The profession that I’m involved with requires some face to face conversation with individuals who may share some personal things with me. Today I was meeting B, a young African American girl who was telling me some struggles she had at work when she was being bullied or talked behind her co-workers’ back. I have never met B before and I was trying very hard to figure out some essential points of her struggles.
Yet there was a burning question in back of my mind for quite a while during our conversation. That is, “are they (her co-workers) white?”
There was part of me wanting to defend this girl and assumed that she was being bullied “because” of her skin color.
Regardless of the level of involvement of her skin color, I was glad that I did not ask her that question.
I think that my burning question reveals some hints of the racist part of me. There was this part of me that was racist and it judges people based on their color, even in the situations when I was trying to protect or defend for the presumably oppressed ones.
I know very clear in my mind that if she were not to be black, I would not have had that inexcusably racist question in the back of my mind. And the fact that this question was burning behind me gave evidence to the racist me.
I am a racist, just like everyone else, knowingly or unknowingly.
It is not my job to point out her skin color as “perhaps part of her struggles.” In fact, if it is, she would have told me, given that I was doing the most fundamental part of my job well, that is, building a working relationship with her.
She did not tell me anything regarding her skin color, and we still had a good chat.
It is little instances like this that reminds me of the struggles and oppression that I have received on the other side of the equation.
This is a structural problem. It effects you, me, and everyone else.
Sometimes it comes out at places that we were not even paying attention to.
One day a colleague of mine was talking with me about a couple she had just talked to. As we were exchanging ideas, I made a comment about how her female gender role may have played into the dynamics of her chat with the couple.
She was offended and said, “Well, there’s nothing I can do about that.”
I often find my identification (or performance) of a feminist character a block for human connections. The above instance was one of them.
I was pointing out an obvious gender dynamic that was taking place, and yet, any comment about gender ought to be eliminated or shelved and thus no one gets hurt or offended.
It is moments like this that I find myself being caught in dilemmas.
On the one hand, I would love to talk about race and gender, they have real, embodied effects in the 21st century of
On the other hand, I should not be talking about race and gender, because that proves me to be a racist, a sexist, and a feminist (with a negative tone).
So how do we get to it?
For now, I will stick with the title of this rant, by discovering the racist, sexist, and classist me, and be honest and courageous enough to confront it, to bring it to light, to make it visible.
I live in fear of being perceived as a racist. I do not want to be racist (sexist, classist, etc.,), but I am a human and as a species we evolved to be distrustful of everyone who was not part of our group. This served us well for millennia - then the world changed.
ReplyDeleteIntellectually we understand racism is illogical and bad. However, we all struggle with our inherently human nature. It is brave of you to confront your inner racism - too many people fear, deny and suppress it. I believe the only way to overcome racism it is to bring it out into the light. Racism can manifest as hate crimes and discrimination, but it can also persist good people who stand opposed to racism.
I also believe that many people do not mean to be racist, and that attacking them only puts them on the defensive. No one likes to be labelled a racist, so no one talks about it. How can we understand and overcome if the subject is taboo?