randomness + race
Yesterday the new Ghibli DVDs came out: "Howl's Moving Castle", "Whisper of the Heart", and "My Neighbor Totoro". I didn't have a chance to go buy them until earlier today. And then... Target only had Howl's, and not the other two. What the heck? And Graham said he'd been to another Target earlier, and saw Howl's sitting there with the new releases, but hadn't seen the other titles there either. What's up with this, Target? What is wrong with you?
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The water in my building was shut off for most of the day so they could install new valves that will let them shut off the water on one building at a time instead of the prior three at a time. Once it came back, I didn't experience any of the sputtering that often happens when water pressure is gone and then comes back, but I've noticed little bits of black stuff in my last few glasses of water. I'm kinda surprised this debris isn't all gone yet... I already washed a few dishes. How much water do I need to go through before it's clean again?
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In doing a Google search about body language, I somehow got a result from a site called the "PeeSearch Community", for a board post titled "My favorite pooping story".
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I watched the premiere of a new TV series earlier tonight that I thought was pretty interesting... It's an FX reality show called "Black White" where they use some really good makeup to switch the races of two families of three (and put them in the same house, of course) to let them experience being out in the world as a member of another race. I thought the fathers, especially, looked pretty convincing. The mothers and kids a bit less so, but still pretty good. I guess the shapes of their facial features seemed a bit discordant with their skin, although the montages did show that there's at least some prosthetics involved. Anyway, I don't know if anybody else might have caught it. And, I've got three whole black people (that I know of) that read my LJ, so the chance of one of them having watched it is pretty small. But if anybody did see it, I wondered what other people's take on it was.
I found the white dad to be pretty annoying, and as such I didn't especially like him, but I think some of what he was saying is probably true: that some portion, hard to say how much, of the perceived racism that the black dad was talking about is illusory. I'm sure this varies from person to person, but I was a little surprised at how strongly the black dad objected to this idea even being presented, as if people aren't capable of misinterpreting the actions of others, and that he can really know that this or that little thing is definitely racism and not something else. The black dad's counterargument was, basically, that the white dad is incapable of seeing these little things because he hasn't been seeing them all his life. But... I don't know how convincing that is. If the things are really that little that they aren't noticeable changes for a white guy in black makeup... how significant can they be?
The most racist I have ever felt was a couple years ago, at the time of the last OTFCC in Chicago, when I went with Dawn to a wedding reception for a couple of her friends. The reception was just a big backyard picnic, but it was something like 30 or 40 blacks, and then me, Dawn, and Dawn's roommate. I was so self-conscious... I worried that they were going to wonder what I was doing there or that I might accidentally do something to make them think I didn't want to be there, or even to betray that I *was* a little uncomfortable and that they might take it the wrong way. It was this whole weird meta-racism thing, but in the end, it was still racism: I had it in my mind that at least some members of this group of poor blacks were going to automatically expect me to be racist.
Way back in 2000, Christopher Priest, who is one of my favorite comics authors, made a post to RACMU which is one of the relatively few things I've ever read about racism that really felt "new" to me. Among saying a few others things, he described this same thing from the other side, a sort of low-level notion that he's been conditioned into holding that whites are going to be wary of him. He knows that in a lot of instances it's just paranoia, but he can't shake it because -- I'm sure -- he's had plenty of instances where it wasn't. I have this low-level notion that blacks are going to be wary of me in the sense that they will be scouring everything I do to look for racism in it.
I definitely wouldn't say that "real" racism is no longer a problem, but this sort of self-conscious second-guessing is an aspect of race relations that feels like it's important, but that I almost never see discussed. Whites don't want to come across as racist, and this in itself can make them (or me, at least) uncomfortable because I'm afraid of being misinterpreted. Meanwhile, blacks (or Priest, at least) are uncomfortable around perfectly nice white people not because they have anything against whites as a whole, but because they don't know whether or not any particular white is going to give them a hard time. This leads to a lot of pointless extra tension and antagonism between people that don't actually have a problem with each other... Tell me I'm not the only person to think about this.
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The water in my building was shut off for most of the day so they could install new valves that will let them shut off the water on one building at a time instead of the prior three at a time. Once it came back, I didn't experience any of the sputtering that often happens when water pressure is gone and then comes back, but I've noticed little bits of black stuff in my last few glasses of water. I'm kinda surprised this debris isn't all gone yet... I already washed a few dishes. How much water do I need to go through before it's clean again?
--
In doing a Google search about body language, I somehow got a result from a site called the "PeeSearch Community", for a board post titled "My favorite pooping story".
--
I watched the premiere of a new TV series earlier tonight that I thought was pretty interesting... It's an FX reality show called "Black White" where they use some really good makeup to switch the races of two families of three (and put them in the same house, of course) to let them experience being out in the world as a member of another race. I thought the fathers, especially, looked pretty convincing. The mothers and kids a bit less so, but still pretty good. I guess the shapes of their facial features seemed a bit discordant with their skin, although the montages did show that there's at least some prosthetics involved. Anyway, I don't know if anybody else might have caught it. And, I've got three whole black people (that I know of) that read my LJ, so the chance of one of them having watched it is pretty small. But if anybody did see it, I wondered what other people's take on it was.
I found the white dad to be pretty annoying, and as such I didn't especially like him, but I think some of what he was saying is probably true: that some portion, hard to say how much, of the perceived racism that the black dad was talking about is illusory. I'm sure this varies from person to person, but I was a little surprised at how strongly the black dad objected to this idea even being presented, as if people aren't capable of misinterpreting the actions of others, and that he can really know that this or that little thing is definitely racism and not something else. The black dad's counterargument was, basically, that the white dad is incapable of seeing these little things because he hasn't been seeing them all his life. But... I don't know how convincing that is. If the things are really that little that they aren't noticeable changes for a white guy in black makeup... how significant can they be?
The most racist I have ever felt was a couple years ago, at the time of the last OTFCC in Chicago, when I went with Dawn to a wedding reception for a couple of her friends. The reception was just a big backyard picnic, but it was something like 30 or 40 blacks, and then me, Dawn, and Dawn's roommate. I was so self-conscious... I worried that they were going to wonder what I was doing there or that I might accidentally do something to make them think I didn't want to be there, or even to betray that I *was* a little uncomfortable and that they might take it the wrong way. It was this whole weird meta-racism thing, but in the end, it was still racism: I had it in my mind that at least some members of this group of poor blacks were going to automatically expect me to be racist.
Way back in 2000, Christopher Priest, who is one of my favorite comics authors, made a post to RACMU which is one of the relatively few things I've ever read about racism that really felt "new" to me. Among saying a few others things, he described this same thing from the other side, a sort of low-level notion that he's been conditioned into holding that whites are going to be wary of him. He knows that in a lot of instances it's just paranoia, but he can't shake it because -- I'm sure -- he's had plenty of instances where it wasn't. I have this low-level notion that blacks are going to be wary of me in the sense that they will be scouring everything I do to look for racism in it.
I definitely wouldn't say that "real" racism is no longer a problem, but this sort of self-conscious second-guessing is an aspect of race relations that feels like it's important, but that I almost never see discussed. Whites don't want to come across as racist, and this in itself can make them (or me, at least) uncomfortable because I'm afraid of being misinterpreted. Meanwhile, blacks (or Priest, at least) are uncomfortable around perfectly nice white people not because they have anything against whites as a whole, but because they don't know whether or not any particular white is going to give them a hard time. This leads to a lot of pointless extra tension and antagonism between people that don't actually have a problem with each other... Tell me I'm not the only person to think about this.