racism (Page 7)

Since the late 80s, I’ve been working on and through my own racism. I’ve written about it on my own blog, before it was called a blog, and I’ve written about it in my newspaper column at the Bangor Daily News.
As the news coverage of the Department of Justice’s study of Ferguson continues, I’ve caught myself in old patterns of translating the facts. I invite my white friends to listen to your inner voices. We want racism to be not as bad as it is. We want that so much. So, to make it easier, when we hear shocking statistics we may translate them into less devastating facts. Maybe you don’t do it, but I know I have.
As I wrote in one of my BDN columns about racism—the one with deeply offensive thoughts as the first sentences—I think we well-meaning white people get so caught up in wanting to be not-racist that we aren’t able to engage in authentic relationships with people of color which means we can’t take or even support real action to change (institutionalized) racism.
Here’s the translation I’ve had to use over and over again as I listen to the news stories, using one statistic as an example:

news story: 93% of summons issued for jaywalking were issued to black people.
me: (for a millisecond) probably more black people jaywalked. maybe that’s something that happens more often in black neighborhoods and maybe there’s a non-racist reason why it’s considered such a bad thing.
me: *checks myself* the police are targeting black people for “crimes” and they are not targeting white people for the same “crimes.”

I’ve had to fix my thoughts again and again as I listen to the news. Each time I hear a statistic, my millisecond “please make this not as bad as it is” thought is louder and more easily detected. It flashes away faster, too.
Just like my work a decade ago getting beyond the “please consider me one of the GOOD white people” nonsense, the desire to have our racist systems be not as bad as they are leads me to an easy way out (hearing the statistic and thinking probably they deserved it).
Please consider reading The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, or listening to the audiobook, or simply listening to Michelle Alexander’s many public presentations. It is the knowledge of her work resting inside my gut that helps me face the ugly truth that I am still trying to avoid the ugly truth about racism in our country.

In the last year, I’ve spent a lot of time and energy examining my own role in racism, classism, and genderism. What I’ve learned is both disgusting and not surprising. I did much of the “work” on racism in the 90s. But then, I stopped.
I get to “stop” if I want to.
As I’ve re-focused my attention (again on racism, more recently on socio-economic class, just touching on genderism), I’ve found myself utterly and completely exhausted by the whole thing. Right now, I feel like retreating into my own little privilege bubble where everything is easy.
I have a choice.
In the 90s, I felt “white guilt” because I didn’t want to be racist. I was out of touch with the actual issues because it was all about me and my experience.
These days, the bell still can’t be unrung. I know that when I retreat into the easy ways, it’s a choice I get to make without many direct consequences. Many, many people don’t have the choice. They have to live with racism, classism, and genderism every day and it’s inescapable.
I’m not sure what I’ll do on a daily basis. I see now that the only way I can really make change is to: 1) listen to people who experience it without the option to take a break *without interjecting my own experiences/perspectives*, and, 2) uncover ways I can help make systemic, institutional level changes and do those things.
But, my god, it’s not easy. I literally can’t imagine how “not easy” it would be if I could never escape the fight.

Anyone who knows me well knows I’d be more likely than most to boldly, brazenly, even “rudely” object if I witnessed injustice. I don’t worry much about how I’m perceived, relatively speaking, when it comes to social justice. I act.
That said, reflecting on this powerful video, I’ve considered a few reasons why I haven’t spoken up in the past and why I might not in the future.
If you haven’t seen it, check out the video. The woman describes her experience being implicitly accused of trying to pass a bad check simply because she is Black. Her friend (sister-in-law? I forget), a woman who looks white, intercedes and appropriately shames the clerk into better behavior. There’s more to the story, and it’s worth watching.

As I said, on reflection, I’m not sure I will usually say something when I witness racism (or any other -ism). Here’s why:

  1. The woman who stepped up and did the right thing was familiar (family, even) with the woman being mistreated. She knew her so the context was all the more absurd and wrong. This relates to #2.
  2. While I consider fighting racism my business and our fight, the pride people take in “fighting their own battles” is quite strong. I’d be concerned that I’d seem condescending or patronizing if I said something to the clerk. I’d worry the other person might think I didn’t think they could handle things on their own.
  3. If the situation were as “Black and white” as the experience shared in the video, I can tell you without a doubt that I would say something. In fact, that’s a big part of who I am. I risk rudeness when I see injustice. I don’t stay quiet. But, the truth is, the racism I witness (and I witness it a lot) boils down to a gut feeling. The nervous laughter and fumbling of a clerk who doesn’t know how to just be a person with another person and makes everyone involved uncomfortable. A receptionist who is mildly cold to a fellow patient. Or a dirty look that just screams bigotry but no words are exchanged.

