because we should always blog against racism
I'm a racist.
I remember sitting on my feet watching Roots with my parents, who had been civil rights demonstrators, and turning around to ask, "Why are they being so mean to that man?" My mother, who had tears in her eyes, said, "Because they're cruel." My father tried to explain about skin color and why it would cause cruel behavior, and I remember it making no sense at all--beating someone over their skin? Surely that happened long, long ago, back in that nebulous TV era of gladiators and cowboys.
Later that week, I apologized to all of the black, Asian, and Hispanic people in my grade, just in case. Most of them looked just as confused as me.
When I was nine, I came home with one of those charming playground rhymes about Japanese people. My mother held me by the shoulders and sang back an equally condescending rhyme about white people. Asked me how it made me feel, and what I'd think of her for singing it. It wasn't really the rhyme (although I can remember the insults in it to this day) but what her eyes said: I'm disappointed in you. I'm frightened that you'll become something we never taught you to be. You sound ignorant. You sound like the crowd. In my immediate family, that was the worst thing you could be.
Being raised on Catholic guilt, I went around and forced my friendship upon every Asian student at my school. Anyone who dared make a racial slur, I pulled out their hair, hit them in the lip, or--my favorite--threw them off a piece of gym equipment. (Poor Jimmy. I hope he doesn't still have those headaches.) I have no idea what the Asian kids thought, but it wasn't about them. It was about my being right.
When I was ten, I entered a drawing contest. I gave two of the five children in the template dark brown skin and one lighter brown, like caramel coffee. A fourth, I colored almond--which is damn hard, if you've tried it, using the standard 1980s box of Crayolas. There was this color called 'flesh', which was the color of no flesh I have ever seen, and to get a Hispanic or Asian skin tone you had to layer pink, peach, and yellow-gold in varying levels. The hair was pretty easy, though. Black black black. I put highlights in white over the top so they looked that blue color, and in general I was very happy with the results.
When I put up my picture on the wall, other students asked me why I made those kids black, why I colored so weird, if I knew those people or what. They told me that the picture wasn't supposed to be that way. I was baffled that they could be so stupid. It wasn't as if I'd colored blue people. People did come in dark brown and light brown and almond. And of course I didn't know them. Did they know the kids in their pictures? I was confident that other adults were like my parents, vastly smarter than mere children. The questions were easy to ignore.
Mr. Chequette, the teacher who was judging the contest, picked up my picture and had a little conference with another adult. I liked Mr. Chequette, even if he did scold me for acting like a boy sometimes. He knelt down and looked me in the eye.
"Why did you make these boys black?" he asked.
I had no answer for that. I didn't inflict blackness on some poor white paper-children. I had never expected a kid question from a grownup, someone as smart as my parents.
My picture was given back to me. It wasn't hung on the wall with the other entries, and a boy named Dennis won. I tried not to learn the lesson--nobody wants to see people who aren't white--but it was hard. Mr. Chequette was a teacher, and I was used to learning from him.
There were always kids getting beat up at my school. Stolen from, tripped, hit, knifed, even shot at. Kids threw desks out of windows, kids hit teachers, kids threw people down stairs, kids broke into teacher's cars. When I was in fifth grade, my parents moved us to a safer town with a better-rated school. There were no black people, Hispanic people, or Asian people there, but there were a lot of idiots.
They invited me to a party and sat in a circle around me, each asking me a question about my parents' jobs, their income, what brand labels I wore, and what music I liked. They had a vote whether they could befriend me, and the vote was a unanimous 'no'. After that, they insulted, mocked, and snubbed me. I would have preferred being honestly hit in the face.
That treatment helped convince me that the crowd wasn't worth listening to. They got stupider the more they talked, and who'd trust someone who treated you that way over clothes? But it was lonely. Once I resolved to ignore them, I went days without speaking a word. Even hate turned to resignation after a while. My friends were the other kids no one would have--kids with disabilities, kids with emotional problems, kids whose parents drank and couldn't buy them decent clothes either. Some of them hit me or turned their backs on me for no reason, and going over to their houses was scary; others are still my friends.
