To A T

What you’ll find below are three comments made as replies to the “Racism” blog of last week.  I’ve held the comments because … they amazed me for awhile, but they shouldn’t have done. They are in most ways all entirely predictable as a group, as a pattern that’s easily discernable when someone takes the time to look. One of them I replied to privately. It was from someone I’ve come to like. And I replied to her because I know her better than I do the other two posters and found something interesting in her questions. 

What I found interesting was what I call “the turning.” How we turn away from whatever it is that makes us uncomfortable in a discussion or a situation. We like to assert an innocence within ourselves, or assert a flaw in our interlocutor, or something ridiculous about the subject of the discussion. Perhaps that a person may not write as well as I, or that they are drunk or silly or that they, member of a minority who is supposed to be discriminated against, doesn’t buy that they are discriminated against. Or that we have suffered someone’s backlash anger and, thus, are as much victims of discrimination and racism as are they. 

Racism is (there, bolded and italicized) an institutional thang all neatly wrapped up with tradition and history, custom, cultural point-of-view, constitutional law and precedent and any number of other types of conditions and conditioning that tend to ensure that the old ways go on and on, no matter how much “change” is promulgated. In fact, maintaining the tradition of “freedom and liberty” may actually be used to suggest that if we all just start from the same start line now all will be “fair.” After all, why would anyone ever need “special rights.” 

I’m sorry that’s just ridiculous: why for about 550 years (1520-1974) did white people need “special rights” that other groups didn’t get? You think about that and I’ll just move along.

Yeah, this is America and everyone knows that we all abide by Jefferson’s ideal that all wealth goes back to the amorphous pit it was drawn from when a billionaire dies or a political legacy runs to a close. And at the same time when we pass a law, in maybe 1964, then that law itself shows that all racism is done with forever and that all is now equal — regardless of educational status and whatever nasty discrimination there might have been in existence the day before the paper was signed. Ah yes, now ain’t that just the way things work? Forgive and forget and “move right along, folks, ain’t nuthin’ ta see here no more?” 

So, I wrote the letter to my friend and she apparently heard it. She suggested I post it here. What she doesn’t know till now, I think, is that that was my intention after I got about 1/3 of the way through the letter the night I wrote it. But it was nice to get the suggestion back. LOL. 

I’ll start with the not-yet-published responses and will not publish the names of the responders. What would they matter anyhow? They know who they are and that’s good enough for me.

Yeah, we all creep and crawl our ways through our lives, and the lives ours intersect with, as best we may, or at least that’s what I like to think. But, occasionally, it’s not a half bad idea to try to point out where we fall short. Where we all of us fall short. It’s hard to meet an innocent who’s older than seven. Although it’s rather easy to meet those who claim innocence who are far older than seven.  

Anyone can be racist, it doesn’t matter what your skin color is. Racism was generally thought of whites towards blacks, so reverse racism was just blacks to whites.. but its still racism no matter which way.

A quote from the local forum.

“When you implys that all black mens got big butts you bein racial an you knows that true. I aint no africian americian I am a black man. I ben call a colored man alla mos my life an that were fine an then peoples change to black man an that were ok to me but now they wants to change to africian americian but I aint changing no more. I am a black man an I am proude of it to.
—–
Hep ! I fell an I cant reach my beer !”

Has anybody you care about recently been the victim of discrimination, Radha? Have you?

Just going with my nascent counselor instincts here…

And since we’re on the subject…what do you think caused your writer’s block?

Still, I am not sure what would lie beneath that intense kind of response. 

That’s what draws me to you here. I like to think it is concern for you. That’s what my sense tells me.

But like you said, you should do the approaching, not me. I respect that.

It’s just i can’t get it out of my head now. What is it? Why would it be so deep? 

That’s just my nature. I find you fascinating, but you may not like that. I will withdraw now.

Nor would I tell you. Or perhaps I will. What lay beneath it was a kind of breathless wonder at the assumption. Yet, I imagine now it was not an assumption at all. Instead rather much like another response to that post that I think I will not publish either.

What I saw in both was a turning, from any real discussion of what was there, in the post, just as your first was a turning. That vague uncomfortable feeling that perhaps there may be more to the crux of that entire racist thing than is comfortable for most white folk to allow discussion of.

Thus, there is a colloquial and fully mis-spelled rendition of the letter of a black man in the one you’ll prolly not see and a piece of verbal wit followed with a “searching” of my motivation, some secret and hidden discrimination I may have experienced that would somehow deflect one’s gaze from the discussion to another discussion: a bit of possible psycho-babble about why I would write such a thing.

The point is not that “why.” The “why” is that I have dwelt much among people of color: blacks, hispanics and a few east asians anyhow. I have seen and heard both the discomfort of white folk in actually unbending enough to speak completely honestly with such folk; and I’ve also known the reticence of those “others” to allow that white person to be trusted enough to speak with somewhat comfortably and openly themselves.

The matter is more of how deeply we hold our discomfort and how willing we are to allow it to be spoken, or written, how much of that portion of white we are willing to both own and speak or write openly. If there’s a psychological search that is necessary, then the search seems to me to be a search by the reader. The finding of whatever might somewhat match the admission that my grandfather in the 1840s, 50s and 60s had owned in excess of 25 slaves. It was a fair-sized plantation. The house still stands and there are tours now, so I’ve been told.

And all those years I never knew. Others did, aunts and my father, my uncles and my great-aunts. yet, never a breath. Not one until 15 years ago. And even then it came not from those close, but from a distant cousin when she wrote to me about a family reunion. Obviously some of the family had faced in their ways the fact that they were descended from a slave-owner.

