Ashamed to be White
Sometimes I am ashamed to be White. That's right. I am regularly ashamed to be from the South, especially from Tennessee. Why? Because of all the beauty to be found in our landscape in the south and in Tennessee in particular, there is so much ugliness in the soul of its people.
Today I saw a picture of a bumper sticker. It referred to the 2012 election. It was racist, it was horrible, and no I am not posting a picture of it here. I already posted it to my Facebook and wish I hadn't when I realized I was just spreading the thing, same as having it on my car.
I do NOT understand racism. Come to that, I don't understand most 'isms'. I am notorious for 'talking down' to people or being 'condescending' when I speak and not being able to hide the contempt in my voice for someone who wants to know the answers and hasn't done the work or acquired the experience to know they've asked a stupid (not dumb) question. Ignorance leads to 'dumb questions'...stupidity is knowing better, knowing the answer even, and asking again from a different person because you think the answer is going to be different somehow. Yeah, nuance can vary, sure. But most really stupid questions come from those folks that you shouldn't be wasting your time with anyway. People like those who would come up with a bumper sticker like I referenced above.
To believe that due to the color of one's skin that one is somehow superior to another is so indicative of a single digit IQ that I cannot even keep from rolling my eyes when I hear someone speak of it. I recently saw the movie The Help and realized just where my mother (who grew up less than 100 miles south of Jackson, MS) got some of the more ...shall we say, shameful ideas that she had and tried to pass on to my sister and myself...and our daughters if we weren't careful. The character of Hilly is so close to my younger sister when she was a child that I gagged watching her several times.
Skeeter's experiences with Constantine echoed some of the experiences I had with the 'maids' that raised my sister and I. We had several, so it wasn't a institution in our house. My mother worked outside the home and my maternal grandmother lived with us and it was bad enough that my mother worked - had to, as a result of 'marrying beneath herself' - my grandmother's presence in our household made it imperative that we have a 'maid'. And boy howdy did my grandmother make it known that she would NOT be treated like an invalid and constantly said things that made these women leave us in the lurch. We had two or three that I remember that stayed with us for several years. One of which I am almost certain became the mother of a boy I went to school with that was my half brother...my father would curse 'damn nig*ers' with one breath and spend his Saturday nights down on the 'south end' of town - incidentally where this woman lived. There may have even been more than one...kid that is.
Anyway, back to 'isms'...perhaps because of my parent's investiture in trying to make me grow up racist...I have an aversion to people who express racist viewpoints. It gives me a sick, hopeless, and yes, even helpless feeling. What do you do? What CAN you do in the face of such incorruptible ignorance? Gag and go on I suppose. Small wonder that my father ( who was the most bigoted person I've ever known personally) and I had a meeting of the minds and a parting of the ways when I was about seventeen.
The recent barrage of 'Personhood Amendments' seeking to limit a woman's access to abortions and other women's health care services, the Limbaugh hoopla (which I take immense pleasure in reading about his loss of advertising revenue) and various other statements and positions of the political landscape that are hostile to women's rights....all make me worry. I can no longer bear children, indeed would commit suicide forthwith were I to discover myself pregnant with no choice in the matter. I know there are any number of women out there with their whole lives ahead of them who find themselves in a position of 'no choice BUT the choice they don't want to make'. I don't think many women WANT to have an abortion, or that any woman who has had one ever does 'get over it'. I didn't. I simply...gagged and went on. It's something you work through, process and compartmentalize. But if you are wise you do not let it have free reign in making you a victim of the guilt many will try to lay at your door. You deal with it, certainly, you have to. But to apply the label 'murder' to such a thing...is not ignorant - it's stupid and ...wrong. Justifiable homicide, because it most certainly IS the ending of a life, but it is NOT murder to want to preserve the life you have, to protect children you may already have from having to live with an accident or a mistake you made. I have no explanation for the women who use abortion as a method of birth control. I think they must somehow be broken to begin with to wind up in that situation time after time, and perhaps the child would have suffered even more to have been born to such a mother. So many are. That point at least is irrefutable.
