Post-Election Racism, and Change I Can Believe In
I went with my husband and my friend Jonathan to Nellie's bar and watched the NBC election night coverage on Tuesday. Sometime around 10:30 or so they started showing the map of the state of Ohio go up. And I sat there grinning. They weren't even close to calling it, they only had a fraction of the vote completed, but I saw the undeclared pockets and I knew it was over. Having grown up in Ohio, you know exactly where all the cities are, and you know that those cities are by and large African-American enclaves, and substantially more liberal than the rest of the rural counties in the state. I was just grinning and grinning and everyone around me was like "what?"
"That's Columbus and that's Cleveland. There's no way that Romney is winning Ohio with those being the only places left to turn in results. They're huge and they're blue."
And I was right.
You don't have to be a prophet to know that about Ohio. You do however have to live in the real world, where people of color, cities, and people who disagree with you also happen to exist.
So, it was endlessly, and repeat-watchably hilarious to me to see Karl Rove, the "master strategist" of the Republican party, misunderstand this very fundamental fact about the state of Ohio. To have Megan Kelly say to his face "Is this just math that you do as a Republican to make yourself feel better" was priceless. But honestly, the same is true of pretty much EVERY city in the country. City populations outnumber the rural populations, and cities trend liberal. Large counties take the longest to vote, and they are the last to come in, and they are almost inevitably blue. It's just a fact.
And the following day the racism started coming out of the woodwork.
A friend of mine posted a picture of screen captures of all these people who were tweeting racist slurs against the President. And I had to sigh. Because that's exactly the kind of shit I heard every day where I grew up.
See friends, I grew up in a rural village in deep red Southern Ohio. We didn't have a lot of people of color. I had one teacher in elementary school who was Indian, I had a pediatrician who was Filipino (I think.), and we had one boy who moved to my school when I was 18 who African-American. That's pretty much the only exposure I had to people of color growing up. Seriously. But I heard plenty of racism. The "N" word was common around my household from my parents, grandparents on both sides. My father gave me all kinds of advice about not becoming friends with "those people." It was always really uncomfortable for me.
I think I was 15 or 16 when I walked away from Thanksgiving dinner when they were telling racist jokes. I asked them to stop and they didn't. So I took my food and went to eat in the bedroom. I don't know that it was the first or last time there was a scene at a family dinner. Though I have to say that after I started coming out to my mother we had to have a very awkward conversation about what would be worse in my father's eyes, a white boy, a black woman, or a black man as a lover? :D Seriously, though that was a funny/tragic conversation.
But this isn't just a digression for the sake of telling stories about my family. I grew up in one of those red counties in Ohio. And racism was part of the fabric of every day life. My town was white. White as you could ever find. And most of the people who grow up there, they stay there. There is a fear of leaving, and especially a fear of the city. And I mean, Cincinnati is not a scary city. It's like really tame people. But I can't tell you how many days my mom and dad agonized over the chance that I was going to get shot and killed just for living in the CITY. And that's the mindset of rural America. It's an unbroken chain of white people being afraid of non-white people and never (or hardly ever) leaving their little enclaves of whiteness. This is what perpetuates racism, reinforcement of the familiar, fear of the other, and maintaining homogeneity.
But let's get back to the tweets. So, a bunch of people, many of them young people, took to Twitter to call the President names and say all manner of disgusting bullshit online. But here's the thing. What you say online doesn't just stay in your little whitebread town. It's global. EVERYONE can see that. And that's where Jezebel not only made my week, but gave me a glimmer of hope for what the future could possibly be.
Almost immediately after the racist tweets started coming out, they started cataloging them, and then they started calling schools. Schools, you see, have codes of conduct for what their students can say and do as representatives of their school's image. So, of course they took it seriously when a national level news outlet called them about their student's behavior. This was met with consternation, denial, and angry rebuttals from the teens, but mostly it was met with many of these Twitter accounts being shut down out of shame, embarrassment, and necessity.
And that's where I have hope.
See, the Internet is a place where anyone can speak and say pretty much anything*. But just because you're entitled to your opinions, does not mean you are entitled to be free from criticism. And anyone, from around the entire world, can call you on your shit. You may grow up in these little sundown towns, and never see a person of color in the flesh, but when you go online you will inevitably be met with the reality of the diversity of the entire world. When you step into a public forum you are responsible for what you say and people will hold you accountable for it. And this is where racism will fizzle and die.
I don't know what it is about me that made me turn against my family's personal racism problems. Maybe it was my gay brain. Maybe it was the constant streams of Sesame Street that I watched as a child. Maybe it was some innate quality of my nature that can't be pinpointed by looking back on my past. But I can't help believe that being exposed to Global Culture via the Internet will expand children's views of the world, of how people of all shapes, sizes, genders, colors, and orientations can be friends, and, as Dr. King said, that we should look to people's character and not the color of their skin. It's clear to me that there is a big portion of this country that believes in Dr. King's vision, and there is a lesser, very vocal portion of the country who still doesn't believe this. We may not be able to change those people, but this isn't something that flips overnight. It takes generations to change. But I have hope that it's moving faster, and deeper than we suspect.
"You may say that I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one." --John Lennon
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* This totally depends on where you live. There are certainly countries who police their user's internet traffic and shut people down for what they say and who they associate with online.