My new city was rigid and intolerant of difference. I had the first bad parent-teacher conferences ever. My babysitter called me a freak and pruned through my lunches, throwing away "that hippie junk". I found a baby robin and she made me watch her son kill it, telling me that nobody "normal" wanted to touch something filthy like that. My cousin, in a grade below mine, brought home news of my inability to fit in; I became "that one" at family gatherings, scrutinized for oddity. I had teachers who mocked my speech impediment in front of classrooms, imitated my failures in gym, and read my unsatisfactory grades aloud. Be the same, and all this will stop, the implication was. You don't have to be different if you don't want to be, so why won't you just be the same?
But my parents had taught me that people who were the same never did much. Besides, I hated those kids. I hated everything they did. Why would I ever want to be hateful?
I was a late bloomer, so I didn't start swearing until junior high. I sat alone in my bedroom for five minutes, sweating, before I managed to produce the whisper "Fuck". Testing the boundaries of forbidden language, I tried to say the N word a week later--a word I had never said aloud. I couldn't (any more than I can type it now). I knew the kind of people who had invented it and uttered it. It had the power of an evil spell, and I didn't want to be touched by it.
When I was fifteen, I'd already been smoking for a few years. A friend of mine and I were having cigarettes at the bus stop one winter, discussing whether we should break regulations and light up in the shelter. We looked through the window and saw a family with an infant in the small space, so we decided against it. A little while later, the woman inside the bus shelter came outside to berate us for not wanting to share space with black people. I remember how angry and helpless I felt, how persecuted--how dare she judge my actions on sight? I wasn't one of those people. Infuriating!
Two things happened during my senior year of high school. First, Rodney King was beaten in Los Angeles, sparking a series of riots. I watched the news tearfully as he begged, "Can't we all just get along?" One of my fellow students started a walk-out to the courthouse, where we all said our piece about the beating. On the way home, chanting "Racial Harmony", I had an idea.
Over the next three weeks, my friends and I collected over thirteen hundred signatures on a moral petition about the injustice of police brutality. The last twenty or so, I received from a painful trip door to door in strange neighborhoods--neighborhoods with nice white siding, neighborhoods with expensive cars in the driveways, neighborhoods with nice white people whose faces turned as ugly as Halloween masks as they told me that the coon deserved what he got, with nice white people who remembered something they suddenly had to do in the kitchen, with nice white people who signed while glancing side to side as if someone might see them. My chemistry grade was docked for asking to pass around the petition--the teacher called it a "disturbance". Someone broke into the locker where I kept my polling supplies and tore up several books.
The other thing that happened was that Dawn Brooks, the daughter of a bank VP and a dentist, got a scholarship for which I had been qualified in every respect--except being black. I was angry. Never mind that there were many other scholarships for which I hadn't bothered to apply, or that her family had moved from Detroit because she'd almost been killed there, never mind that we all petted her like some kind of exotic novelty and her friends were condescending. It wasn't fair to me.
In college, I had second thoughts about the value of affirmative action. Wasn't it against the theme of equality to privilege any race? Things weren't so bad any more, not with laws in place to contest prejudice. Why did my school permit all-black frats when it didn't permit all-white ones? Why did every professor I approached about an anti-racism group refer me to the school's multicultural society? As if racism was about other cultures, or something. Wasn't it time to let things go, to just act like we were all the same?
A friend of mine from Israel once said to me, "The concentration camps, the Nazis, the Gestapo. I'm so sick of hearing it. I'm not angry about the camps, I'm angry that my goddamned bus blew up two weeks ago. But that never makes the news." In a way it's a relief to have a holocaust as an example of racism. Almost everyone sane agrees that that kind of action goes too far, and should be stopped. Subtle prejudice is harder to detect, especially when you have every reason not to look for it--for instance, when you know you're not a racist.
Somehow through the years, despite my best intentions, I started thinking there was a valid difference between races; that belief overlies the earlier, childish one that cries "Stupid!". I don't know what caused it. I can't blame anyone. Maybe it's just built into society, the stigma of difference and the invisible privilege. For a long time I was in denial--after all, I was a good person, a thinking person, a well-bred person, not a follower. I made an effort to understand all the meanings of everything that I heard, read, and saw. I wasn't like my aunt, who said that the only good "Indian" was a dead one, or like my coworker at the factory who told me that someday I'd understand that all Mexicans would rob you blind. I wasn't curb-stomping anyone or shaving my head, for God's sake.
