Stop Waiting for Racists to Save You: Why "Ending Racism" Keeps You Powerless | Shahid Bolsen

When you establish completely unrealistic, unrealistically high moral standards, standards that literally nobody could ever actually meet in real life, will you create a system where everyone is perpetually guilty? Everyone has already failed before they even tried. And when everyone has failed, then failure itself becomes meaningless. You can just say I'm not a saint, and that becomes an excuse for any violation because you've set the bar, for what constitutes moral behavior at sainthood. Unreachable.

So then you normalize falling short. You normalize the stumbling until all you can do is stumble, and you don't even know how to walk upright anymore. See, the performative proclamation of high values ends up providing a cover for, in real life, escalating violations of even realistic moral boundaries because you can always claim. Right? You can always claim to have impossibly high moral values while at the same time transgressing even reasonable moral limits.

And you can minimize the seriousness of your violations by saying, I'm not a saint after all. Because you have you've set the bar, like I say, for what constitutes a moral person as patently unreachable and unrealistic and inhuman. So you're gonna be excused for any violation below saintly morality. So then by consensus, you will you will automatically be excused for any violation that falls below saintly morality, no matter how minor or major it is. See, in Islam, we're realistic.

This is a realistic religion. This is a practical religion. We have practical realistic moral values. You're not gonna hear us talking about turn the other cheek. Doesn't make any sense.

You're not gonna hear us talking about love thy enemy or bless them that curse you and pray for them which despitefully use you and persecute you. No. Absolutely not. We don't believe that, and we're not gonna pretend that we do believe that. It's unnatural.

It's unintelligent. That's not moral. That's not actually moral. That's not functional morality. Yes.

If the moral values are not functional, meaning they cannot realistically regulate your behavior, then they're not functional. But you constantly uphold these as ideals. Well, what sort of psychological dissonance do you think that that must create in any individual in your society if the moral value is inapplicable in real life? If it's inapplicable in real life, then violating it is not morally wrong. No violation has occurred if you break that rule.

But the individual feels that they have failed. Do you see my point? In other words, you are placing unnatural behavioral obligations on individuals rather than determining moral values that are actually consistent with natural human behavior. It's not regulation of behavior in a realistic way. It's imposing unnatural expectations upon behavior that are completely inconsistent with nature.

We don't teach our people to do that. That's not what we teach. And our people, we don't teach that, and our people actually behave better than the people who do teach that. Reflect on that reality. Because I know a lot of you are gonna say, love your enemies.

Right? Love your enemies. Bless those that curse you. Turn the other cheek and whatnot. You'll say that that it's still good to believe in that because it's godly, it's righteous, it's saintly.

You're not listening. It's inhuman. It's unnatural. It's unrealistic. It's unintelligent.

And nobody practices that in real life. What's the use of this? No one practices that in real life because no one is that foolish. So you're holding up as the definition of a of a high moral standard that which is completely contrary to human nature. Which means fundamentally that you have actually a very low regard for human nature.

And fundamentally, you believe that human beings can never truly be righteous, so we may as well set the bar so high that no one even has to bother trying to reach it, which means that morality has no practical role in determining your behavior in the real world. Do you understand? This is how you do. Unnatural moral expectations do not elevate people. They break people.

They create a psychological pathology by demanding people to deny their own nature, then condemning them when they can't deny their own nature. When they act as any sane normal person would, you can condemn them for not being able to reach that so called saintly level. Now Islam teaches very practical moral values. In Islam, there are no unrealistic behavioral expectations. We don't aspire to an unreachable moral state.

So what I'm saying is that people have to they must identify what they actually believe by what they actually practice and stop with all the performative moral values declarations that bear no resemblance whatsoever to what you actually believe and what you actually do. You need to do this. If you genuinely want to want to be a moral individual, a moral human being. Now I'm not saying whatever you do, it doesn't matter as long as it's natural and shouldn't be regulated. No.

Obviously not. Look, what I'm saying is that you need to look at what you actually do and don't let there be a disconnection between what you espouse and what you practice. And if you see that there's a disparity between what you espouse and what you practice, then you need to examine the realism of what you espouse. I hope you understand me because you do have moral values in the West. You do have moral values, but they are not even remotely like the moral values that you talk about in the West.

