I am very sorry that you went through such a traumatic experience. I think your feelings towards the man who abused you are as a result Of doing a despicable thing to you, not due to his race.
To understand my feelings towards him you have to understand the nature of trauma and its relationship to how humans compartmentalise and categorise things and experiences at a deeply unconscious level.
So, for example, at one point he held a kettle over my face, one of those old kettles that you put on the stove, not an electric one. I have, on occasion, when I have seen one of those old kettles on TV, in a film or IRL, been in touch with a feeling of anxiety, like a dark cloud hovering over me. I don’t like the use of the word “triggering” for various reasons, however I am aware that sometimes I feel bad, the dark cloud oppresses me from above, and it may be that I just saw one of those kettles on TV and, without me realising it, I experienced a feeling of anxiety, not quite a flashback but something like it.
As a rational adult I recognise that the kettle poses no threat to me. Kettles are inert objects harmless in themselves, it is the unconscious association that can generate a feeling of anxiety if I see one, or even if I do not register seeing one but feel plummeted in anxiety, on such occasions I have rewound the video to see a kettle and I have a moment of realisation as to why I am feeling anxious.
The anxiety arises because of an unconscious association that kettles = torture. This is both rational given my experience, and irrational because it was in the past and not happening right now.
I understand that I have a conscious, rational aspect to my mind and an unconscious, irrational aspect to my mind, like every other human being on the planet. We all have an “inner chimp” a primitive part of ourselves that is selfish, scared, irrational, likely to blame and scapegoat others. It is the human condition.
Unfortunately, given the current coronavirus situation, tensions are rising and people do what they always do in pandemics, they blame, scapegoat and fall back on primitive ways of thinking / not thinking.
Our default unconscious mode of dividing the world into good and bad, clean and dirty, infected and not infected, self and other is intensified.
This is coupled with the manipulation of the mob internationally by some highly skilled puppet masters. In a “divide and conquer” situation different activist groups are encouraged to nurture grievances and to attack each other. Old against young, women against men, gay against straight, everything against everything until chaos rules.
If we get to a point where we assume everyone who is black is beyond reproach even when the commit evil acts, because to point out these actual is racist, then we will be in big trouble - we have already seen the consequences of this with things like girls in Rotherham.
Is anyone saying that everyone who is black is beyond reproach even when the commit evil acts ?
I do not think that anyone is saying that. Plenty of commentators from ethnic minorities have pointed out that George Floyd pointing a gun at a pregnant woman was an appalling thing to do, but that this is about much more than George Floyd.
Even if he was a person with no redeeming qualities police should not kneel on a someone’s neck until they die. Obviously. When that someone is African American it resonates with all the people who have lost loved ones in similar situations and there are many, many people out there who have lost loved ones in similar situations. This is an issue that has touched me very personally.
DiAngelo's Pernicious narrative is circular and inescapable. All White people Are racist. If you are white, There is no way you cannot be racist. If you say you aren't, this is proof that you are. The only way to show you are not racist is by admitting you are racist and it is racist to say that you aren't racist.
The problem here is that being accused of being racist becomes being accused of being evil and the worst thing possible. If I had £1 for every time one of my new neighbours had started a sentence with “I’m not racist but…” before going on to say something disgustingly racist I would probably be able to go on holiday with the money.
Acknowledging your own racism isn’t about wearing a hair shirt, beating yourself up, wringing your hands and virtue signalling. None of that is any good to anyone.
Acknowledging your racism is about simply having a commitment to supporting oppressed people in a racist society and that means staying thinking, staying communicating and tolerating feeling uncomfortable.
It does not mean that if someone calls you out on racism that they are always right. They might be. They might not be. Misunderstandings arise all the time, especially with non-verbal communication.
Similarly just because a whole room of people say that something isn’t racist doesn’t mean that it isn’t. I was recently in a situation with a group of neighbours where, during a heated discussion about racism one said “Enoch [Powell] was right!” and they all agreed except me. This ended up in a big shouting match about Brexit, foreigners and “the country being too full”. Me against maybe 15 other people.
To be honest I no longer call out racism and sexism where I live. My life is already difficult enough and it only encourages them into further furious rants. Some person from an ethnic minority will probably end up on the receiving end of their hate because of me.
Back to the kettle issue.
At an unconscious level our anxieties are all about binary categories. Clean / dirty, safe / dangerous, self / other, good / bad. At a more conscious, mature level we can appreciate things on a more complex, nuanced level.
When humans are sleep deprived, stressed, scared, when we feel unsafe, we lose the capacity to think reflectively and we fall back into binary thinking, what a psychotherapist would call “splitting” in which everything is good or bad, clean or dirty, self or other.
The evacuation of “badness” becomes a preoccupation at such times and these are the dangerous unconscious drives that can become the foundations for genocide and other atrocities.
It is during these times that the divisions between people can be manipulated in an inflammatory manner and can ignite into violence and even riots. People become aligned with various “tribes” and activist groups and end up fighting with each other as they are not able to comprehend the real opponent. This is the nature of divide and conquer.