marrael: I should be sleeping

Janet Chui (

marrael) wrote,
@ 2007-09-28 00:49:00

Current mood:	not sleeping
Entry tags:	culture, politics, racism

I should be sleeping
But wanted to post a link to this brilliant post from Digby:

http://commonsense.ourfuture.org/no_way_baby

I realized something not long ago. I was in the US for both the 2000 and the 2004 US presidential elections. Not that that did anyone any good, since I'm not a US citizen, but even my 2000 self--ignorant as she was in US politics--could see the cultural and political divide in the US between the states in which I experienced racism (sorry, but till now my gut reaction to the words "Southern hospitality" is to say "my ass") and the states in which no one even brought up (or sometimes even suspected) that I was from out of the country. I'd been in parts of the US where I've been cornered in really uncomfortable situations (till now I wonder if I was in danger), where black families were still receiving burning crosses on their lawns (really), and where the tension was undeniable, where people would look at me in fear out of the corners of their eyes, not looking, but still looking every few seconds, as if they were just fighting the urge to kick me into a crate and ship me "back to China", where they always assumed I was from. Always.

I do recognize my experiences as mild, really. What I always hated more, was telling my experiences to Southerner friends (non-racist, obviously) and getting complete denial from some of them. "No way! You were being over-sensitive! Probably just your imagination." Yeah, right. Can we please now acknowledge I wasn't imagining?

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	Grr watermelontail 2007-09-27 05:55 pm UTC (link)
	"No way! You were being over-sensitive! Probably just your imagination." My first reaction is to want to slap people who say that and tell them they're only imagining it. (Reply to this)(Thread)

	Re: Grr marrael 2007-09-28 01:14 am UTC (link)
	Oooh, good one! (Reply to this)(Parent)

	dsmoen 2007-09-27 06:40 pm UTC (link)
	Knowing what other people of color have been through (and other foreigners) in the U.S., there's no way I'd possibly believe you were imagining it. People live in denial of what they don't themselves see. (Reply to this)(Thread)

	marrael 2007-09-28 01:17 am UTC (link)
	Yep... (Reply to this)(Parent)

	thaldir 2007-09-27 06:50 pm UTC (link)
	That's disappointing, and extremely sad. I somewhat naively believed that things had changed with time... Given what's the mood over here though ( 'there's no racism in Italy', full stop, evidence notwithstanding) I'm hardly surprised :-(. (Reply to this)(Thread)

	marrael 2007-09-28 01:19 am UTC (link)
	Yeah, and it's a problem that will not diminish by ignoring it. :/ (Reply to this)(Parent)

nojojojo
2007-09-28 04:04 am UTC (link)

Wow -- thanks for linking that Commonsense article; powerful and so, so right. Though I can't agree with his implication that the Southern racism of the Republicans is limited to the South; that falls into the usual trap of vilifying the South as the sole bastion of racism in this country. I grew up spending 9 months of every year in Alabama and 3 months in Brooklyn -- mostly during the era of the Crown Heights incident, Bernhard Goetz's rampage, and some of the worst racial unrest since the Civil Rights movement. I saw the same ugliness in both places; Southerners are just more open about it.

(Reply to this)

bardofawen
2007-09-28 06:50 am UTC (link)

Ugh. How very frustrating. And how heartbreaking to see that we're still dealing with so much hatred.

I think it's terribly hard for anyone who doesn't experience a kind of intolerance to truly understand what it's like to be in that sort of situation. Even if, on an intellectual level, you fully acknowledge that racism/sexism/etc. is still a problem, it's almost impossible to really grasp the fear, the degradation, and the humiliation of the situation without at very least witnessing it firsthand. To add to that, most people have the subconscious need to defend those around them that they perceive as good people. Couple that with a label people use to identify themselves, and you get the sort of defensive denial your Southern friends have demonstrated.

"I'm a Texan/Mormon/Japanese citizen/person with a disability/transvestite lumberjack, and I'm a good person, and the people I know who are Texans/Mormons/Japanese citizens/people with disabilities/transvestite lumberjacks are good people, so they can't possibly be guilty of committing the sin you're laying at their feet."

As soon as you involve identity in the equation, people become less willing to accept that there's a problem.

And its frustrating and shortsighted, definitely. And I'm just not sure there's a way around it (although I admit, once in a while, slapping them does sound appealing).

A contributing factor to the problem is, I think, the tendency we have in this country (I won't speak for people outside the US, but I would suppose it exists elsewhere) to divide people into strict black and white categories. I find this is true even among the so-called "liberal intelligentsia," where the prevailing attitude seems to be that either people are enlightened philosophs, paragons of virtue, whose very presence perfumes the air with loving kindness and goodwill to all the creatures of earth; or else they are unwashed, ignorant and crass cavemen dredged up from mudholes, who keep their wives chained in the kitchens while they gorge themselves to corpulence and watch highlight reels of the top 100 worst sports injuries in history.

And of course this is utter rubbish. You can have a passionate and dedicated minister, kind and loving, constantly giving to the community and the world at large, open-minded about other people's religions but completely homophobic. That kind old lady down the street who was a Holocaust survivor and always shares the fruits and vegetables of her garden with all her neighbors nevertheless mistrusts Hispanic people and goes out of her way not to deal with them.

The point is, I do think it's fully possible for a person to be exposed to the wonderful side of "Southern hospitality" and never see its ugliness. Because of that, it's easy then to want to relegate the ugliness we do see to this mythical group of hate mongers that exist in our collective subconscious like cross burning modern-day bogeymen. "It isn't anyone I know. It's those other people, those really bad people, giving the rest of us good southerners a bad reputation."

We have to be willing to accept that even the nicest people have ugliness in their character, and no one is universally nice to everyone. We have to be able to accept that of ourselves and to recognize it and own up to it when people call us on it. Most importantly, we have to be willing to acknowledge that the actions of Group A don't diminish us as individuals. Only our own actions can do that.

We win a major victory in the war against prejudice every time we convince a new person to examine their own.

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