Your actual moral values are demonstrated by your behavior. This is what I'm telling you. So you need to look honestly. You need to look with ruthless honesty at your own behavior and then figure out by that behavior what it means you truly believe in. Yes.

I'm not saying that the West has no moral values. I'm not saying that. What I'm saying is that there is systematic dishonesty about what the actual operating values are. This creates hypocrisy in your people where you claim values that you don't practice. It creates psychological harm in your people where you have people feeling guilty for absolutely normal behavior.

And it creates moral confusion in in your people when you have an inability to identify any truly immoral behavior. In Islam, we have a system where here is what is permitted, here is what is prohibited, and here are the reasons that it's permitted or prohibited, and here is how you can live within those reasonable boundaries. We'll teach you that. Clear, practical, applicable. When someone violates it, they know they have violated it.

Not because they failed to reach an impossible standard, but because they crossed a very realistic, boundary that they could have kept. A boundary that is entirely possible to not violate. Like I said, when you have, when you proclaim impossible standards, that does not in any way whatsoever constrain behavior in real life. It just provides cover for bad behavior. So you can say, for example, we take child protection so seriously in America and that somehow coexists with Epstein operating for decades with institutional backing until now, backing until now.

Because for you, the performance or the declaration of high moral standards that actually substitutes for you for actual enforcement of realistic moral standards. So you say that you take child protection, for example, you take child protection seriously. Right? You say that. Where's the child protection?

You see what happens when you have unrealistic, deliberately abstract, basically symbolic and meaningless moral values? You see what happens? You essentially prevent any practical morality from ever manifesting in your society. See, that's why I said in Islam morality basically comes down to something very simple which is obedience and disobedience, not subjective interpretations of good and bad. We deal with observable actions.

We have clear boundaries. It's very simple. It's very clear. We deal with adherence to commands, realistic demands that are absolutely doable and that are not ambiguous. And we judge exclusively on the basis of behavior.

You either prayed five times a day or you did not. You either fasted in Ramadan or you did not. You either committed zina or you did not. These are concrete, verifiable, and action based. Everybody knows what the wrong things are.

And so we have a system. We have a a a a societal system, a cultural system, a family system, a legal system to ensure individual and collective compliance with proper behavior. And this is reinforced in our societies by innumerable safeguards. This is practical morality. This is functional morality.

And this is what is completely absent and missing in the West. You can't say one thing and do another in Islam because the only thing that we look at is your conscious deeds and your conscious behavior. You might feel all kinds of ways. We don't care about that. You might feel anger.

You might feel rage. You might feel lust. You might feel hatred or whatever the case may be. Your heart is your problem. I'm sorry.

This is your personal private struggle. Your heart is your problem. We just care about what you act upon. Obedience and disobedience. We don't get distracted by abstract moral declarations If your deeds don't back that up, if your actions don't back that up.

And we're also not concerned about what kind of a person you are. No. We might like you or dislike you. It doesn't matter. Makes no difference.

You might be our friend or you might be our enemy. Good, bad, decent, indecent, what have you. You might have a pure heart or an impure heart. That's not our business. Like I said, this is not our business.

Your actions are what we look at. Your actions are your actions. Your obedience is obedience. Your disobedience is disobedience. No matter who the person is who's doing it.

And if you keep on acting in a certain kind of way, then we start to expect you to act in that certain kind of way. Do you understand? Because the way you act reveals what your character is like. Understand that's not a judgment about you. We're not I'm saying that we we learn to anticipate the way you're gonna act.

That's not the same thing as saying that we're making a a moral determination about the goodness of your soul or otherwise. Like I say, your soul is entirely your business. That's entirely your concern. And it's not our job to cleanse your soul if it needs cleansing except in so far as the enforcement of right actions in the society can be a way to change the orientation of your soul. But you in the West, like I said, you come out of a tradition that completely separates the nature of your deeds from the nature of your soul.