But if a black man was running pell-mell toward me down the sidewalk, I would feel more anxiety than if a white man was. At a science fair, I might expect the Asian student to win. I've laughed at West Indies accents, assumed someone who didn't understand my language was simple, and mocked long foreign names. I've asked to touch different-textured hair. I've had condescending "Well good for THEM"-type thoughts about Hispanic professionals. I've written stories full of exotic, magical black people. I don't have a single LJ icon with a person of color on it. And I've been accepted for jobs, believed without question, left alone in traffic, given three-dimensional representation in fiction, extended credit on faith, and treated as desirable. I've been treated as if my life was worth saving first.
Some stuff I've realized about racism and privilege:
1) Racism exists. It's everywhere. I can't keep treating it as a simple problem with one solution and still regard every instance I see as isolated.
2) Thinking it isn't my problem...is the problem.
3) There is no A for effort. My trying consciously to conquer prejudice in myself does not mean I deserve to be lauded or cut slack.
4) Nobody owes me patience or understanding. It's a privilege, not a right. If I'm granted it, the proper response is gratitude.
5) Privilege is invisible and automatic. Where I can't see it, it's my responsibility to look.
6) It makes me feel better to deride more obvious examples of racism at the expense of searching for my own. This doesn't mean I shouldn't be vocal when I see prejudice, just that battling prejudice doesn't mean I'm guiltless.
7) No matter how hard I try, I will never understand completely what it means to be non-white. This does not mean I have an excuse to stop trying.
8) I am a racist, and it breaks my heart.
I want to offer an apology to anyone I ever hurt or dismissed, in action or with inaction. I want to assure you that I would never offend you except in ignorance, and I'd be eager to correct the behavior if it was brought to my attention. I can't promise I'll ever eradicate my racism, but every day I'll make the decision to try.
I remember sitting on my feet watching Roots with my parents, who had been civil rights demonstrators, and turning around to ask, "Why are they being so mean to that man?" My mother, who had tears in her eyes, said, "Because they're cruel." My father tried to explain about skin color and why it would cause cruel behavior, and I remember it making no sense at all--beating someone over their skin? Surely that happened long, long ago, back in that nebulous TV era of gladiators and cowboys.
Later that week, I apologized to all of the black, Asian, and Hispanic people in my grade, just in case. Most of them looked just as confused as me.
When I was nine, I came home with one of those charming playground rhymes about Japanese people. My mother held me by the shoulders and sang back an equally condescending rhyme about white people. Asked me how it made me feel, and what I'd think of her for singing it. It wasn't really the rhyme (although I can remember the insults in it to this day) but what her eyes said: I'm disappointed in you. I'm frightened that you'll become something we never taught you to be. You sound ignorant. You sound like the crowd. In my immediate family, that was the worst thing you could be.
Being raised on Catholic guilt, I went around and forced my friendship upon every Asian student at my school. Anyone who dared make a racial slur, I pulled out their hair, hit them in the lip, or--my favorite--threw them off a piece of gym equipment. (Poor Jimmy. I hope he doesn't still have those headaches.) I have no idea what the Asian kids thought, but it wasn't about them. It was about my being right.
When I was ten, I entered a drawing contest. I gave two of the five children in the template dark brown skin and one lighter brown, like caramel coffee. A fourth, I colored almond--which is damn hard, if you've tried it, using the standard 1980s box of Crayolas. There was this color called 'flesh', which was the color of no flesh I have ever seen, and to get a Hispanic or Asian skin tone you had to layer pink, peach, and yellow-gold in varying levels. The hair was pretty easy, though. Black black black. I put highlights in white over the top so they looked that blue color, and in general I was very happy with the results.
