Why racism is a big deal for me
And specifically anti-black racism.
So in fifth grade I went to a private xtian school. It was very small, one class per grade. There were two black kids in my class, there might have been two more in the entire school. It was wall to wall white and mostly affluent (my sister and I were there on charity). In my class, without exception, the girls were all backstabbing, social climbing assholes. The worst was a girl I'll call Miranda. She was the top of the class, pushy and mean and judgmental. One time I slipped and fell down a hill and said, "god dammit!" (because I've always been a cusser) and she turned to her little crowd and said all salaciously, "she said dam but not like the kind that holds back water!" Naturally, as soon as I taught her pig latin she was cussing left and right worse than I ever would try at school. Because god doesn't speak pig latin apparently. Basically she was every mean girl stereotype rolled into one. The others in her group were bad too, but mostly because they were emulating her.
One of the girls in her group was one of the two black kids in my class. She was annoying, she did that baby talk thing because she thought it was cute. But she was nothing, not even a drop in the bucket, as bad as Miranda. But when Tonya copied Miranda and was snotty toward me, all of a sudden I had all these words and idea and beliefs about Tonya and people like her. It felt like they had sprung fully formed into my head and heart. And that freaked me the fuck out. Because up until that point in my life I had never, ever, had a negative experience with a black person. Ever. In third grade, in fact, I had an overwhelming number of positive experiences with my black classmates. At home no one was, I thought, openly virulently racist. So this really quite took me by surprise.
How could I be having all these racist thoughts/beliefs/feelings? Where did they come from? Why couldn't I just ignore them and move on?
I was born at the point where my parents were their most progressive/liberal and as a result I got all those ideals ingrained in me. But since they are both white, middle-class and not terribly radical they never really had to challenge themselves too deeply about their own racist issues. So they'd be all, "all people are equal! we don't see color!" and that's nice and all, but it doesn't actually deal with reality and how society doesn't allow such context free statements to just solve all the problems.
Anyway, the point is they had a lot of unconscious racism (father was first gen Sicilian in NY, mom is from Texas) that they passed on to me and they never taught me to reject the racism that our society is drenched in. When I realized that I was racist without being one of Those Kinds of Racists, I was upset and felt betrayed. And I was determined to never ever let that happen again. I was going to root out that nonsense, expel it from my brain and never ever be racist ever again!
I have always been stupidly idealistic and frequently naive.
It took until I was in high school, now in Texas, for me to realize just what a hypocritical asstart I was about race. Because you see, for all my attempts to rid myself of anti-black racism, I held on nice and firm to my anti-Latino racism. See, in fourth grade, I did have some truly horrid experiences with Latina girls in my class. Since the area they were attacking me was to do with my gender expression, something I remain highly sensitive about, some part of me felt justified clinging to my racist feelings toward them.
It took until I got online and was fortunate enough to interact with a great variety of people from around the world that I finally came to realize I was always, always going to have to work against racism inside me and in society. That it's not something that you can just fix in one or two steps and be done. That combatting bigotry and prejudice is a process that goes on throughout one's life. That it's not enough to just not be actively evil, that I need to be actively progressive (be it speaking to friends and family on the subject or writing letters or voting or even something more physically demanding).
So, if I seem strident (sometimes I feel like I'm being that way) about issues of race representation in my media, this is why. Because anti-black racism was the first and most profound bigotry I recognized in myself. Because I know that the things that hurt me as a woman, the misogyny and rape culture and violence, hurts the rest of the humanity too and if that's true (it is) then racism (even if I don't see how it is directly harming me) is also tremendously harmful to our species and neither one of them is acceptable in any way shape or form. Most importantly, and what I've come to understand most recently, is that I must take oppressed people's word for it when they say something hurts. It doesn't matter if I don't see how it could hurt, or understand what is hurtful, all that matters is they have said "this hurts" and the only response I need to give that is to STOP. Well, and to step up and speak out in my privileged spaces and say, "hey, this hurts people we need to fucking stop it." Because it's the right thing to do. Period.
PS: I apologize for any of this that comes across as clueless white person drivel (which I expect some of it definitely does if not all of it).
Posted from DreamWidth.
comments there.