Separates character from actions. And that's why you have no kind of system in the West that can actually apply morality in any sort of coherent, consistent, practical way. It doesn't exist. I mean, look at racism in America. Just look at racism in America, in the West.

For the longest time in America, all of my life and certainly before my life, you keep talking about the need that we we need to end racism. Well, that's like saying that you need to end greed. You need to end stupidity. You need to end evil and obnoxiousness. Try to end arrogance.

No. These are all ways of just misdirecting the the the the victims of racism from their own practical liberation. You understand me? Telling you that your only hope is for your oppressors to become enlightened, for your oppressors to become fair minded and benevolent people. That just keeps you neutralized.

It keeps you neutralized from ever taking any real world steps to try to protect yourself, to try to fortify yourself, and to try to liberate yourself. You see what I mean? In Islam, we understand, like I said, we understand morality in a very practical way. Real world actions, real world measures. We don't believe in the idea of sitting around and waiting for racism to end.

That's not moral. That's not moral. Racism exists here and now. It affects people. And the only truly moral thing is to take action to neutralize it rather than allow yourself to be neutralized by it while you're waiting around for a racist to reform.

Now I'm not talking about taking action against racists. I'm talking about taking action for yourselves to address the actual destructive dynamics and the actual conditions that racism creates in your own life. In other words, I'm talking about saving yourself instead of trying to save a racist from their own racism. It's no one's job to try to rehabilitate their own oppressor. So just like in the case of child protection, genuine protection of children is supposed to manifest in concrete actions, concrete measures, concrete measures that provide real world safeguards, real world protections for children, not just speeches and declarations about how much children should be protected.

The answer isn't we need to rehabilitate child predators so that finally our children can be safe. You don't say what what is it? Let he who is without sin cast the first stone? No. I'm talking about trying to face the reality of what the conditions really are in the real world, And then trying to implement measures, trying to implement steps to try to correct those conditions for the people who are the victims of those conditions.

Because look, the reality is this. If you are African American or any member of the global majority living in The United States, in my opinion, you need to completely abandon the idea that you're gonna end racism in America. Not because racism is acceptable, it's contemptible, it's evil, it's a civilizational disease. But you need to abandon the idea because it is baked into the operating system of America. And you are wasting precious time, energy, and resources fighting in a battle that was designed to be unwinnable.

I mean, think about it this way. If you lived in a region where tornadoes were a regular occurrence, would you spend your life trying to campaign to end tornadoes? Would you organize protests demanding that the atmosphere stop producing severe weather conditions? Right? Would you dedicate your existence to trying to convince the sky that tornadoes are morally wrong?

No. You would accept that tornadoes are just a part of the climate of that region, and you'd build storm shelters. You'd develop early warning systems. You would construct your homes with reinforced foundations. You would create evacuation plans.

You would prepare. That's practical. I know you'll be mad about that comparison because you'll say that racism is the isn't a natural disaster. Right? Brother Shaheed, racism is not a force of nature.

I agree with you. But when a tornado comes and rips apart your house and your property and your family and your life, you're not worried about what caused it. You're worried about the fact of its impact. And you should do the same thing with regards to racism when it rips apart your life the same way Because white supremacy in America is a permanent feature. It's a permanent feature of America.

It's a permanent feature of western society, of so called western civilization. It's a it's as much a feature of that as just as much as tornadoes in Illinois or blizzards in North Dakota or earthquakes in California. You know? You can tread as lightly as you want in San Francisco, but that's not gonna stop the the the tremors. They'll still come no matter how lightly you walk.

Do you understand me? You're not going to eliminate racism in the West any more than you're gonna eliminate rain in Seattle. It's not gonna happen. It's a part of the weather system. It's a part of the weather system in America.

It's a part of the environment. It is the climate of the West. So don't take my example of a tornado as me saying that racism is natural. No. It's unnatural.

It's absolutely unnatural, but it's also structural. It's engineered and it's maintained by foundational civilizational incentives. But just supposed to believe in these all men are created equal platitudes, they're just meant to substitute any actual practical equality in that society. That's why ending racism becomes the perfect moral treadmill. You run, you sweat, you suffer, you post, you march, you beg, you vote, you educate, you plead, on and on and on.

