So, there's apparently been an uproar about something in fandom (I know, when is there not), but this one is touching on some very big, very serious issues.
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synecdochic has a solid, rational post about why it's such a big issue, which I can recommend you all go read: it opens a dialogue, it puts a topic on the table, which needs to be addressed.While I'm nowhere near educated in those particular matters to make an incisive statement on them, there is something that was brought to my attention in a particularly horrible way as I was reading, and this, I can make a statement about.
It's neither a pleasant, nor an easy thing to say, but it should be said.
Okay... here goes.
I am racist.
Except that it shouldn't be hidden in small-tags like that... I am racist.
Let me put this in some context for you. I'm female, which is one thing. I'm an agnostic Unitarian Universalist. I'm African-American in that my father was a full-blooded Nigerian, even though my mother is pure German ancestry. I'm non-cisgender, which is an acknowledged but fringe identity. I'm an asexual, which some people don't believe exists. I consider myself a walk-in, which even fewer people believe exist. I have plenty, plenty of fringe identities. I have, myself, though not as often as some, been a victim of racism both covert and overt.
And I am racist.
So, I'm willing to bet, are a lot of you.
Now, there are about a thousand different directions I can go with this--"we're hardwired to be racist," "society makes us racist," "it's not our fault that we're racist," and all of these are partially true and partially false. They're also partially irrelevant. What's relevant here, in my post, is that I consider myself an open-minded, at least somewhat socially-conscious person, and when I sit down and examine my attitudes and assumptons, when I drag them out of the unthinking part of my mind into the thinking part, I'm astounded by how racist they often are. Or sexist, or classist, or how many assumptions they make about differently-abled persons, or persons of other religions, or... well, you name it. I'll make assumptions and, when I look at where they've come from, be unable to come up with a better reason than, "Because he's black." "Because she's a woman." "Because he's poor." "Because she's Christian." Or even, "because he's a white college boy with a buzz cut...."
And I'm not making this post, in any way, to say that I'm proud of this, or embracing it as a part of my identity. I'm posting it because I'm deeply, deeply ashamed of it, and if people examined their own assumptions most of them would be deeply ashamed of them too, and the reason they endure is because nobody looks.
Because, and here's the crux of the issue, everyone is racist. It is part of cognition--it's easier, brainwise, to apply descriptors to groups of people than to take each one on their own terms. It is part of society--what we see in the news, in movies, in books, online. And no, it's not as if we went out into the world wanting to be racist. But we all are.
And we all make excuses, whether it's "But you can just look at them and see they're not as intelligent" or "Tests have shown that they're different from us" or "they're conditioned by society to be different from us" or "But I know it's wrong, I would never act on it...."
And all of these are excuses, ways we pat ourselves on the back and say "It's not so bad." It is so bad. As soon as we make those excuses we justify, to ourselves, shuffling the problem off, hanging it in its closet and not looking at it again. This is an issue that won't go away on its own--it needs to be looked at, examined, lamented, confronted.
Ignoring it is the easy choice. What's difficult is training yourself to see it, and training yourself out of it.
And how to do that? Sadly, I don't have all the answers. But I have a place to start, and that's to say "This problem exists. I want to face it head-on. I don't want to give into it, and I don't want to perpetuate it."
I'm making this post to bring the problem to light, to say that racism exists, here and now, even where you think it shouldn't. There's no benign racism, no place it "should" exist, and it exists everywhere. It should be acknowledged, combated, everywhere.
I am racist. But day in and day out, I'm trying not to be.
Note, here, I'm using "racist" as a stand-in for all sorts of -ists; racist, classist, sexist, ageist. Too many to name individually, I'm afraid. Certainly too many to type, again and again.
While I'm on the subject, let me point to Erika Moen's comic on the same issue, a cleaner, pithier, more visually striking take on the same thing.
Okay... okay. Pushing "Post". I'm gonna do it. ...yeah.
October 27 2007, 03:27:20 UTC 4 years ago
You should listen to this. :)
October 27 2007, 05:45:20 UTC 4 years ago
Also, you were very brave to post this. :)
October 27 2007, 14:25:40 UTC 4 years ago
Also known as "not being an asshole."
