IBARW: In Defense of Americanism (as a starting point)
I declared that my Jackie Kay post was a sidetrack from a larger point, but I never got around to saying what the larger point actually was. This is it, and it's an exhortation to non-Americans -- in particular, to non-American, Western white folk like me -- not to disregard online (and offline) discussions of race and racism because they seem US-centric. Even if they are undeniably US-centric, we can still learn a lot from them. I know that I did.
I was looking through the del.icio.us tags for IBARW and came across this post, one of the three (including mine) tagged 'scotland.' The poster, who grew up very close to where I did, calls Glasgow in the 1960s "a milieu largely bereft of racism" because it was a milieu largely bereft of people who were not white; he acknowledges class, sectarianism and anti-English feeling, along with sexism and homophobia, as structuring conflicts there, but he clearly has not come across the more radical understanding of racism that oyceter details very clearly here. That understanding would allow him to see his very experience of racism's absence as conditioned by the systemic workings of a global imperialism which is grounded in racism and exemplified by the commonplace depictions of "the people of Empire" which he perceives to be entirely innocent. (Another excellent article on racism globally, link provided by oyceter.)
I don't intend to single out this particular poster for criticism; I don't know him from Adam and the post's a year old. It is, however, representative of the understanding of racism that's still all too prevalent in Scotland. And it represents an ignorance that I have been able to challenge in myself primarily because of my encounters with US-centric writings about and discussions of racism. American writers gave me the tools to think about race with; tools without which that Scot's post would have looked a lot more sensible to me.
You see, nobody talked about race or racism where I come from. They talked about multiculturalism and we learned about Hinduism and Islam in school (there was one Asian kid at my primary school, around 10 in my year of 200 students at high school); we were told not to be prejudiced; but we never learned about the material effects of race on people's lives, about the enduring reality of racism. Most of us didn't have a language to talk about it with; I remember when I started high school, at 11, having a teacher point out a particular prefect to me by describing her, in a stage whisper, as coloured. I knew there was something wrong with that, but I didn't know how to articulate it, or what to do about it.
Nor did I know how to address the different experiences that I and my Muslim friends of Pakistani descent seemed to be having, or why they often seemed to spurn my gestures of friendship and keep to themselves. I thought it must be racist to think about, notice or even see race, and I worried a lot that I was doing something wrong because I did think about it, notice it, see it; so I didn't talk about it.
I think the first time my nascent, confused ideas about race were really challenged was when I read my mother's omnibus edition of Alice Walker, when I was 13 or 14. That was the first time I looked at white people as a privileged, powerful group, through the eyes of someone to whom that power did actual harm. It was a painful experience, and I wanted to understand what my pain and confusion meant; was I a part of the group called 'white people' Walker wrote about? Could I do something about that? I tried to talk about it with my mother, but I don't think she understood what I was talking about; she just said something about guilt not being productive.
Later, at university, I got interested in feminism and came out as queer. I read bell hooks and Audre Lorde and other American writers of color, and I still wasn't sure to what extent wee Scottish me was implicated in the 'white women' and 'white feminists' they would describe. It was abstract, academic, in ways that theorising class and gender and sexuality never could be for me (a queer woman who'd grown up with a single mother on benefits in a council flat and gone to a university where most of my classmates seemed to know one another from boarding school). When I started to read online discussions about race (lurking, to begin with), I was amazed to find that people were capable of talking about race and racism to each other just as frankly as the theorists did, that conversations could happen without the layers of confusion and obfuscation that seemed to pop up in my brain every time I tried to write something down on the subject, and without the self-conscious circling around the issue that seemed to happen when we read about race for another all-white seminar. I wondered if this was because the people having the conversations were American, because Americans seemed to be able to talk about race more easily; I wondered to what extent the words translated; and I listened.
Listening and gradually talking, over years, I managed to do some translating work of my own. Thinking about racism as power and prejudice and as inextricably linked with imperialism, I have a clearer understanding now of what was going on in those experiences at school (even down to the factors that conditioned who my friends were, since I hung out mainly with the misfits at the lowest end of the social hierarchy). I can explain in great detail why I disagree when Scots are accused of being "racist" against English visitors, but also when Scots claim to be a racially oppressed minority within the UK (short answer: some Scots were colonised, some weren't; but most of us benefited from the British Empire). I can see how my experiences of class conflict and sectarianism in Scotland are analogous to the functioning of racism in some ways, and not at all in others.
I live in the US now, in an area where white people are in the minority numerically and where race and class map onto each other almost perfectly: where the disproportionate power and privilege of white people like myself is painfully self-evident. It's impossible to avoid thinking and speaking of race, here, and I would certainly put my foot in my mouth even more than I do if I had not been working to ameliorate my ignorance for a while already. I spend more time learning about the history of where I am than about where I come from, because while I may be an alien it's important to me not to offend, and because I want to know. But in learning about America, still, in reading and in talking in person and online, I find myself surprised by new and better ways to interpret racially inflected encounters I've had in the past. Or by ways to think of books I've read. Or by the continued prevalence in my own thinking of ingrained racist, imperialist concepts I have to try to unlearn.