You can comment there with OpenID or a DWth account.
So in fifth grade I went to a private xtian school. It was very small, one class per grade. There were two black kids in my class, there might have been two more in the entire school. It was wall to wall white and mostly affluent (my sister and I were there on charity). In my class, without exception, the girls were all backstabbing, social climbing assholes. The worst was a girl I'll call Miranda. She was the top of the class, pushy and mean and judgmental. One time I slipped and fell down a hill and said, "god dammit!" (because I've always been a cusser) and she turned to her little crowd and said all salaciously, "she said dam but not like the kind that holds back water!" Naturally, as soon as I taught her pig latin she was cussing left and right worse than I ever would try at school. Because god doesn't speak pig latin apparently. Basically she was every mean girl stereotype rolled into one. The others in her group were bad too, but mostly because they were emulating her.
One of the girls in her group was one of the two black kids in my class. She was annoying, she did that baby talk thing because she thought it was cute. But she was nothing, not even a drop in the bucket, as bad as Miranda. But when Tonya copied Miranda and was snotty toward me, all of a sudden I had all these words and idea and beliefs about Tonya and people like her. It felt like they had sprung fully formed into my head and heart. And that freaked me the fuck out. Because up until that point in my life I had never, ever, had a negative experience with a black person. Ever. In third grade, in fact, I had an overwhelming number of positive experiences with my black classmates. At home no one was, I thought, openly virulently racist. So this really quite took me by surprise.
How could I be having all these racist thoughts/beliefs/feelings? Where did they come from? Why couldn't I just ignore them and move on?
I was born at the point where my parents were their most progressive/liberal and as a result I got all those ideals ingrained in me. But since they are both white, middle-class and not terribly radical they never really had to challenge themselves too deeply about their own racist issues. So they'd be all, "all people are equal! we don't see color!" and that's nice and all, but it doesn't actually deal with reality and how society doesn't allow such context free statements to just solve all the problems.
Anyway, the point is they had a lot of unconscious racism (father was first gen Sicilian in NY, mom is from Texas) that they passed on to me and they never taught me to reject the racism that our society is drenched in. When I realized that I was racist without being one of Those Kinds of Racists, I was upset and felt betrayed. And I was determined to never ever let that happen again. I was going to root out that nonsense, expel it from my brain and never ever be racist ever again!
I have always been stupidly idealistic and frequently naive.
It took until I was in high school, now in Texas, for me to realize just what a hypocritical asstart I was about race. Because you see, for all my attempts to rid myself of anti-black racism, I held on nice and firm to my anti-Latino racism. See, in fourth grade, I did have some truly horrid experiences with Latina girls in my class. Since the area they were attacking me was to do with my gender expression, something I remain highly sensitive about, some part of me felt justified clinging to my racist feelings toward them.
It took until I got online and was fortunate enough to interact with a great variety of people from around the world that I finally came to realize I was always, always going to have to work against racism inside me and in society. That it's not something that you can just fix in one or two steps and be done. That combatting bigotry and prejudice is a process that goes on throughout one's life. That it's not enough to just not be actively evil, that I need to be actively progressive (be it speaking to friends and family on the subject or writing letters or voting or even something more physically demanding).
So, if I seem strident (sometimes I feel like I'm being that way) about issues of race representation in my media, this is why. Because anti-black racism was the first and most profound bigotry I recognized in myself. Because I know that the things that hurt me as a woman, the misogyny and rape culture and violence, hurts the rest of the humanity too and if that's true (it is) then racism (even if I don't see how it is directly harming me) is also tremendously harmful to our species and neither one of them is acceptable in any way shape or form. Most importantly, and what I've come to understand most recently, is that I must take oppressed people's word for it when they say something hurts. It doesn't matter if I don't see how it could hurt, or understand what is hurtful, all that matters is they have said "this hurts" and the only response I need to give that is to STOP. Well, and to step up and speak out in my privileged spaces and say, "hey, this hurts people we need to fucking stop it." Because it's the right thing to do. Period.
PS: I apologize for any of this that comes across as clueless white person drivel (which I expect some of it definitely does if not all of it).
Posted from DreamWidth.
comments there.
You can comment there with OpenID or a DWth account.