My Lived Experience With Systematic Racism -- Daniel Joseph

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johnkarls
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Joined: Fri Jun 29, 2007 8:43 pm

My Lived Experience With Systematic Racism -- Daniel Joseph

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Amazon.com’s first “customer review” by one Trizah Kelvin of “Evil Aliens With Afros: My Lived Experience With Systematic Racism in The 21st Century” caught the eye of one of our regular participants, Linda Chalfant-Allen --

“Evil Aliens with Afros” could not have come at a better time! With the ongoing protests that primarily erupted from the police brutality and racial profiling against people of color, I was inclined to get a copy of this book and learn more through a first-person account. I shed tears when reading what Daniel went through and it was mind-boggling to visualize how such experiences crushed him emotionally and psychologically. The book contained many experiences that you can’t find anywhere- either in books or magazines - or at least not as such comprehensive first hand narrations! Needless to say, it turned out to be a natural page turner and I ended up reading the entire book in just one sitting, which is a rare occurrence for me. BUT the book is not just about the wealth gap, abusive interactions and other disparaging racial occurrences - it is also a source of HOPE. At the end of the tunnel, a bright light is shining. We just need to work together and learn from the past, and soon we will get to light.”

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“Evil Aliens With Afros: My Lived Experiences…..” is a 45-page book available only via Kindle for $0.99 from Amazon.com.

I’ll have to admit that after Linda’s “Heads Up” which included the Amazon “customer review,” I read the book without noticing until the last page that its author was one DANIEL Joseph rather than the author of our focus book “The Sword and The Shield” by Prof. PENIEL Joseph.

HOWEVER, the Amazon “customer review” UNDERSTATED the poignancy of the events recorded in the book.

Many of which described the treatment of the author’s father who was the quintessential “model citizen” – always working diligently, sacrificing everything including himself for his family and never so much as jay-walking.

And how his father and one of the author’s brothers, on their way home from a movie, were “racially profiled” by two police officers who dragged both the father and brother out of their car and threw the father to the ground and “beat the living crap out of him” while sticking a gun in the face of the frightened adolescent brother -- all for no reason whatsoever other than the classic “driving while black”!!!

Nothing happened to either police officer despite a formal complaint. And the authorities imperiously offered the author’s father $10,000 as compensation for the beating. When the father said he wanted justice, the authorities just laughed and withdrew the $10,000 offer, and that was that since the father had no resources to pursue the matter further.

THE AUTHOR AND HIS SIBLINGS NEVER AGAIN HAD THE SAME RESPECT FOR THEIR FATHER WHO ALWAYS TRIED TO “GET ALONG” WITH WHITE SOCIETY BY BEING INDUSTRIOUS AND HUMBLE!!!

[IT WAS ESPECIALLY FOR THE CONSTANT HUMILITY IN THE FACE OF INJUSTICE THAT THE AUTHOR AND HIS SIBLINGS LOST RESPECT FOR THEIR FATHER.]

For me there were two surprises --

1. Daniel Joseph was born and raised in poor SUBURBS, not inner-city slums; and

2. He was born and raised in CANADA and the ABUSIVE POLICE were members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

If you are willing to spring for the $0.99 cost of Kindle from Amazon and spend the time to read 45 pages, it is well worth “walking in the shoes” of the other person!!!

Who BTW claims there are many reasons why he should have wound up “down and out”!!! So you would not quite be “walking in the shoes” of a typical victim of racial discrimination.

Though info about Daniel Joseph (website = https://josephdanielauthor.com) is sparse except that he has authored quite a few works of fiction (“Evil Aliens With Afros” appears to be his only work of non-fiction) and he now lives in Illinois.

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I HEREBY “GIVE CREDIT WHERE CREDIT IS DUE” --

Daniel Joseph (pp. 41-43) describes how as a teenager he “rebelled against my father’s religion and hated the hypocrisy that I saw in Christianity.” And how it wasn’t until he was homeless that a white Christian gave him a place to stay on condition that Daniel Joseph come to church on Sundays with his new benefactor and his family.

As a result of their kindness and the kindness of the congregants, Daniel Joseph became religious and believes that the solution to society’s racial divide is to “love one another as you love yourself”!!!

If, in the wake of his experiences and bitterness, Daniel Joseph can recommend that to blacks, we should be able to do the same and implore our white friends to do the same!!!

Accordingly, I plan to propose one of our Six-Degrees-Of-Separation E-mail campaigns to that effect.

But instead of going to one or a few of the nation’s decision makers, with copies to all of our friends asking each of them with only a few keyboard keystrokes to do the same in an unending chain so that, in theory, the decision maker(s) have 330 million e-mails in their inbox(es) in short order --

this campaign will be addressed solely to our friends and their friends in an unending chain, because America’s 330 individuals are the decision makers in this situation who need to be influenced!!!

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