When I put up my picture on the wall, other students asked me why I made those kids black, why I colored so weird, if I knew those people or what. They told me that the picture wasn't supposed to be that way. I was baffled that they could be so stupid. It wasn't as if I'd colored blue people. People did come in dark brown and light brown and almond. And of course I didn't know them. Did they know the kids in their pictures? I was confident that other adults were like my parents, vastly smarter than mere children. The questions were easy to ignore.
Mr. Chequette, the teacher who was judging the contest, picked up my picture and had a little conference with another adult. I liked Mr. Chequette, even if he did scold me for acting like a boy sometimes. He knelt down and looked me in the eye.
"Why did you make these boys black?" he asked.
I had no answer for that. I didn't inflict blackness on some poor white paper-children. I had never expected a kid question from a grownup, someone as smart as my parents.
My picture was given back to me. It wasn't hung on the wall with the other entries, and a boy named Dennis won. I tried not to learn the lesson--nobody wants to see people who aren't white--but it was hard. Mr. Chequette was a teacher, and I was used to learning from him.
There were always kids getting beat up at my school. Stolen from, tripped, hit, knifed, even shot at. Kids threw desks out of windows, kids hit teachers, kids threw people down stairs, kids broke into teacher's cars. When I was in fifth grade, my parents moved us to a safer town with a better-rated school. There were no black people, Hispanic people, or Asian people there, but there were a lot of idiots.
They invited me to a party and sat in a circle around me, each asking me a question about my parents' jobs, their income, what brand labels I wore, and what music I liked. They had a vote whether they could befriend me, and the vote was a unanimous 'no'. After that, they insulted, mocked, and snubbed me. I would have preferred being honestly hit in the face.
That treatment helped convince me that the crowd wasn't worth listening to. They got stupider the more they talked, and who'd trust someone who treated you that way over clothes? But it was lonely. Once I resolved to ignore them, I went days without speaking a word. Even hate turned to resignation after a while. My friends were the other kids no one would have--kids with disabilities, kids with emotional problems, kids whose parents drank and couldn't buy them decent clothes either. Some of them hit me or turned their backs on me for no reason, and going over to their houses was scary; others are still my friends.
My new city was rigid and intolerant of difference. I had the first bad parent-teacher conferences ever. My babysitter called me a freak and pruned through my lunches, throwing away "that hippie junk". I found a baby robin and she made me watch her son kill it, telling me that nobody "normal" wanted to touch something filthy like that. My cousin, in a grade below mine, brought home news of my inability to fit in; I became "that one" at family gatherings, scrutinized for oddity. I had teachers who mocked my speech impediment in front of classrooms, imitated my failures in gym, and read my unsatisfactory grades aloud. Be the same, and all this will stop, the implication was. You don't have to be different if you don't want to be, so why won't you just be the same?
But my parents had taught me that people who were the same never did much. Besides, I hated those kids. I hated everything they did. Why would I ever want to be hateful?
I was a late bloomer, so I didn't start swearing until junior high. I sat alone in my bedroom for five minutes, sweating, before I managed to produce the whisper "Fuck". Testing the boundaries of forbidden language, I tried to say the N word a week later--a word I had never said aloud. I couldn't (any more than I can type it now). I knew the kind of people who had invented it and uttered it. It had the power of an evil spell, and I didn't want to be touched by it.
When I was fifteen, I'd already been smoking for a few years. A friend of mine and I were having cigarettes at the bus stop one winter, discussing whether we should break regulations and light up in the shelter. We looked through the window and saw a family with an infant in the small space, so we decided against it. A little while later, the woman inside the bus shelter came outside to berate us for not wanting to share space with black people. I remember how angry and helpless I felt, how persecuted--how dare she judge my actions on sight? I wasn't one of those people. Infuriating!
Two things happened during my senior year of high school. First, Rodney King was beaten in Los Angeles, sparking a series of riots. I watched the news tearfully as he begged, "Can't we all just get along?" One of my fellow students started a walk-out to the courthouse, where we all said our piece about the beating. On the way home, chanting "Racial Harmony", I had an idea.
