What is racism?
I had a dream (last night, but it gets kind of confused, so here goes), but in it, I was asked a very tough question. Dreams are kind of funny, because they are so abstract, so all I could do was answer my question in the more pure and abstract terms possible.
What is a person but the sum of their hopes, fears and experiences?
If so, then what is a racist but someone whose fears have outweighed their hopes, and is no longer balanced by their experiences.
Senator Barack Obama spoke of many issues in his groundbreaking speech on Tuesday, and although the doors have been opened for dialogue, the question is, how are we really going to begin this dialogue?
If we can all agree that people are sums of their best, their worst and their experiences, then racism should be something more easily defined. It is a product of the environment we grow up in.
For example, the white father who's driving his children around, sees a couple of blacks on a street corner and mutters, "Dirty niggers," the children soak that up. When their mother drives the children and, seeing those same blacks, quickly locks her doors, that message is sent to the children. These are fears of an other that are passed down.
Similarly, when black children hear their dad come home from work and complain about "that white police officer," who constantly pulls him over, and then one day he just doesn't make it home, and the telephone rings with a call from the local jail. The words are unspoken, but the feeling is understood: "They got him at last." The black children grow up with this, feeling that incurring white wrath is only a matter of "when," not "if."
These are fears that outweigh hopes. They are often left unbalanced by experience, because these groups aren't talking to each other. They aren't sharing these fears, or these hopes. So each group remains a nebulous "them" to the other, and the results are that every body winds up with a complete lack of knowledge and experience of the other side.
Racism, at its heart, is the idea that the entirety of a person's life, their experiences, their hopes, their dreams, every unique thought and piece of personality that defines them, is secondary to the color of their skin. That they are abstract caricatures defined by their pigmentation.
What I've seen through my life is that these are inherently social constructs. That skin color is not one or the other, but several graduated shades. That a person is an individual first, and a skin tone a distant second.
The best way that I can see for us to begin this dialogue is to throw out this social construct - to dismiss every thing we have known and every thing we've been taught, and start from scratch. Throw out the racism, forget the fears and put the experiences aside from a moment. Give every one a fresh face, regardless of color.
Perhaps then, when we start again as babes, the dialogue can begin.