And the machine of a work of western society, that machine just updates itself. They patch all the holes, they rebrand the language, they, you know, hire a diversity officer and keep doing what they were built to do, what that system was built to do. And you don't understand how you've been on that treadmill, how you've got tens of thousands of steps in. Right? How you've been on there for hours and hours and gotten nowhere for years and years, for decades and decades, for centuries.

And again, I know what the indoctrinated response is gonna be. The programmed response is. If we just accept that racism is permanent, well, doesn't that constitute just giving up? Isn't that a hopeless position? No.

No. What you are doing by trying to chase the end of racism is actually surrendering. You're surrendering your agency. You're surrendering your agency to people who have no intention whatsoever of ever treating you as equals. You're making your survival completely dependent upon your oppressors having a moral awakening.

That's surrender. You're betting your children's future on the goodness of people who have given you no practical evidence whatsoever for centuries that they have any good in their hearts towards you except what you yourself project into their hearts in your in your head. That's the hard truth. And waiting upon unfair, biased, bigoted people, a bigoted society to have a moral awakening, where they're not even asleep when they do what they do. No.

They're wide awake. Their eyes are wide open when they do what they do. And you're waiting for them to have a moral awakening? They're not asleep. They know what they're doing.

Waiting for them to have a collective change of heart. That's not a strategy for liberation. That's a permanent psychological captivity that you are choosing to trap yourself in. Like I've been saying, you need to understand how how how morality actually works, practical morality versus how America pretends that it works. In a real civilization, moral principles aren't just decorations.

Moral principles are supposed to be. Like I said before, it's the actual structure, the actual architecture of your society. It's the foundation, the the the walls, the roof. That's what protects you from the elements. That's what makes civilization possible in the first place.

Your moral values, that's what makes it possible. They're not ornaments. Moral values aren't ornaments. You understand? It's supposed to be in your bones, not on your clothes, not just on your t shirt.

I've told you before, what America actually operates on is nothing but raw power dynamics, law of the jungle, the law of capability. If you can do it, you have the right to do it. That's how it works in America. If you have the power to take it, then it's yours. If you have the capability to inflict something, then you are entitled to inflict it.

And if you're too weak to stop it, well, that's your problem. This is the system in the West. Your safety is your own responsibility, and the strong have no obligation whatsoever to restrain themselves from exploiting you. If they can exploit you, it's their right to do it. That's the actual operating system in America, in the West.

And you need to know the way that your society actually functions and not the lies that they tell you about how that society functions. Or you're not gonna get anywhere. You're never gonna get ahead that way. Just trudging away on that treadmill, like I said. And while you're doing that, while you're trudging on that treadmill, you're not building power, which is what you need.

You're not creating alternatives, which is what you need. You're not developing functional independence, which is what you need. You're trapped in this cycle of appealing to power, then disappointment when you don't get it, then outrage, then more appeals, more disappointment, more outrage. It's an endless loop. That endless loop just keeps you psychologically dependent upon your oppressors while they continue doing exactly what they have always done.

Do you understand me? With you sitting at some diversity workshop trying to convince people to give up their entitlement, to give up their privilege because it's the right thing to do? You think that has any currency? I'm telling you, as long as you keep giving uncle Sam the benefit of the doubt, you're giving uncle Sam no doubt that he never has to change. That's the truth.

When you make your survival strategy dependent upon ending racism, then you are assuming, first of all, you're assuming that racism in that society is some kind of a flaw in the system that can be fixed rather than something that is absolutely foundational to how that whole society operates. You're treating it like a problem to be solved rather than a permanent condition that needs to be navigated, that needs to be mitigated, that needs to be neutralized in terms of your own life. Now obviously, African Americans, Muslims, so called Latinos and so forth, all members of the global majority in The United States who in The United States are called minorities, obviously, they've been navigating. They've been navigating those conditions all this time, but they have been navigating under the false hope, in my opinion. I mean, to one extent or another, they've been navigating under the false hope that American society will eventually give up its bigotry, which is unrealistic.

