Life's a Beach!

Many White people act as though Blacks are always crying wolf about unequal treatment (read: experiencing racism in our day-to-day lives). Yet, there is always evidence that racism is as prevalent today as it has been in the past.

From shopping in stores (and being followed by security), to trying to catch a cab (and having the cab driver pretend to be off-duty and ignoring your waving hand), to moving into a predominately White neighborhood (and having your neighbors make it perfectly clear that you supposedly don’t belong), Blacks have to deal with racism in many aspects of our lives.

Now, let’s add going to the beach to that list.

Yes, going to the beach.

Snooty White homeowners near Brooklyn’s Manhattan Beach are trying to have the beach privatized in order to stop “thugs” (read: minorities) from going to the beach. How do they plan to do this? They plan on making it very difficult and unpleasant to come to the beach by:

-- charging people a fee to enter the beach area;
-- closing the beach at a moment’s notice, whenever “thugs” start to arrive;
-- creating a single entrance to the beach and having metal detectors there; and
-- by adding more cops and surveillance cameras.

The issue is that many minority high-school and college students like to go to Manhattan Beach and the homeowners don’t like it. So, they’ve gone as far as fabricating a shooting incident to justify the changes they want to make. People on the beach said there wasn’t a single serious incident at the beach. When pushed on the subject, one of the homeowners had to admit that there wasn’t a shooting incident (read: it was a lie). But, the homeowners thought everyone would accept the lie because everyone knew they were referring to minorities, when they spoke about alleged shootings.

Why am I writing about this? Because people like this work somewhere! So, I ask…

How do you think they perceive the Blacks they work with, if they don’t find Blacks (and other minorities) worthy of going to “their” beach?

You see, this open-minded society we live in is nothing more than a fabrication. There is still more to strive for regarding the dream Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke of. We must stop pretending we are all one big happy family and that racism has gone the way of the dinosaurs.

Again, these people—who are bold and stupid enough to be obvious bigots—are someone’s employer, supervisor or coworker.

Can they give fair performance evaluations? Can they decide a Black, Hispanic or Asian employee has earned a promotion? Will they sign off on the training classes that will help a minority employee gain valuable knowledge and skills that will make them more competitive with other coworkers (read: White coworkers)?

The answer is…You can’t turn racism on and off! These stories are directly linked to racists in the workplace. The people that engage in this behavior off the work site will also engage in the behavior on the work site.