I seriously doubt you would need to own that particular bit of history, although in some fashion you may perceive your father in that light from what you’ve said to me about him.

But … it’s difficult, no?

To find the center of where one holds her privilege — regardless how much privilege may also be denied her? It’s not an easy or likeable journey, that one. Much easier, for instance, to imagine that one’s own discomfort in being visibly or somewhat visibly transssexual or transgender or gay or whatever must surely absolve one of any privilege at all?

Yet, your visibility or mine in that respect is not so great as that of being born black or brown or that sort of golden brown we call “yellow,” is it?  With that color, that visible mark, people become the inheritors of a history that goes quite along with the skin, the features — the visibility. With that comes the attachment of fear. Our fear, the fear of the dominants or former dominants: the fear that somehow a great revenge may be taken or that the darkness implies evil or at the very least anger and possible violence.

Why, I wonder do so many of us see black, particularly, skin and make that connection either very consciously and easily or less easily but just as consciously. “O, I should move faster or further or not engage in any way. For, there lies danger.”

Two things, perhaps. One, ironically is the very same visible history that white folk see in black and brown skin: color. Our own color that marks us as surely as brown or black mark others out as a part of that history-still-alive. It’s uncomfortable, no? Knowing that someone might think, or know, where you come from, who you are and what you are because your skin is pale compared to theirs? Yeah, it is. I know.  

I suspect that second fear comes from a deep knowing that we do manage to inherit in many ways the sins of our fathers and mothers. Their’s was the guilt for the action and ours the guilt of the inheritors. We didn’t visit the plagues on black folk or latino folk, but we manage to reap the same history they reap, just the flip side of that history.

There’s a deep uneasiness in approaching it. So, we make a joke or preen ourselves as having black, or latino friends. Yet, I imagine we really don’t. Have friends that is, for how can we be intimate with the flip-side of that history without owning and embracing it? Better for us, like one of the thread repliers who triggered my essay, to talk instead about the ways I may have been misused and demeaned, especially if it was by one of those “others.”

If I have been raped or beaten or robbed cheated or made fun of by a black man or an hispanic man, cut or laughed at by a black or brown woman, maybe even attacked physically by a woman at all, then that lends an innocence to me doesn’t it? I mean, I know what it feels like to be misused by someone of a different skin color. So there’s an equivalence, right? I don’t think so, not unless the conversation’s engaged as honestly as those having the conversation can be, with ourselves, with each other. 

OK, ya know that, that dismissal or attack or discrimination by a black, brown or golden brown person. But what did ya do about it? Call the cops, file a complaint with some government or business agency, or stand there and complain that you were being discriminated and you didn’t have to put up with that? That you would call in enforcement to “set things right, by god?”

If ya did that, any of those, then why did you believe it would work to do so? Lemme suggest that you may well have been so used to the mechanisms of your privilege that you could not imagine NOT having your complaint redressed as you expected it to be? Now, that’s just a suggestion, not saying that’s the case, but think about it. OK? 

It, when white folk feel put upon in hiring or by a Latino or Black or any person of color, sort of allows us to try and possess an innocence from that history that becomes extremely uncomfortable to carry around with us. For the history, rather than the glory or wealth or social-standing it once meant now has become a kind of albatross and we are all become ancient mariners, no?

So, what I saw in your responses was a desire to turn from a place you had no desire to be in. No willingness to approach and own. Instead what I thought I saw was an attempt to use me, so to speak, as a shield for something you’d rather not look into. Easier instead to make an attempt to try to find some deeper motivation in myself that would send the topic skittering off on a carom far from any need to remain with the actual subject of the essay. Our own white discomfort with history and the fact that anger from those “others” may well be very justified. Why maybe even some of us feel that anger as well, at our own ancestors. Maybe? 

I reacted strongly to that. For I thought that perhaps you might do something more bold. I thought you might actually remain with the topic and search yourself. I felt you didn’t. That was disappointing to say the least. But after thought, I don’t find it surprising. It’s a
regular affect displayed by both white and black, by brown and other people of color. Basically by us all. 

It’s an attempt to find a ground of innocence where we might stand steadier in the face of the uncomfortable discussion we would rather not have. Or, so it seems to me. Instead we talk about those “others:” those “bad” white racists or those nasty and evil black or brown separatists and the good, the righteous, the saved (yeah, really? any of us qualify for that group?) in all colors of folk are so uncomfortable with the conversation that we never manage to start the conversation on any level where we cannot first find our own innocence and deny that the history lives within us.

We shall never “bind up the wounds of the nation” until we can first admit that we carry the wounds, all of us.

I see it among cissexuals when they deal with us, among us as we deal with each other or with whomever we are willing to believe we are “more” than: truer, better, less autogynephilic than. Whatever. Males do it with females and females try to take unassailable ground to hold our conversations about patriarchy and sexism. No wonder nothing ever really gets said and what is said becomes all too easy to dismiss by either party.

We long for innocence and purity. I suspect that there is none, just degrees of guilt that change dependant on what the discussion is about, which intersection we happen to be moving through together. Who is truly just and always on the bottom in every situation? Why, I imagine, no one. There’s always someone we are able to turn the tables on and repress or deny, even for those who do most often to seem the hardest put-upon.

Well, if you’ve read this far then you’ve read my reasons for “that intense kind of response.” The lack of willingness to have the conversation makes me nuts. Especially when it comes from those I respect in many ways. Perhaps I expect too much of us all.

Hope you dreamt in peace and are having a grand day when you read this.

Love,

Radha