Over the next three weeks, my friends and I collected over thirteen hundred signatures on a moral petition about the injustice of police brutality. The last twenty or so, I received from a painful trip door to door in strange neighborhoods--neighborhoods with nice white siding, neighborhoods with expensive cars in the driveways, neighborhoods with nice white people whose faces turned as ugly as Halloween masks as they told me that the coon deserved what he got, with nice white people who remembered something they suddenly had to do in the kitchen, with nice white people who signed while glancing side to side as if someone might see them. My chemistry grade was docked for asking to pass around the petition--the teacher called it a "disturbance". Someone broke into the locker where I kept my polling supplies and tore up several books.
The other thing that happened was that Dawn Brooks, the daughter of a bank VP and a dentist, got a scholarship for which I had been qualified in every respect--except being black. I was angry. Never mind that there were many other scholarships for which I hadn't bothered to apply, or that her family had moved from Detroit because she'd almost been killed there, never mind that we all petted her like some kind of exotic novelty and her friends were condescending. It wasn't fair to me.
In college, I had second thoughts about the value of affirmative action. Wasn't it against the theme of equality to privilege any race? Things weren't so bad any more, not with laws in place to contest prejudice. Why did my school permit all-black frats when it didn't permit all-white ones? Why did every professor I approached about an anti-racism group refer me to the school's multicultural society? As if racism was about other cultures, or something. Wasn't it time to let things go, to just act like we were all the same?
A friend of mine from Israel once said to me, "The concentration camps, the Nazis, the Gestapo. I'm so sick of hearing it. I'm not angry about the camps, I'm angry that my goddamned bus blew up two weeks ago. But that never makes the news." In a way it's a relief to have a holocaust as an example of racism. Almost everyone sane agrees that that kind of action goes too far, and should be stopped. Subtle prejudice is harder to detect, especially when you have every reason not to look for it--for instance, when you know you're not a racist.
Somehow through the years, despite my best intentions, I started thinking there was a valid difference between races; that belief overlies the earlier, childish one that cries "Stupid!". I don't know what caused it. I can't blame anyone. Maybe it's just built into society, the stigma of difference and the invisible privilege. For a long time I was in denial--after all, I was a good person, a thinking person, a well-bred person, not a follower. I made an effort to understand all the meanings of everything that I heard, read, and saw. I wasn't like my aunt, who said that the only good "Indian" was a dead one, or like my coworker at the factory who told me that someday I'd understand that all Mexicans would rob you blind. I wasn't curb-stomping anyone or shaving my head, for God's sake.
But if a black man was running pell-mell toward me down the sidewalk, I would feel more anxiety than if a white man was. At a science fair, I might expect the Asian student to win. I've laughed at West Indies accents, assumed someone who didn't understand my language was simple, and mocked long foreign names. I've asked to touch different-textured hair. I've had condescending "Well good for THEM"-type thoughts about Hispanic professionals. I've written stories full of exotic, magical black people. I don't have a single LJ icon with a person of color on it. And I've been accepted for jobs, believed without question, left alone in traffic, given three-dimensional representation in fiction, extended credit on faith, and treated as desirable. I've been treated as if my life was worth saving first.
Some stuff I've realized about racism and privilege:
1) Racism exists. It's everywhere. I can't keep treating it as a simple problem with one solution and still regard every instance I see as isolated.
2) Thinking it isn't my problem...is the problem.
3) There is no A for effort. My trying consciously to conquer prejudice in myself does not mean I deserve to be lauded or cut slack.
4) Nobody owes me patience or understanding. It's a privilege, not a right. If I'm granted it, the proper response is gratitude.
5) Privilege is invisible and automatic. Where I can't see it, it's my responsibility to look.
6) It makes me feel better to deride more obvious examples of racism at the expense of searching for my own. This doesn't mean I shouldn't be vocal when I see prejudice, just that battling prejudice doesn't mean I'm guiltless.
7) No matter how hard I try, I will never understand completely what it means to be non-white. This does not mean I have an excuse to stop trying.
8) I am a racist, and it breaks my heart.
I want to offer an apology to anyone I ever hurt or dismissed, in action or with inaction. I want to assure you that I would never offend you except in ignorance, and I'd be eager to correct the behavior if it was brought to my attention. I can't promise I'll ever eradicate my racism, but every day I'll make the decision to try.