October 27 2007, 05:04:31 UTC 4 years ago
[Insert a lot of other sentences here that I can't properly think through enough to say coherently. Oh, username, you escape me once again.]
October 27 2007, 05:17:31 UTC 4 years ago
What I was trying and failing to say was that a lot of people can say, "Oh, everyone's racist" but often silently add "except me" to the end of that. They don't seem to put themselves into the same equation. Which is a problem. So even if it's just a 'small' admission, and everyone admits to it, at least they're admitting to it. Recognizing it's a problem, all that.
I'm tempted to modify my "Me too" with something to make it seem less :C-inducing, but...in the spirit of things, I won't.
October 27 2007, 05:22:12 UTC 4 years ago
It's one of those things that you don't think about until you say something particularly racist and you suddenly realize what that sounded like. It's quite a shocker. Sometimes its easy to forget your mind works that way.
I've always said that "everyone's racist" thing as a way to make it feel like it's somehow okay (even though it's not). And there have been people who have adamently told me that I am wrong and that they are not racist. Which I just don't think is possible...they must be at least ageist or classist or..or something. Right?
October 27 2007, 06:00:02 UTC 4 years ago
Almost all the time I am aware of what I am projecting outward so I try not to show these feelings and treat everyone the same. Sometimes I over compensate a little by being more friendly to the Saudi's or the Sudanese or whoever. I know in my head that my initial reactions toward them are just freaking wrong and I blame the media to an extent. But to blame the media is to blame an external force that you cannot control and I want to think that I can control my prejudice/racist thoughts.
And thats another thing, is it truly racist or is it just prejudice? Perhaps am I just splitting hairs here but I remember someone a few years ago, possible a professor of mine, though it could have just been someone I strongly respected, saying that what we are talking about is actually "prejudice" and not "racist". That we all have preconceived notions about every person we meet. The way they dress, talk, their gender, their race, it all affects our actions and emotions regarding them.
I want to say that I am not racist but at times I can be very prejudice. But to you that might just be replacing one term with another while the feeling behind it is exactly the same.
October 27 2007, 06:52:23 UTC 4 years ago
Take my above comment as is though, it feels to me that *you* are talking more about prejudice and her about racism than the both of you about racism.
*flops into bed*
October 27 2007, 14:21:55 UTC 4 years ago
October 28 2007, 03:25:48 UTC 4 years ago
This was difficult for me to post too. (part 1)
I'm an asexual, which some people don't believe exists. I consider myself a walk-in, which even fewer people believe exist. I have plenty, plenty of fringe identities....I always have thought that walk-ins have the opportunity for a unique perspective on this, and too often I just see the issue entirely disregarded or ignored, as though one's own origins must be set aside in any discussion of social issues because they are regarded by most as "fantasy" and prejudice is reality. Yet I think that can be summarily dismissed on the basis that that very belief (in one's status as a walk-in) consigns one, if it is widely known, to one of the pariah groups of our society: those regarded as mentally aberrant and mad. Supposing even that a walk-in is entirely mad and delusional and mistaken about his or her origins, that too delivers them to a status much reduced in power from the "normal person."
And for other reasons I think it may be easier for me to approach this issue than others in my system.
I was born to a position of relative privilege in my own society. I was not (and I think I was fortunate not to be!) born to any hereditary nobility or to an outrageous fortune, but my family's money and position still insulated me from nearly all the misfortune that those things can insulate one from. I was a boy in a still male-dominated society, a son of its dominant culture and ethnic group and not an outsider or foreigner, having no immediately obvious differences of body or mind which would have caused anyone to regard me as defective (and perhaps undergoing "punishment" for some crime committed in a previous lifetime). I felt that I was grateful for my advantages, but while I did give money and food to beggars and so forth, I still also felt that I should not "rock the boat" and do any thing that would greatly upset social conventions: all ways of thinking which pervade this culture also. I was aware that the high exalted themselves by standing on the backs of the low, but I thought also to myself "What can one do? It has always been so; who has an idea for a system to replace it?"
