of us astute enough to notice, to avoid triggering this ‘national reflexive umbrage’.

Deference is ‘granted’ by Race all right.

And people of color, from a Trayvon Martin to our esteemed First Family are STILL under nihilistic threat on many levels and many ways to their very lives and legacy due to this now-normalized drought of human deference and lack of recognition of our humanity . . . and that is a rancid shame that America seems to not give a damn about wallowing in to this very day.

(C) 12/21/16