"kelly, can i ask you this one favor?"we are sitting in a bar, shaun and i, chainsmoking. he is drunk, i am eating a blt.
"can i ask you to just forget about race for a minute?"
no.
"can i ask you to assume i'm not racist?"
no.
nope. sorry. no. shaun at least recognizes that he is white, and will say he is a white male and such. but he bitches about affirmative action in college, saying he couldn't get money for some tech school that a person of color with his same background familial/financial status could and that he had to work to pay back his loan etc. he thinks that his grandmother who was born "in the ghetto" and was "the only white person" had no skin based advantages and she was just fucked because she was poor, that "nobody gave a shit about her skin color."
i know what he is saying is fucked up, but i dont have any ready stats about affirmative action to argue my point. he claims that he looks at everyone the same, he bases his judgements on who they are not their skin color. he says that because i am married to a black man i cant call myself racist. so i explain the difference between overt and covert racism. no, i am not overtly racist - and neither is shaun. i ask him to pay attention to the subtle ways he reacts to people and groups and notice how it might have been different if a few details were changed - like skin color. i ask him why he is being so defensive, i ask him what he is protecting...
i feel irate in these sort of conversations because i feel like i know how they will go, with most white people. the same stupid shit will come out of their mouths. i dont even want to have the fucking conversation. but i do. and i need to get better at it, i need to be more prepared. i need to flesh out my ideas, have concise manners of discussing the same stupid shit over and over.
but an interesting note of comparison can be made between ponge and shaun. both of them say that there is only one race and dont like to talk about people self-identifying as a color. yet i've heard racist comments out of both of them - ponge about "toubabs" (europeans/whites/those that act like them) and "the french" (who he unconsciously thinks of as being all white and all native to france) and shaun in other ways (about people of color).
i suppose the thing that links them is that they are the majority group in the countries they are native to. that is, although each may have experienced race-based harassment, neither has experienced life long systemic racial discrimination as a marginalized group member. well, ponge has in the way that his government is so dependent on white organizations like the IMF - but that is not something he would be able to recognize in his daily life as racism without a deeper look at it. i guess the thought is, its not being WHITE per se that creates a lack of racial awareness - its life long membership of the majority group. in senegal the majority of politicians, teachers, police men (and i do mean MEN), military, etc, is all black. the president is black. taxi drivers are black. whatever shit ponge went through as a youth was not systemically based on his skin color (at least not on internal senegal systems), so he would not have cause to think about race on a covert level. he would not probably have ever experienced covert racism.
indeed he does not recognize or talk about covert racism, only overt. for him, if you are not calling him a N----- or burning his house down, its not racism. and thats how most whites in the united states think as well.
and whites who join the kkk or another facist racist group. i can almost understand now, whereas before it confused the shit out of me. in a country that doesnt talk about white people existing, in which it is somehow dirty or forbidden to say WHITE. where you are the majority but you have no roots to your own tribes - germanic or whatnot, and dont necessarily have a common struggle with other whites or whatnot, one may seek an identity and find it in self-empowering hate mongers.
i mean, there you are told you are White and none of the shit that whites do or have done is your fault. you are relieved of any responsibility and indeed your deepest and easiest urges are gratified. it puts you in a place of injustice - it is YOU who is in danger, YOU who is the victim, YOU who may feel rightiously outraged. YOU who may feel pride in your history (because, really, if people of color and other marginalized groups dont deserve what they've gotten than white history is a source of IMMENSE shame) you can dive into your ugliest self and not have to struggle or grow or change or feel bad about anything. you can just fucking hate everyone else, and its all justified.
and iff.... IF you could get people in those positions to recognize those emotions than maybe they could change.. maybe.
maybe one in a hundred. or a thousand.