I've found parallels, too, in accounts of the differing lives of rich and poor in Victorian society: how little the lives of the well-off and "the other half" really intersect, and how easy it is for the fortunate ones to take for granted that the less so can always be relied upon to perform all those menial tasks on which their comfort rests, and to put them out of view and regard it as "not my problem" the rest of the time. All this I was as relatively blind to as most people of my position, while I lived. Likewise, I did not really consider very often the idea that women might be unhappy with the lesser status to which they were relegated, and that they might aspire to exactly the same things as men if it were only allowed. And I knew that still while my city was rather a cosmopolitan one, a foreigner, a person from "outside our culture," had to labor longer and harder to gain trust; and to culturally assimilate themselves as much as possible, and acknowledge the supposed superiority of our culture; yet I didn't see this either as a great and pressing problem.
Additionally, as contrary and twisted as it may seem to the modern ideas of this society, to be prejudiced and openly so, to display cultural chauvinism and exhort the superiority of our own nation and culture over all others of the world, wasn't considered taboo in my own society. They were not bad or depraved people, those who did so; they were, as I was, a product of the attitudes and circumstances which surround them; and I didn't realize the extent to which this was, indeed, a terrible problem, until I came here. (Ironically, we don't look particularly "white" either-- I mean the body does, but most of my nation do not.)
October 28 2007, 03:34:54 UTC 4 years ago
Part 2
But there's a more fundamental difference, I think, perhaps, at work. I'm not, in my basic principles, anti-religious; though I do believe that religions in time indubitably pervert the spiritual truths on which they were founded (and even their founders may not interpret a revelation correctly), and become instruments of enforcing social order, still there is much social good as well as bad which can come out of organized religion, whether the principles it holds true are actually truth or not. While most people (though of course not all) of my own society are nominally to profoundly religious, still there don't exist concepts equivalent to those of original sin and the need for divine redemption of humans. I think, perhaps, that Western people, even those who have nominally discarded Christianity or religion as a whole, still have their thoughts very much steeped in those contexts, even when they are stripped of a religious grounding. Admitting one's own prejudice seems to often be framed in the terms of a Christian confessional experience: one 'confesses' tearfully, with pain, that he or she is a sinner (that is, harbors prejudice, has privilege over other groups, etc), must become 'humble before God' (that is, the group to whom they are trying to present themselves as a 'good' male, white person, heterosexual, etc) and is then 'redeemed' by their approval and made 'pure.'I think there is really so much deliberate and inadvertent parallel between it and what I find to be one of the nastiest features of some versions of Christian theology (admitting one's 'innately bad nature' and only through hating one's sinful nature and one's self is redemption possible) that many people choke up on it. Admitting to one's prejudice or power over others, of course, really isn't and should never be in the least equivalent to admitting that one is innately bad, or must hate one's self. But perhaps I can see that more clearly than many who have that cultural and theological grounding, as whether one rejects the theology or not, it still pervades and lingers. It doesn't in the least way make me immune to prejudice, or to thinking I don't have a certain prejudice which I really do; I simply don't view it as a sin-and-confession narrative if I realize that I have a prejudice and must retrain myself to think differently.
And I *do*; I do run into assumptions I make, in this world, constantly; there is a continual struggle of telling one's self "No, you must not assume this thing; you must not assume this person's life is of less worth than yours, nor that they lack the same individuality and sense of self you have because they look or talk in this way," and so forth. Even from the perspective of using a shared neurologically-variant brain, for instance, we often find ourselves making assumptions that people with other kinds of disabilities must live worse lives than we, and so on. And of course such thinking is a thing which we could easily find ourselves on the wrong side of, if someone were to decide, for instance, that we are not "high-functioning" enough to have the same worth as a person, and the same capacity for joy in life, which they possess; so it is dangerous to divide one's self from those one regards as "worse off."