And there are those who believe that race has something to do with a woman's need for basic health care. Personally, from my experience, there are far more white women who utilize the services of Planned Parenthood than there are black pr other women of color who use the same services. How do I know this? Because I utilized the services of Planned Parenthood, in a city that was predominantly black (Memphis, TN) and I can count on ONE HAND the number of black women I encountered using those services. Why do I remember that so distinctly? Because even though I have eschewed racism as wrong, as ignorant and stupid...I found that ignorance in myself when I walked into Planned Parenthood for the first time expecting to be the only white girl there. I could not have been more wrong. Even the staff were mostly, if not all white. I think there might have been a black male nurse in there...and I remember a black COUPLE ...and she was certainly having a difficult time with the decision, something to do with a medical condition she had, blood pressure or something, I didn't eavesdrop but it was hard not to glean that there was a REASON she was there that she was NOT happy about. That's another thing I find corrosively detrimental - the judgment of others of the women who choose THEIR lives or their current children's lives over the potential of another child.
There are people who think race has something to do with intelligence or the ability to learn. Or that race has something to do with the predisposition for a lazy work ethic or a life of crime. I have been subjected to crime perpetrated by white people...over and over....and took up the slack for lazy white co-workers MUCH more often than for any of the other races combined. And before you think I am going to say it was men...which it was in some cases, most of the CRIME I have been subjected to was from WHITE WOMEN. That's right. Those pretty little soft spoken, well mannered, ladylike southern belles.
So you can hang on to any idea that race has something to do with your IQ or learning ability, the propensity for crime or use of social services, or that it entitles you to be treated differently or thought of as superior, or that it can be used to treat others in a discriminatory way.
And you can shove that opinion up your ass. You are stupid and vile and you know something? You are not worth the shit on the shoes of some of the people of color I have had the privilege to know and love in my life.
There are, of course, exceptions to my opinion, but they are not the rule I live by. And I will not share the same space, the same air, with the vileness that perpetuates such ideas as 'a matter of fact' or 'because everyone knows that's just how they are'. The more I hear of it, the sicker I get of it...and yes it is very definitely because I once was seeded with ignorance. I was brought up to believe the world was one way, when in reality it most certainly bore NO resemblance whatsoever to that ideology. I am proud that I knew, almost from the beginning that racism was ...in a word, WRONG. But I can't deny that the stupidity I was raised around didn't bear fruit in my opinions before I began to truly think for myself.
Lately I'm worried that even that small ability is so threatening to some, that it is in danger. It looks like my Warrior days are taking on a new focus. Social media is to public opinion like dandelion seeds are to a landscape. I'm spending my energy blowing those dandelion seeds around to places where there needs to be just a bit more diversity in the social eco-system.
Today I saw a picture of a bumper sticker. It referred to the 2012 election. It was racist, it was horrible, and no I am not posting a picture of it here. I already posted it to my Facebook and wish I hadn't when I realized I was just spreading the thing, same as having it on my car.
I do NOT understand racism. Come to that, I don't understand most 'isms'. I am notorious for 'talking down' to people or being 'condescending' when I speak and not being able to hide the contempt in my voice for someone who wants to know the answers and hasn't done the work or acquired the experience to know they've asked a stupid (not dumb) question. Ignorance leads to 'dumb questions'...stupidity is knowing better, knowing the answer even, and asking again from a different person because you think the answer is going to be different somehow. Yeah, nuance can vary, sure. But most really stupid questions come from those folks that you shouldn't be wasting your time with anyway. People like those who would come up with a bumper sticker like I referenced above.
To believe that due to the color of one's skin that one is somehow superior to another is so indicative of a single digit IQ that I cannot even keep from rolling my eyes when I hear someone speak of it. I recently saw the movie The Help and realized just where my mother (who grew up less than 100 miles south of Jackson, MS) got some of the more ...shall we say, shameful ideas that she had and tried to pass on to my sister and myself...and our daughters if we weren't careful. The character of Hilly is so close to my younger sister when she was a child that I gagged watching her several times.
Skeeter's experiences with Constantine echoed some of the experiences I had with the 'maids' that raised my sister and I. We had several, so it wasn't a institution in our house. My mother worked outside the home and my maternal grandmother lived with us and it was bad enough that my mother worked - had to, as a result of 'marrying beneath herself' - my grandmother's presence in our household made it imperative that we have a 'maid'. And boy howdy did my grandmother make it known that she would NOT be treated like an invalid and constantly said things that made these women leave us in the lurch. We had two or three that I remember that stayed with us for several years. One of which I am almost certain became the mother of a boy I went to school with that was my half brother...my father would curse 'damn nig*ers' with one breath and spend his Saturday nights down on the 'south end' of town - incidentally where this woman lived. There may have even been more than one...kid that is.
