I'm glad that there was something of a stand taken by the corporate media (after a lot of pressure from people like you guys and right on to you) against the racist and sexist comments. But it's hard to take a lot of joy in this victory. I think about what Coach Stringer said : "Do we understand what's going on in our society?"
For me, the whole affair speaks to the fact that white people often say racist things that range from slightly creepy to downright murderous, and a lot of the time don't seem to see what's the matter with that. Which speaks to the fact that we're living in a society that's structured by race, so structured by it that people who are privileged by race don't even perceive race at work--it's been made to seems so natural to them that it's invisible to them. I know this--when you're white, it can actually be very difficult to perceive how race structures the world you live in, even though it's affecting your world in a big way (largely to your benefit at someone else's expense). To be able to perceive this, you have to learn about racism, and history. I try to learn about this and I am lucky because people pointed it out to me again and again. But I feel like a lot of people who don't perceive race in action--don't perceive it because they're not being harassed or exploited or discriminated against or even attacked because of race--don't care to learn about it and don't care to say to themselves, 'gee, why are people so upset, what is the deal and what is wrong with our society?'
And this situation is generally depressing. I originally wrote this post to end with a comparison of U.S. and German history and a sentence about the 'genocide olympics' but this is all bumming me out way too much.
3 comments:
As a primer to this comment, watch this. Eddie Murphy is a funny dude.
I'm willing to concede the point that being white, I cannot conceive of what it's like to be not-white in America. But the reverse is just as true. We don't all experience the same stresses, but being white is not a free pass in our society.
I truly believe that no individual can really grasp the hardships and challenges that another person has face throughout his life. It's deplorable that people judge others on skin color, but isn't it just as deplorable that they judge on height, looks, speech, clothing, attitude, friends, family, religion, education, physical ability, etc...
Sure, being white is not a free pass in our society, but being white certainly means that one doesn't experience structural racism and that one often doesn't know how he/she benefits from racial privilege.
It's hard for white people to understand the systemic way in which they benefit from whiteness. So although all discrimination is deplorable and white people experience forms of discrimination, they do not experience racial, systemic oppression. i guess that's more the point...
Yeah, I'm just saying that though race is everyone's problem, white people actually benefit from racism and the legacies of racism, and other people have to deal with it. This article is one's woman's enumeration of all the privileges she has because she's white. I feel like there are even more concrete effects of racism than those she focuses on. One time I went to rent an apartment and the real estate agent was like, as we were looking at the place, 'I'm so glad you showed up, this [person who was not white] was going to rent it, but now we will rent it to you.' How often do you think that happens? And we'd never know about it, eh? I grew up in a mostly white neighborhood and I don't think it was just a coincidence that it was mostly white. Another example--my family is still spending the money that my great-grandfather made in the first half of the 20th C, from a business for which he was able to get bank loans, open a factory, etc., at a time when businesses owned by people who weren't white were discriminated against by white people. Another example--People in my family were eligible for those loans the govt. made after WWII so that they could buy houses in the suburbs. The govt. discriminated against people who weren't white when they gave out those loans
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