I also saw, for instance, getting onto the bus one night, a young woman dressed in the "typical" fashions and makeup of young women nowadays, talking to a friend on a cell phone. The bus stop was right outside the university's science library, and a sort of idea went through my mind, not quite in words, "Of course I doubt she was at the library to study science; girls like her aren't the types for science, or to want to bother with anything very intellectually rigorous." A few minutes later, she mentioned "physics homework" to her friend on the phone, and I at once realized that I'd been operating from a very cynical prejudice, and was rather ashamed of myself.
October 28 2007, 03:35:52 UTC 4 years ago
Part 3
I don't in the least bit accept the excuse that prejudice being hard-wired into humanity-- and I think it is entirely possible that humans of every sort have some instinct towards grouping themselves into an "Us and a Them"-- makes it inevitable, and a naive dream to think it can be overcome. The nature of the Us and of the Them is, after all, so dependent upon what culture dictates it to be. Ancient Greeks noticed the darker skin of Ethiopians, but didn't regard them as an inferior version of humanity because of it; likewise sexual relations between men, in certain contexts, were so routine a part of society that there was no word dividing "homosexual" from "heterosexual" (there's none in mine either, though that's apart from my point). But then, despite all this, women still held nearly the same status as slaves in most places; and the fact that there *was* slavery at all, of course, a group of humans as property to be bought and sold...But then again, there's another feature of my own society which I've still carried with me somewhat: history is not a "march" from one point to another, but cycles which repeat, in some form, again and again, as humans repeat the cycle of the transmigration of the soul, death and rebirth. There are, I think, advantages to both ways of looking at it, and neither is wholly true. Still I tend to read history with an eye to patterns, to what repeats, to what in the past mirrors events in the present; to attempting to see through the superficial details of an event or epoch or change and discern what more universal pattern might be unfolding.
-Rikiru
October 30 2007, 04:14:28 UTC 4 years ago
you are most correct in stating that everyone is racist, or some other "-ist" of some sort. it just is. Those who do not acknowledge it are the ones in most trouble, if only with themselves. For as diverse and individual as we are, we are also the same. Born of the same 2 arms and 2 legs, 2 eyes and 2 lungs... We are all each other, and we are all built of the same thought and process. We are all born the same, with the same capacity to become... anything.
That said, I would like to state for the record, that I am racist, sexist, classist, specieist, gamerist, and a cold, arrogant, asshole. I am gay, spiritual and not religious, white male, 32 and living with my parents, I have not finished my college degree, and I have no sense of humor. These things are part of me, they do not define me. They help me express who I am. And I am happy.
Why am I happy being such? because I have earned the right to be so.
and so have you.
I fight with every breath I take, I strive for excellence always and I tolerate nothing less than best effort always. I walk with my head high, and I sleep confidently every night. I am honest and loyal, I am motivated, energetic, and wealthy in mind, body, and spirit.
I am so far above those I blast on. And I am an equal-opportunity -ist. I blast on everything, everybody, everywhere, always.
And most importantly...
I blast on my self.
And THAT is why I am happy being exactly what I am. because I can rag on myself as easily and as harshly as I rag on everyone and everything else. And if ever anyone has something legitimate and honest to blast me for, I am most eager to open a discussion in order to work out what it is that they feel I am diong or not doing, in order that I might have the opportunity to meet the challenge and as with all things, surpass it with ease.
you are what you are, 100%. You cannot dismiss those parts of you that you do not like, but rather accept them as part of your description and your path.
You know they say that you only truely find something when you stop searching for it. The harder and harder you search, the farther you go from the answer. but when you stop searching, and accept that you will find the answer when it is time to be found, you will find it very quickly, and in a way that you would never have expected. (I need to follow this advice in terms of finding a career)... So I would offer this suggestion if you are so inclined to try it.
Stop searching for the way to become not ashamed of yourself for your feelings. Accept that you are you, nothing more and nothing less. And the next time you turn around, you may very well find some subconscious development in an area you can't even put into this one, which will lead you to the understandings you need to accept your self.
and in the mean time... you should NEVER doubt what you are.
Never.
Nobody has the right to classify you in any way. No society has the right to call you something you do not believe in yourself. You are only what you believe.
And I believe that I am a Dragon.
even if that means I am a racist, or an asshole.
So be it. I walk tall and proud, and that is what matters.