This latest installment of our “Real Racism” series comes to us from nikcole (correctly spelled) cunningham, a member of the San Francisco Reparations Committee.
Here, from Neirin Gray Desai’s article for London’s Daily Mail, is a sampling of Ms. cunningham’s wit and wisdom:
A member of San Francisco’s reparations committee called straight white men a ‘danger to society’ because they are ‘the ones shooting up schools’.
Nikcole Cunningham, who serves on the 15-person committee, told The Daily Telegraph that straight white men were failing to support the controversial black reparations effort and had to ‘come to grips with their ancestry’.
In an interview with the Telegraph, she said: ‘They have the most, I watch these shows, the most serial killers. Straight white men are the ones who are shooting up schools, right?’
‘So they are a danger to society,’ she added, before noting it was ‘not all of them’.
‘If anything, they pose more of a harm than support and help. And then you got to remember their ancestors… are the ones who were standing out here in their Sunday best watching black people hang and burn,’ she said.
‘So until white people come to grips with their ancestry too and make amends with them, to say, I want to be the change,’ she added.
She went on to describe how ‘white supremacy is ingrained in the DNA in this country and definitely in this city’.
Cunningham also argued white people should be held responsible for the actions of slave owners as they are ‘still benefiting from the harms that… [their] ancestors caused’, The Telegraph reported.
If you’re into race-based stereotypes and generalizations, this should put you in downtown seventh heaven. If not, I assume you find the overt racism of cunningham’s comments sickening.
To make my point a little more clearly, suppose a White man who opposed reparations said something like this:
Straight Black men are uneducated welfare cheats and violent criminals who father kids they can’t support and have to come to grips with their ancestry.
‘They have the most, I watch the news, the most murderers, thieves and rapists. Straight Black men are the ones who are shooting up their neighborhoods, right? But not all of them.
‘If anything, they pose more of a harm than support and help. And then you got to remember their ancestors… are the ones who were running around in the jungle with no clothes on, then collected by other Black men and brought to the docks where those Black men sold them to White slave traders, who sent them to the United States where they worked every day for slave owners (mostly White but some of them Black as well).
‘So until Black people come to grips with their ancestry too and make amends with them, to say, I don’t owe them a penny.”
Would you call the person who said that an ignorant racist, loaded with racial/racist stereotypes, who accuses everyone of what some are – in other words, who uses the kinds of stereotypes (such as Jews are cheap, Irish are drunks, Italians are mafiosa, Muslims are murderers, etc. etc. etc.) which could be spewed about every race ethnicity and culture, not just Black?
If so, you’d have my 100% agreement, because that would be exactly correct.
So why would anyone listen to the ravings of nickole cunningham? And why on earth would a city, even one as far gone as San Francisco, put her in any position of authority?
Real Racism. It can come in any form from any source. No one is immune to it or from it. Especially a hate-filled, stereotype-spewing racist like this one.
