Hello lovely Kossacks. I'm waiting for a client and in the middle of reflecting upon the toll that dealing with self-described divas takes on a body, I thought I'd write my own "Liberal Strangelove or; How I Learned To Stop Deflecting And Owned My Own Racism" diary.
Oh jehosephat, that sounds like a fun read? Goodie. It seems like a fun write. Just over the jump is where we separate the men from the boys, the girls from the women, though that doesn't sound like much fun.
I'm the kid of a couple of Yippies. I grew up thinking that I had a lock on fighting the man, expanding my mind and horizons and desperately wanting my father to stop looking like Walther Matthau with a ponytail. Good people and good principals -- in theory.
The problem with thinking that you as a white person are different from those white people "Way The Fuck Over There" who behave a certain way is that it leads you to never challenge your own shortcomings. The goal is to accumulate as many rewards as possible for not being "that bad", while you leave what is bad enough within yourself unexamined. I was one of those people.
One of the few bright spots in high school for me was having a great BFF I'm going to call "Yolanda" for this conversation. Yolanda was beautiful, smart, funny and she just "happened to be" Black. I remember very clearly telling her over and over again just how much her Blackness didn't matter to me and how glad I was that we could be friends despite it.
[takes a sixty second moment of silence in honor of her not having beat me into silence over my ignorance when she had every right to]
Well, there came a time when we were both pursuing modeling careers, as one does in their senior year, and we went to a trendy little shop that were looking for models to stand in front of the store in their merchandise to hand out flyers. Yolanda had the look, the height and everything that was needed to make couture look good. She also could not get the owners to look at her book, let her put on an outfit and walk for them, or the literal time of day.
When we left, she began to complain about her treatment and how she believed it was racist. Being a good white friend, I immediately told her that she was reading too much into it and asked if she wasn't being too militant in expressing a desire to tell everyone she knew to never shop there. Yoland was a kind person. I know that is the only reason she didn't do more than tell me that these people didn't see her and now her best friend didn't hear her.
I grieved for weeks that we weren't close after that, but I allowed myself to believe the problem had nothing to do with me. Other white friends reinforced this wrongheaded, piggish attitude, allowing me to continue thinking that racism was about cross burnings, the Neo Nazis and the Klan. Believe me now when I tell you that they did me no favors.
Flashing forward a good many years, I'm in school for fashion design and I meet someone. He's the one. He's Black, but I can "look beyond that". I wouldn't have cared if he was a "recovering drug addict". Yes, sadly enough, I said that kind of thing early in the relationship. I said offense things, refused to listen to anyone that tried to tell me about the depictions of minorities in the media, the list really could go on. A turning point for me was when after five good years of living together, my partner walked out of the door for two months with nothing but the clothes on his back because he could take no more of my questioning every statement he made about discrimination he was experiencing at the workplace. Those people seemed perfectly fine to me! Was he sure he didn't have a bad attitude? I am not too proud to say that it was shameful of me to make a Black man have to defend and explain his experiences with the outside world and the bias in it at home. Home is supposed to be a safe haven.
There was a lot of soul searching done in that time apart, but it made me aware. I woke me up from the sleep inducing cocoon of white privilege. I started to really look and listen to things with different eyes and ears. The ears and eyes I have now will not guarantee me that I will never offend a PoC. It will take my lifetime to undo a lifetime of indoctrination regarding what the reality is of a country deeply invested in racial divides and how I benefit from it even as I rail against it.
The racial animosity that we are seeing in this country presently is taking a toll on those personally affected it by it. Perhaps they aren't being called these thing to their face, but I believe that every right wing (and even the left is failing mightily on this) smear and inexplicable rant about our President is a statement on how a portion of this country feels about African Americans. It is a statement on how the dissection of a Supreme Court nominee is also used as a pulpit for some to remind any Latinas that would dare to believe they are "wise" or capable to watch their step. It is an opportunity for us who have not had to walk this walk to be cautious that we are not riding out our political disappointments on ugly, Dixiecratic coattails. It is for whites who hate racism and the destruction it brings to examine ourselves and to accept that being anti-racist is not a destination, it is a never ending journey and that our discomfort in the process should not outweigh the concern of the effect we have on PoC arround us and how they feel. It is time for us to stop making excuses for others and ourselves.
Being anti-racist is an evolutionary process, but nobody is going to drag us out of the primordial soup of thinking that racism is only worth fighting when it's "them", or PoC make it convenient and easy for us.
My client arrives! Thank you for reading my very longwinded way of saying that if you think you've overcome racial bias and racism, then it is almost a guarantee that you haven't.
No derailing about "all those people over there are racist too, blahhhh, they took my milk money, chitter chatter, they were mean to me". It's dishonest and to be honest, not the problem with race we are dealing with in the here and now, so don't do that.