Sorry to say, but you don't know racism.
I engaged in a conversation about racism in Japan that downward spiraled down into an all out wank-war between myself and a fellow white poster living in the country. To make a long story short, the white person opened up his comment with, " I fucking love racism in Japan! I finally get to know what it feels like to be a minority and I love it. I
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I always feel as if I need to cover my bases because, like the example I used, they'll quickly flip it and turn it into something ugly. Become a defensive and act like the victim of racism. It's so maddening.
Oh, I do get it. White people can be a huge, huge pain in the ass about this stuff, always. I just hope that, at least in this one place, we can put the words and thoughts of POC first for a change, and not worry about the poor fee-fees of those who don't want to give up their racism and privilege. A sort of safer space, as it were - not safe, but safer, at least. But yeah, I get the impulse.
It's like...many women (including me) tend to write comments and posts using the words "I think" and "I believe" and so on, where many men would just state their opinion. We feel the need to qualify our opinions as just our opinions, as we've been trained to do. And it's hard to even notice you do it, unless someone says, "Hey, you don't need to do that, y'know."
So I guess my goal in saying it was sort of that same thing: here, at least, you don't (or shouldn't!) need to defend yourself from the stigma(!) of calling out racism.
It's amazing you were able to experience that, especially in Thailand. I think everyone experiences "prejudice" but racism, I always feel, runs deeper. It's a permanent scar that carries on from generation to generation. It changes cultures, changes people, and causes so much disruption.
So men will never know what it's like to be a woman. A non-disabled person will never know how it feels like to be disabled. A straight person will never understand how it feels to be a homosexual. A white person will never understand how it feels to be a person of color. It's different types of hate and abuse, but the scars last and shape a community.
I agree completely. That day in Thailand was interesting, but it gave me only a brief glimpse, from a safe place, of what life might be like for POC here. What it's like to look into a sea of faces that aren't like your own. But it didn't carry any fear, or microaggressions that add up to RAGE-INDUCTION, or any knowledge that not only is it this way, but as long as I live here, it will continue to be this way. Nobody was asking me where I was really from, or touching my hair, or expecting stereotypes from me, or that I should know all the other people who look like me, or any of the other stupid, irritating things that POC have to deal with constantly here (I'm in Ontario, Canada, not far from Toronto, in a university town).
Those things I know of intellectually, through listening to people who've experienced them, but not even that day in Bangkok could ever give me the emotional depth, the visceral knowledge of the underlying hatreds and even simple dislikes. Nothing can, because nothing I can ever do will take away the privilege I am afforded for being white.
All I can do is use it, to the best of my ability, to tear itself down. To use the fact that my voice carries greater weight with the power group to say that that greater weight is wrong.
Which is starting to sound like a cookie plea, so maybe I'd better end there, as that's really not what I'm after.
I just hope you can feel safe enough here to be able to post without fearing that kind of reaction.
Happy Post-Birthday Time!
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