Some people first learn about racism in their own country or culture, from bitter experience or through education. For the rest of us, and again I mostly mean white non-American western people like myself, there may be more chance that we'll run up against the dominant American accounts and theories of it first. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't listen; we might, after all, learn something, not just about other cultures but about ourselves.
I was looking through the del.icio.us tags for IBARW and came across this post, one of the three (including mine) tagged 'scotland.' The poster, who grew up very close to where I did, calls Glasgow in the 1960s "a milieu largely bereft of racism" because it was a milieu largely bereft of people who were not white; he acknowledges class, sectarianism and anti-English feeling, along with sexism and homophobia, as structuring conflicts there, but he clearly has not come across the more radical understanding of racism that oyceter details very clearly here. That understanding would allow him to see his very experience of racism's absence as conditioned by the systemic workings of a global imperialism which is grounded in racism and exemplified by the commonplace depictions of "the people of Empire" which he perceives to be entirely innocent. (Another excellent article on racism globally, link provided by oyceter.)
I don't intend to single out this particular poster for criticism; I don't know him from Adam and the post's a year old. It is, however, representative of the understanding of racism that's still all too prevalent in Scotland. And it represents an ignorance that I have been able to challenge in myself primarily because of my encounters with US-centric writings about and discussions of racism. American writers gave me the tools to think about race with; tools without which that Scot's post would have looked a lot more sensible to me.
You see, nobody talked about race or racism where I come from. They talked about multiculturalism and we learned about Hinduism and Islam in school (there was one Asian kid at my primary school, around 10 in my year of 200 students at high school); we were told not to be prejudiced; but we never learned about the material effects of race on people's lives, about the enduring reality of racism. Most of us didn't have a language to talk about it with; I remember when I started high school, at 11, having a teacher point out a particular prefect to me by describing her, in a stage whisper, as coloured. I knew there was something wrong with that, but I didn't know how to articulate it, or what to do about it.
Nor did I know how to address the different experiences that I and my Muslim friends of Pakistani descent seemed to be having, or why they often seemed to spurn my gestures of friendship and keep to themselves. I thought it must be racist to think about, notice or even see race, and I worried a lot that I was doing something wrong because I did think about it, notice it, see it; so I didn't talk about it.
I think the first time my nascent, confused ideas about race were really challenged was when I read my mother's omnibus edition of Alice Walker, when I was 13 or 14. That was the first time I looked at white people as a privileged, powerful group, through the eyes of someone to whom that power did actual harm. It was a painful experience, and I wanted to understand what my pain and confusion meant; was I a part of the group called 'white people' Walker wrote about? Could I do something about that? I tried to talk about it with my mother, but I don't think she understood what I was talking about; she just said something about guilt not being productive.
Later, at university, I got interested in feminism and came out as queer. I read bell hooks and Audre Lorde and other American writers of color, and I still wasn't sure to what extent wee Scottish me was implicated in the 'white women' and 'white feminists' they would describe. It was abstract, academic, in ways that theorising class and gender and sexuality never could be for me (a queer woman who'd grown up with a single mother on benefits in a council flat and gone to a university where most of my classmates seemed to know one another from boarding school). When I started to read online discussions about race (lurking, to begin with), I was amazed to find that people were capable of talking about race and racism to each other just as frankly as the theorists did, that conversations could happen without the layers of confusion and obfuscation that seemed to pop up in my brain every time I tried to write something down on the subject, and without the self-conscious circling around the issue that seemed to happen when we read about race for another all-white seminar. I wondered if this was because the people having the conversations were American, because Americans seemed to be able to talk about race more easily; I wondered to what extent the words translated; and I listened.
Listening and gradually talking, over years, I managed to do some translating work of my own. Thinking about racism as power and prejudice and as inextricably linked with imperialism, I have a clearer understanding now of what was going on in those experiences at school (even down to the factors that conditioned who my friends were, since I hung out mainly with the misfits at the lowest end of the social hierarchy). I can explain in great detail why I disagree when Scots are accused of being "racist" against English visitors, but also when Scots claim to be a racially oppressed minority within the UK (short answer: some Scots were colonised, some weren't; but most of us benefited from the British Empire). I can see how my experiences of class conflict and sectarianism in Scotland are analogous to the functioning of racism in some ways, and not at all in others.
I live in the US now, in an area where white people are in the minority numerically and where race and class map onto each other almost perfectly: where the disproportionate power and privilege of white people like myself is painfully self-evident. It's impossible to avoid thinking and speaking of race, here, and I would certainly put my foot in my mouth even more than I do if I had not been working to ameliorate my ignorance for a while already. I spend more time learning about the history of where I am than about where I come from, because while I may be an alien it's important to me not to offend, and because I want to know. But in learning about America, still, in reading and in talking in person and online, I find myself surprised by new and better ways to interpret racially inflected encounters I've had in the past. Or by ways to think of books I've read. Or by the continued prevalence in my own thinking of ingrained racist, imperialist concepts I have to try to unlearn.
Some people first learn about racism in their own country or culture, from bitter experience or through education. For the rest of us, and again I mostly mean white non-American western people like myself, there may be more chance that we'll run up against the dominant American accounts and theories of it first. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't listen; we might, after all, learn something, not just about other cultures but about ourselves.