And that has, in my opinion, gotten in the way of taking the kinds of actions that you actually need to take. As long as you hold it as some kind of an objective to so called end racism, obviously, you are giving your oppressors veto power over your own progress. You're saying literally, I can only be safe, can only be successful, I can only be free if you choose to stop oppressing me. That's not power. That's begging.

And they are never going to grant you what you beg for. They're never gonna grant you what you're begging for. Otherwise, you wouldn't even have to beg in the first place. They know what you need. You wouldn't need to ask if they cared about you having it.

And you've been asking for so long, you can't possibly believe that they don't know what you want. If you don't know by now, Wallahi, if you don't know by now that they are not gonna give you what you want, then you're like some sort of a a prisoner on death row who's waiting for a reprieve from the governor, and the governor is the one himself who's gonna pull the electric chair switch. So you're sitting there waiting for a reprieve and he shows up and you think maybe there's some good news. You think he's gonna let you off the hook. And all he says to you is do you have any last words?

No. Asking racists to stop being racist so that you can be free is like asking a a a parasite to stop extracting blood from your body because it's bad for your health. Well, the parasite doesn't care about your health. He's feeding himself. You understand?

And he knows that he's gonna be able to keep right on feeding himself off of you, off of your blood as long as all you do is wait for him to change his diet. You get my point? I'm just telling you like it is. It's not pretty. It's not pretty.

It's ugly. And it doesn't get any better looking with age. And understand that the racist element in that society is a sub element of the overall system. I think it's crucial for you to understand this because you're talking about a society in which 10% of the population owns and controls 70 to 80% of all the wealth. That's bigotry.

Yes, it is. It's bigotry. It's bigotry. It's dehumanization and subjugation. And the truth is that it is systemic and it is fundamental to that society, to the way that that society runs and operates.

That's a fact. That's 10% of the population that despises 90% of the population no matter what so called race they are. Because the fundamental issue is not that individual Americans are racist or have racist attitudes or what have you. No. The fundamental issue that everyone in that society is living under is that you are economically captive to systems that are designed exclusively to extract wealth from you to politically marginalize you in a structure that does not represent your interests.

Listen. The whole world is turning away from America. That's a fact. The whole world is turning away from America. It's turning away from the West, and they're turning towards each other.

They're turning away from the colonizers, and they're turning towards each other. And if you are a so called minority in the West, a so called minority in America, then like I say, you are actually part of the global majority. That means that your parents or your grandparents or your ancestors come from the global South. The truth is that you are diaspora communities over there. And in my opinion, you need to do over there, what your people are doing in their part of the world.

In other words, turning away from them and turning towards each other. And I mean, don't just turn towards each other over there. No. Turn towards your brothers and sisters in the lands that your people came from, where your ancestors came from. You need to understand that when when the society tries to make you identify yourself as an American citizen and not as part of the diaspora of the global South.

They're trying to make you reduce yourself. They're trying to make you isolate yourself and accept the lie that you are a minority. You're a minority. Not that 10% that's controlling all the money and not that so called the so called white population that represents maybe 15% of the people on earth. Do you understand?

You're the minority. When you accept that you're an American, the whole point is to get you to internalize the falsehood that you're small and they're big. Citizenship is an optical illusion if you understand it properly. If your people came from Africa or Asia or so called Latin America and ICE comes after you and you cry out, I'm an American citizen. This shouldn't happen to me.

You think that that's the reason why this shouldn't be happening. No. It's exactly why it's happening to you. That's exactly why it's happening to you. Because when you call yourself that, when you call yourself an American citizen, you're calling yourself a minority.

You're calling yourself weak. You're calling yourself vulnerable. You're calling yourself someone who hasn't got any backup. When you call yourself that, you're calling yourself the prey that has wandered away from the herd. Meaning, you are calling yourself eligible for oppression, eligible for subjugation and brutality in that society where the law of the jungle is actually how they operate.

I really hope you understand me. I truly hope you understand me. Saying that you're an American citizen when you come from the global majority, that's not a defense against ICE. That's an invitation to ICE.