Anyway, back to 'isms'...perhaps because of my parent's investiture in trying to make me grow up racist...I have an aversion to people who express racist viewpoints. It gives me a sick, hopeless, and yes, even helpless feeling. What do you do? What CAN you do in the face of such incorruptible ignorance? Gag and go on I suppose. Small wonder that my father ( who was the most bigoted person I've ever known personally) and I had a meeting of the minds and a parting of the ways when I was about seventeen.
The recent barrage of 'Personhood Amendments' seeking to limit a woman's access to abortions and other women's health care services, the Limbaugh hoopla (which I take immense pleasure in reading about his loss of advertising revenue) and various other statements and positions of the political landscape that are hostile to women's rights....all make me worry. I can no longer bear children, indeed would commit suicide forthwith were I to discover myself pregnant with no choice in the matter. I know there are any number of women out there with their whole lives ahead of them who find themselves in a position of 'no choice BUT the choice they don't want to make'. I don't think many women WANT to have an abortion, or that any woman who has had one ever does 'get over it'. I didn't. I simply...gagged and went on. It's something you work through, process and compartmentalize. But if you are wise you do not let it have free reign in making you a victim of the guilt many will try to lay at your door. You deal with it, certainly, you have to. But to apply the label 'murder' to such a thing...is not ignorant - it's stupid and ...wrong. Justifiable homicide, because it most certainly IS the ending of a life, but it is NOT murder to want to preserve the life you have, to protect children you may already have from having to live with an accident or a mistake you made. I have no explanation for the women who use abortion as a method of birth control. I think they must somehow be broken to begin with to wind up in that situation time after time, and perhaps the child would have suffered even more to have been born to such a mother. So many are. That point at least is irrefutable.
And there are those who believe that race has something to do with a woman's need for basic health care. Personally, from my experience, there are far more white women who utilize the services of Planned Parenthood than there are black pr other women of color who use the same services. How do I know this? Because I utilized the services of Planned Parenthood, in a city that was predominantly black (Memphis, TN) and I can count on ONE HAND the number of black women I encountered using those services. Why do I remember that so distinctly? Because even though I have eschewed racism as wrong, as ignorant and stupid...I found that ignorance in myself when I walked into Planned Parenthood for the first time expecting to be the only white girl there. I could not have been more wrong. Even the staff were mostly, if not all white. I think there might have been a black male nurse in there...and I remember a black COUPLE ...and she was certainly having a difficult time with the decision, something to do with a medical condition she had, blood pressure or something, I didn't eavesdrop but it was hard not to glean that there was a REASON she was there that she was NOT happy about. That's another thing I find corrosively detrimental - the judgment of others of the women who choose THEIR lives or their current children's lives over the potential of another child.
There are people who think race has something to do with intelligence or the ability to learn. Or that race has something to do with the predisposition for a lazy work ethic or a life of crime. I have been subjected to crime perpetrated by white people...over and over....and took up the slack for lazy white co-workers MUCH more often than for any of the other races combined. And before you think I am going to say it was men...which it was in some cases, most of the CRIME I have been subjected to was from WHITE WOMEN. That's right. Those pretty little soft spoken, well mannered, ladylike southern belles.
So you can hang on to any idea that race has something to do with your IQ or learning ability, the propensity for crime or use of social services, or that it entitles you to be treated differently or thought of as superior, or that it can be used to treat others in a discriminatory way.
And you can shove that opinion up your ass. You are stupid and vile and you know something? You are not worth the shit on the shoes of some of the people of color I have had the privilege to know and love in my life.
There are, of course, exceptions to my opinion, but they are not the rule I live by. And I will not share the same space, the same air, with the vileness that perpetuates such ideas as 'a matter of fact' or 'because everyone knows that's just how they are'. The more I hear of it, the sicker I get of it...and yes it is very definitely because I once was seeded with ignorance. I was brought up to believe the world was one way, when in reality it most certainly bore NO resemblance whatsoever to that ideology. I am proud that I knew, almost from the beginning that racism was ...in a word, WRONG. But I can't deny that the stupidity I was raised around didn't bear fruit in my opinions before I began to truly think for myself.
Lately I'm worried that even that small ability is so threatening to some, that it is in danger. It looks like my Warrior days are taking on a new focus. Social media is to public opinion like dandelion seeds are to a landscape. I'm spending my energy blowing those dandelion seeds around to places where there needs to be just a bit more diversity in the social eco-system.