That’s it. The racism I witness is almost exclusively of the “plausibly deniable” variety. It’s subtle, insidious, and evil. Standing up and doing the right thing is more complicated than the video above implies. I am not, in any way, condoning staying silent. In fact, if it weren’t for my concern that I might make the object of the racism uncomfortable by stepping in, I might very well get direct with a clerk for the shitty eye glares they give. Can you imagine it, thought? If it were my friend who was getting that cold awkward ugliness, and I knew they’d understand I was using my privilege for good, you can be sure I’d call the bigot out on their bullshit. But, a stranger? a subtle interaction? It’s not so simple.
I’ll be thinking about how to fight those plausibly deniable offenses for a long time. I’ll also be thinking with empathy about the people who don’t have the luxury of just thinking about the offenses, but have to live them every day of their lives.

It was the hidden brain I was writing about. The way our minds work, using unconscious biases to make it through our day-to-day lives. We have gut feelings we rely on that don’t express themselves with language or logic.
Here’s an article (Psych-Out Sexism: The innocent, unconscious bias that discourages girls from math and science) written by the author of The Hidden Brain giving a practical example of our our cognitive functions affect us in significant ways.
Why was it I chose such racist and specific examples to start my column? I did it to attract attention, of course. I also did it to demonstrate how ugly those fleeting thoughts—typically manifesting more as feelings than discernable thoughts—can be. And, finally, I did it because I wanted to address the case where a child was killed because (in my opinion, regardless of what the courts determined) the shooter was scared of a Black guy. I wanted to show that it wasn’t only the overtly dangerous acts that block us from eradicating racism.
As the days pass, and I mourn the loss brought on by my words, I have considered again and again what I said. My most recent conclusion is that it was easier for me to use racist statements as an example of those unconscious thoughts that influence our behavior than it would have been to use other kinds of examples. Setting aside my interest in addressing the Martin/Zimmerman case, if the piece had been about the sexualization of children, there are certainly horrific nearly-thought thoughts I could share. That, however, would put me at risk of being misunderstood on a level that could threaten my role as a parent.
Racist or pedophile-like thoughts are the easiest examples for me to use because they are the thoughts I have the most experience dismissing as wrong. They are no longer the things that freak me out with a nervous-nellie oh-god-I’m-awful-for-some-reason-I-don’t-know-why feeling. They are stupid, ignorant, bizarre thoughts that rarely ever come to words. When they do, I’m startled. I reject them and move on.
Let’s say I was writing about the hidden brain—how our unconscious biases affect our social interactions—related to transgendered people, or people with physical disabilities, or people in hospice care facilities, or generationally poor white people in West Virginia. In all of those cases, if I were to dig into my mind and come up with words to describe those gut feeling reactions they would be such unfamiliar and newly awful thoughts, I would have a great deal of difficulty expressing them. It would be especially difficult because I have little practical daily living experience with transgendered, differently abled, dying, or rural poor people. I haven’t become mindfully aware of those ugly feeling-thoughts, yet.
That isn’t to say the racist phrases were simple to write, or that I’d ever like to write them again. But, again, I’ve been learning about our cognitive functions (“supporting the Republican platform means you support rapists,” is one of my blog posts about these issues) for a few years. Facing my gross and, frankly, boring white-guilt thoughts made it much easier to free myself from their bondage. And, the same holds true for the unconscious thoughts about the sexualization of children. I’ve got a 10 year old daughter, so I’ve been un-thinking the most shocking quick-thoughts (freaky disturbing feelings) for a long time. Retraining my mind was most successful once I realized what was going on.
As I’ve said a couple times now, I stand by my column. It is not about my own obsession with my own experience. That would be a detraction from… police harassment and brutality/criminal employment practices/redlining based on perceived racial identity/systemic racism in the criminal justice system, or, of course, the list goes on.
We don’t all have those particular disgusting thoughts I shared at the opening of my column. We do, however, all have thoughts that inform our daily lives that would make us quite uncomfortable if we were to examine them closely. I’m committed to championing the idea that we should examine our unconscious biases closely in order to free ourselves from them.

