In the caption of the Instagram post, he wrote, “An old white woman got on the train and immediately pointed at me and told me to correct how I was sitting. I refused, so she went to the conductor and complained. The conductor called the police and stopped the train,” he said.
O’Keefe also says in the caption that the friend of the woman who called the police had said to him, “You’re not the minority anymore.”
A separate video about the incident has been uploaded by the user, Nalae, on TikTok, where it has quickly gone viral, having been viewed over 160,000 times as of reporting.
They said I was disturbing the peace by not leaving the train. They pulled me off the train and arrested me without even talking to the Karen who reported the one black person on the train. On the platform, the police detained me and interrogated me. Only black folks stayed nearby and recorded the arrest. When I demanded a lawyer and reminded them they didn’t even take a statement from the woman who complained they eventually released me. This country is growing more psycho by the day. What will you do about it?"
This is why the term “color blind” is used by someone trying to go the right way, but still not getting it, which leads to the ignorance of their racism. In being blind you are blind to the fact that racism still exist and isn’t fixed. Then that leads to incorrect beliefs like “minorities are getting special priveleges and when they don’t have the same quality of life it is because of their own poor behavior” as opposed to acknowledging the systemic racism still in place.
Sometimes, but not always. I used to call myself colorblind, but I could see how the cops treated my black friends worse than they treated me. At one point, they rounded us up waiting at the bus stop (there was an abandoned restaurant by the bus stop, and the cops said we were trying to break in), and all my POC friends got frisked, but I was the only blonde girl, so I just got a talking to about how “hanging out with the wrong crowd will ruin my life”. Some of those kids are working on their PhD now, so “wrong crowd”, kiss my ass.
I understood “colorblind” as a “skin tone has no bearing on how I interact with you, we’re all human”.
I always thought that “everybody gets treated the same at first, adjust as we go along” was respectful, but then moved to the west coast and it’s apparently a horribly racist thing to do here, and I don’t understand why?? Something about how black people are going through struggles I can’t understand, but I also thought that everybody had struggles I don’t know about?
Like, if I don’t make assumptions about somebody in a wheelchair, it’s a good thing and not ableist, but if I don’t make assumptions about a black person, it’s a bad thing and racist? I have never been able to understand how people up here think it’s less racist to stereotype an ethnicity.
There’s also the problem with white “leftists” up here not actually knowing any POC and getting it from fucking facebook memes. Like, I had a white person once tell me, in all seriousness, that me saying “hey, what’s up” is appropriating AAVE and the correct thing to say in greeting to a black person is “I see and respect our differences”. I said that sounded patronizing as fuck, and she said I should join the kkk with that attitude.
Unlearning racism has been an awful experience, really. I’m listening to what black people say they want, but that’s somehow still racist, and I’m so close to just giving up and doing what feels right to me.
Colorblind is removing their identity.
You are still a black, white, brown, etc. person (I’m using {color} from now on cause I don’t want to type an array of colors each time). The person’s experiences as a {color} person are valid.
While you shouldn’t treat someone different because they are {color}, you should validate that they ARE different and celebrate those differences in an appropriate fashion.
It’s like a friend coming out to you and you reply “I don’t care”, while that is not the worst way to respond and you mean well, you are invalidating WHO they are.
I think this is much more eloquently illustrates my point: https://youtu.be/91O7q7D4xnU
Consider therapy. It helps
Thanks, you must have missed where I said I’m slowly unpacking all this in therapy. My therapist says I’m doing good, and that I’m not a racist monster because I’m putting in the effort, but that doesn’t seem to be a common definition. In any case, I don’t call myself colorblind any more, even if I don’t understand why, people do react poorly, so I don’t do it any more. This is retrospective.
But when I called myself ‘colorblind’ I wasn’t saying “I don’t care”, I was saying “Okay, tell me what that means”.
Like, when I came out, I absolutely hated how big of a deal people made about it. I had people “validate that I was different”, but it felt like they were just making fun of me for being different because it was all weirdly patronizing. All this nonsense about “it’s okay that you like boys and girls, you’re still my friend” when I’m an adult who is into men and women, and I wouldn’t have started hanging out with you if I thought you didn’t like gay people? I’m still me, I haven’t changed, and stroking my ego is just telling me that you feel weird around me now that you know I’m not ‘normal’.
I still felt stereotyped and unwelcome, even though they were being “inclusive”, and I don’t want to do that to black people. I don’t understand why that’s racist.