Candace Owens: Black men getting shot by police isn’t about racism

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I date a white guy.

Like, a REAL white guy, in the hyperbolic essence of a character you might draw up for a TV show.

He has only attended private schools. He is a golfer. And he owns nothing in his closet outside of polo shirts, khaki shorts, and country-club crested belts.

Against my will this year, I watched The Master’s. Against his, he downloaded the Kanye West album.

I should mention first that I am not a “stereotypical” black girl. I don’t have a name that’s hard to pronounce, and I don’t speak in colloquialisms. My mother kept my head in novels, which afforded me a leg up in my academics, and consequentially, in life.

Good grades and white classmates meant being accused of “acting white” in middle school. It felt wrong to try to argue my state of blackness to other blacks, and so I never did. I got pushed against a locker a few times, blocked from walking down certain hallways — until eventually, in some all-encompassing art or music class, they would realize I wasn’t so bad.

The irony of it all is that in terms of stereotypical blackness, no one is more qualified; my mother didn’t finish high school. Her brothers all went to various colleges, except in the hood, “going to college” means prison.

I visited my uncles in state penitentiaries growing up. My sisters and I would race back and forth from the vending machine to an allotted visitor’s bench, where my youngest uncle sat in a green jumpsuit.

And his big brother went crazy in solitary confinement.

And their eldest brother, my uncle Vinnie, lived outside of a lot of liquor stores. Ever the oblivious children, we gave him the nickname “wobble, wobble,” because that’s what he always did.

When you grow up like that, you develop a bond that can never be broken. I view my first cousins as brothers and sisters, which is something my boyfriend has known since the very first night of our courtship.

And I can’t wait for him to meet them all.

My first time at a country club was in 2012. There was a dress code, a deafening silence, and way too many forks aligned next to my plate. It gave me an icky feeling of exclusion that I couldn’t reconcile with my childhood, and I swore I’d never return.

Until I realized the ick was simply my own discomfort. It was me, stumbling into foreign territory guided by a map made up by every movie, media piece, and article written since the beginning of time; “Country clubs are for rich jerks,” it read.

A similar map led me a year later when I unwittingly roomed with a Muslim woman. She and I didn’t speak for weeks, and I was genuinely mortified when she invited her family over our place for dinner. Because, “Muslims, 9/11, and terrorism” my map read. I can’t remember if I purchased it at Fox or CNN.

Today, that Muslim woman is one of my truest friends and I now know that Islam is a beautiful religion. Just like I know that country clubs are about the preservation of history — and I would know none of these things if I had been labeled a racist.

Had my roommate called me a racist I would have doubled down on my ignorance. I would have produced statistics, and pursued evidence to rationalize my fears, and further ostracized the Muslim community.

We tend to rely upon information, over our own experiences, which is a dangerously flawed manner of learning.

In my experience, there is a direct correlation between poverty and crime. I know that my uncle “wobble wobble” was once a 9-year-old boy, left on the side of a highway by my grandmother with his 5-year-old sister. I know that if you have to figure out at 9 years old how to feed your 5-year-old sister you might begin with petty crimes, like thievery. I know that once you’re in the system it’s hard to get out because people don’t hire individuals with a criminal background, and I know that being a 5-year-old little girl left on the side of the road by your mother has to got change you, for better or worse. And if by some miracle, that little girl made it out of group homes and grew up to marry a good man from Stamford, then her children at the very least ought to understand.

And I do understand.

Which is why when I watch the senseless killing of another black man by a cop, my heart shatters. I see my cousins, I see my uncles, I see a family member, bleeding out onto a car seat. And then my heart breaks once more because I picture my boyfriend pulling the trigger. Scared perhaps, justifying his actions, abandoning logic in favor of protocol.

I want to save them both.

Racism exists, but it is far less rampant than ignorance, and ignorance can be cured through experience. I see ignorance, on every side, from people who believe there actually IS a “side.”

White people feel they are being accused of racism, black people feel that a real problem is being overlooked, and no one is understanding.

Look, if you can picture yourself feeling slightly uncomfortable at a country club, or seated next to an individual in head-to-toe Muslim garb aboard an airplane, then you have what it takes to understand:

We are ALL the ignorant products of our media, and this only ends with forgiveness. Our programming can only be overridden by real experiences.

“You keep a group captive by keeping it divided against itself.”

The way I see it, we are all victims.

Candace Owens runs the blog Degree180.com and recently formed the anti-bullying startup SocialAutopsy.com.