In the aftermath of yesterday’s column, and the high personal costs for me, I stand by what I said. Because, as I tried to say in the column, my own personal feelings about racism in the larger scheme of things should be moot. I won’t use that public space to write a personal journal entry about my own relationship with racism. It’s not about me. I don’t suffer the injustices, the crimes, the vitriol of racism.
Even here on my own personal blog, telling my story seems uninteresting. A distraction from the real issues. It’s the same story we read all the time. White woman means well, liberal, Democrat, wants to be anything but racist, becomes an activist in college fighting apartheid, attends conferences trying to find solutions to racism, reads Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr’s later writings, falls in love with Audre Lorde/Baby1 Angelou/Zora Neale Hurston in some segregated literature class, and in all that time, racism was still all about me and my own experiences and feelings.
Knowing I will lose friends because they don’t want to associate with someone who has come out publicly with racist thoughts is a price I’m (mostly) willing to pay. Some losses are more costly than others, and I certainly have questioned my priorities. But, again, it’s nothing in the larger scheme of things. Racism doesn’t hurt me on an institutional or daily-living level.
The irony for me is that as I came out with those awful “hidden brain” thoughts, I was describing lessons I’d learned that had helped me get past that tedious “white guilt.” And, again, my own white woman experience seems unimportant but I’ve hurt someone I love and I can’t say nothing. After I accepted that I will have these horrific thoughts, so fleeting they can nearly go unnoticed, I stopped feeling that anxious “please like me” feeling. How angry some people will be when they read this, because it may sound like I think I’m impressive. I don’t. But, being around Black, brown, “other” people hardly phases me at all. It’s ugly to say that it could, or that it did, but this is the United States. It’s one of the most brutally racist countries in the world. (I’ve thought about that qualifier, as if “racism” needs “brutally” in front of it? It doesn’t.)
I’m owning those disgusting thoughts. The key for me, though, as I’m writing about my own story, is that as soon as I got honest that those thoughts go in and out of parts of my mind, I was able to say “fuck you” to them and be just a person being with other people. I see race, I love differences, I see skin colors and hair textures and facial shapes. I see that in all people, equally. Because I know those asshole thoughts will rear their ugly heads, I’m able to dismiss them. They don’t take up energy, guilt, shame in me. And it’s only after I stopped making my racist thoughts all about me (I’m so terrible, I’m awful, how can I think those terrible things) that I’ve been able to stop thinking those thoughts.
Those thoughts still come to me on occasion. Riding the train in Boston, I enjoyed being around so many different skin tones and styles of clothing and languages. I appreciate true diversity. And, while I still think of Boston as a “white town,” it calms be to be in places where people’s differences are apparent. I couldn’t identify to you specific racist thoughts, but I can tell you I’m sure I had them. I had them so fast I don’t know what they were. But, again, now that I understand how cognitive functions work (“the hidden brain“), I notice the uncomfortable feeling, I catch myself and I correct myself almost as subconsciously as the racist thoughts appear. It has become easier over the last few years, too.
Before I started reading about how human brains work, I was one of those white people who would get giddy if a Black person seemed to accept me. I even hid from public display an important relationship of mine at times because I wanted to protect it from that “badge of not-racist” I know so many white people do as they trot out their Black friends as evidence. That friendship was one place where I was able to find trust and love and it was, for me, truly beyond race. Not ignorant of it, but open and honest about it. Mostly, race didn’t come up because our lives were so rich and full of other stuff.
Still, with the exception of that friendship, until a few years ago, I got nervous people with significantly darker skin than mine. I freaked out inside wanting their approval. I didn’t understand why, but I knew I was somehow wrong about something and I needed them to make me feel better. Despite learning intellectually that racism isn’t about my own feelings, and despite knowing in my heart and gut that it isn’t up to anyone but me to get that shit out of my system, I’d get fluttery and self-conscious about every word I spoke. That may be an exaggeration, but it’s not far off.
After writing that column, I have noticed in people’s responses that many people say, “We all have racist thoughts, but…” What’s different in my column is that I articulated with fierce and ugly honesty two examples of those thoughts. I truly believe this discussion should not be about me and my own relationship with racism, even here on my own blog. I intend to keep that to myself and my closest friends. If there are particular public conversations where my experience is relevant, I will contribute. I encourage other white people to dare to face what those racist thoughts actually are. Face it.
I think it’s wrong for white people to get caught up in trying to prove we’re not racists. Down to the smallest interactions between well-meaning people, there can be an awkwardness when the guilt and self-consciousness about those shocking and painful feelings/ideas/thoughts flash in and out of minds. Fuck that. Own it. Know there are parts of you that are horrible. Know that, if you are white, finding solutions for the effects of racism is not about you.
In my experience, getting really honest with myself—with the help of serious study of how brains and minds work—my own personal solutions involve acceptance. It was only then that I was able to start moving past them and changing my thinking.
For what it’s worth, I have received an enormous amount of feedback on this column. More than 30 messages in my inbox, most of which I read a sentence or two and then deleted (many were defending Zimmerman, some were calling me a racist, some were thanking me). It seems there are about 100 comments on the newspaper’s site. I know people have been personally hurt and deeply affected by my words. I have also received many notes on public forums saying they found my column brave. I have heard from white people things like, “We all think those thoughts,” “I’ve never thought the ‘monkey’ thought, but my thoughts have been just as awful.” The hurtfulness of the words, like those at the beginning of my column, defy description. They are more than pain.
The reason I stand by my column, though, despite the fact that many people couldn’t get beyond the hate in those first two sentences (and the lame and muddled wimpy offers of solutions) is because writing my column is a part of what I can to help fight racism. By discussing these things in ugly ways, I am certain that ugliness will come from it, but I am also certain there will be lessons learned that can help make positive change.