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yesterday i went to the fiesta flambeau parade. it was three hours long and there were about half a million people watching. anyways, a majority black high school marching band from dallas was in the parade, and my friend's father commented, saying "don't you wish you were black sometimes?" i was highly offended. by his question. and my friend
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while i understand your response here, i have to disagree with you. i don't know that kenny has yelled at anyone via livejournal or facebook posts. it's hard to yell through the internet.
i think figuring out this racism thing often elicits a lot of very strong feelings from people when their new understandings aren't reciprocated. how am i supposed to call you (or anyone) out on a racist comment or action without sounding mad or upset about it? an inherent fact of pointing out someone's faults is that you disagree with those faults. those faults aren't going to make you happy. that's why it's so hard to nicely call someone out on a racist action. couple that with the fact that most people shut down PERIOD when confronted on any issue, and the fact that we don't have to think about race everyday because we have a privilege.
and i don't want this to come off as a personal attack, it just happens that you were courageous enough to express this view, when i know that many many white folks feel this way...
feeling bad is a fact of life, especially feeling bad for something that hurts others and not doing anything about it. it is not kenny's job/place, or any person of color's job/place to gently break the news of racism to white folk so that we can better understand our own faults. personally, i feel that no person of color should initially be accountable for helping me understand my own racism. it is not fair to ask the people we have oppressed and marginalized to tell us what we did wrong, and tell us how to fix it, so we can be better person. i think it is important that people of color call us out on fucked up things we do, because white people may not always notice it. i think it is more important for white people to call out other white people and help white people understand what it is that is wrong, and what we can do to fix it. once a basic understanding of race and the experiences of other races has been built, then we can start being accountable to each other in our fight against racism.
what is hard about acknowledging racism is that the acknowledgment becomes a call to action. very seldom do people embrace that call, it's inconvenient and it's difficult to deal with... i think that's where it all comes from, all the denial of race. unitarians are pretty good people, i feel most people are pretty good people, and so when we acknowledge racism and still don't want to do anything about it... that, that is what makes us feel bad. that is what makes it not easy. that is what makes us live in denial.
i encourage you to take up educating yourself. once we start educating ourselves, we are doing something and all of the sudden tackling the problem of race doesn't seem as big as godzilla. it will seem increasingly attainable and desirable after you take each step.
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Thanks for saying this so well.
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