Still Sick Of Hearing The Term 'Race Card'

'It wouldn't be necessary to 'play the race card' as you peeps so derisively put it if you Euro-descended Americans ancestors hadn't set up a system that demonizes non- whites, maximizes benefits to your ethnic group, stacks the deck to maintain that advantage, marks the biggest face cards in the American cultural card deck for themselves and passes them on to their children.'
--TransGriot August 6, 2007 'Sick Of Hearing The Term 'Race Card'

And once again I'm having to write a post about the insulting to the Black community conservaterm 'race card'.

We non-white folks are more than sick and tired of being sick and tired of hearing that insulting conservaterm deployed every time a discussion pops up about race in mixed company either online or in the media. 

Last time I checked that race card or my government slavery reparations check for $150,000 hadn't hit my mailbox yet. 

Non-white people are fed up of hearing from vanillacentric privileged conservative white people that having POC organizations tasked with addressing our lack of representation in the larger communities we interact with or pointing out how race, class white privilege and white supremacy negatively affect us is 'playing the race card'.

It's even more infuriating when that same conservalanguage and rhetoric comes out of the mouths of our liberal-progressive white allies. 

I remind you that predominately POC organizations such as the NAACP, La Raza, LULAC, MALDEF, the Urban League, the National Bar Association, the Congressional Black, Latino and Asian-Pacific Islander caucuses, the National Black Journalists Association, the Divine Nine historically Black fraternities and sororities in the National Pan Hellenic Council, HBCU's and countless other organizations founded by people of color during the 20th century didn't just pop up in a vacuum.  

They exist because of a need for communities of color to band together to fight a persistent four century old pattern of racial discrimination aimed at non-white communities by white America and indifference or outright denials from vanillacentric privilege addled whites not affected by that discrimination it exists or they benefit from it.  

Sadly, because the TBLG community is a subset of the parent society infected with those same problems, isms and ills, it has become necessary in the last two decades to create predominately POC organizations to address the same lack of representation issue just as we had to do in the parent society. 

The National Black Justice Coalition (NBJC), the Trans Persons of Color Coalition (TPOCC), the Trans Latin@ Coalition, the International Federation of Black Prides (now the Center For Black Progress), Black Transmen Inc/Black Transwomen Inc (BTMI/BTWI), along with corresponding conferences, seminars, the Honor 41 list and events these organizations sponsor such as TransFaith In Color, various Black prides across the country and NBJC's upcoming September 18-22  OUT on the Hill conference in Washington DC are necessary in order to close ranks, help us own our power and become part of the greater BTLG and other communities we intersect and interact with.
   
If a 'race card' truly exists, it's the White Privilege Rewards Card which gets played every time any person of color begins to excel despite the barriers strewn in their path.  As the Zimmerman case demonstrated, it also get deployed when whites get in legal trouble.  And yes, it comes with a rainbow sticker on it as well.

We are a long way from the colorblind society Dr. King envisioned.  But at the same time colorblind does not mean ignore race or not have thoughtful discussions about it.

Frankly, not having serious discussions about the issue of how America's original sin of slavery still impacts this country's race relations 150 years later and how its foul stench still permeates American society is why race and the color line are still major dissension causing problems in 21st century American society. 

But one point I need to emphatically make once again is there is no such thing as a 'race card'.  White peeps, especially on the liberal-progressive side need to eviscerate those insulting conservawords from their vocabulary so that we can at least on our side of the political aisle have a thoughtful and civil discourse on it.