First, the quick story. On another blog, the writer quoted someone who said they’d gone to Africa, and after hearing that another country was apologizing for slavery, he wondered why no one had apologized to him while he was in Africa.
Initially I assumed the writer was white, then when I learned the writer was black, I indicated that he was misinformed, based on history I studied while in college, and history that can easily be found online. I was immediately attacked, or so it felt, by a woman who seemed to think I was cutting Africans a break just because they were black, and that they shared equal culpability in the slave trade. One of those things that happens with all of us, at times, is that we will tend to give back what we get, and since I didn’t like her writing tone, I gave back the same. Not the most adult thing in the world, but there you go. She has eventually acquiesced, though not quietly, with the kind of argument I was expecting to get. I almost thought about not even going back to read the response, but, well, I’m like that sometimes.
I have to say, though, that after having that following up on my post on the N-word, and some other things that had been occurring, it made me start thinking about how, when the pressure is on and emotions start getting into it, that there’s a major problem with the concept of minorities being able to actually talk straight with each other on the topic of race. It’s somewhat disturbing, as someone who does diversity training, to realize just how hard something like that can be, to let go of thoughts and feelings that are strong and inflamed.
Do you know why Bill Cosby’s words lately have stirred up so much emotion? Here’s a newsflash for some of you. Black people, behind closed doors, often say the same things that white people say about black people. There’s a lot of stuff we hear on the news that black people do that just irk the heck out of us. We have some of those same thoughts and feelings oftentimes. About ten years ago, even Jesse Jackson said that he’s scared to walk outside at night, as well known as he is, because he’s not sure if a young black man dressed as what he might perceive as a thug is going to hurt or rob him. How freaky is that, from the preeminent civil rights activist of my time? Even with that, though, we as black people really don’t like the dirty laundry aired in public. Why?
Here’s the difference, if I may. When white people say things like this about black people, it seems like it’s words used in anger. When black people say these things, most of the time we’re embarrassed. People from my generation still ask, as the first question whenever we hear some bad news of a crime on TV, if it was a black person that did it, and we hope that it’s not. These days it’s much easier because of the names that many young black people have been given, and we’re not sure how we feel about that either. I’m trying to think of the last time I heard that a young mother named her child Mark or Mary or Robert or Sue, unless they were named after someone else in the family.
However, there’s another quick acknowledgment one has to make. When white people talk about themselves when they hear about crimes, they say the same hateful things about them as they say about black people. And once again, it sounds like they’re saying these things more out of anger than embarrassment. I could be wrong, but that’s how it seems. And it’s part of the premise of this post.
I’m not sure how we can really talk to each other as a group and not misunderstand what the other is saying, or meaning. I participated in something known as the Community Wide Dialogue maybe 4 or 5 years ago here in the Syracuse area, where it’s purpose was to try to open a dialogue between the races, as well as people of different social and financial backgrounds. The first week there was 14 of us; by the final week there was only 7 remaining. Even in a safe environment, it’s a hard conversation to have.
So, where do we go from here? I’m not really sure. Obviously I have all sorts of friends, and I can say that with my friends I never see race, and hopefully they don’t either. But when friendship is removed, and now we’re looking at the world in general,… well, it’s there, smacking us in the face with each new encounter, whether it’s in person or not. How do we open the dialogue that needs to take place so that, one of these days, we’re all on the same playing field, with the same opportunities, and not looking over our shoulders to protect our safety because of race?
Now, having to deal with these problems without race is another matter, but maybe we can work on that one at the same time.
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May 28th, 2008 at 11:09 pm
I think the reason why African-Americans don’t like their dirty laundry aired is because for the most part we are all lumped into one group. Just go to the blogs on syracuse.com and listen to what people say about us when a crime is committed. It’s not just the one person they lash out at it is all African-Americans. There are people within all races that are thieves, thugs etc…but they are not lumped into one group. When I see a white person doing something wrong I don’t lump them all into one category and say they are all this or that. But unfortunately most white people that I have encountered, when they see one African-American do something wrong we are all thugs, thieves etc… So yes we hate it when someone black does something wrong because it doesn’t matter that we fall into the lower, upper and middle class ranks just like any other group. For us we are all the same big group. For other groups it seems they are looked at as individuals.
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May 28th, 2008 at 11:18 pm
Very good point, Linda, and I feel that myself quite often. I think of talk shows where women say they’re scared of black people because they had a bad experience, but then they’ll admit that they’ve had bad experiences with white people and it doesn’t affect them the same way because it doesn’t make them scared of white people. And it’s something else that makes it hard for us to have a proper conversation.
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May 29th, 2008 at 4:16 am
The trouble with a lot of people is that they are simply bigots and a lot of it stems from the way they were brought up by their parents and they will probably pass it on to their kids. As I am of Italian decent I had to grow up with the derogatory ‘wog’ and other racist words. It wasn’t easy but I thought as an adult things would change. Check out the comments left on this post I did awhile ago, and I thought I had left this sort of stuff behind me.
The thing is that it is quite OK for me to use the wog word amongst fellow Italian/Australians as we do not mean anything by it, but it is not always so when coming from outside. Still I don’t think I ever had to put up with the shit you guys must have had to deal with as you grew up. When will we all learn to live together in harmony?
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May 29th, 2008 at 8:45 am
For me, that perception of thuggishness/fear feeling comes more from presentation. If you’re walking down the street flashing ink in a muscle shirt, snarling, looking straight ahead to avoid eye contact and are clearly tensed up, I don’t care if you’re black, white, brown or pink, I’m avoiding you.
The “racial conversation,” as such, I don’t think gets us where we need to be. Even if you pull together people with varying backgrounds — economic, religious, education, skin color, whatever — everybody still has something important in common: the desire to talk about racial divisiveness, difference, etc.
Essentially, it’s a lot of people preaching to the choir.
I’m lucky in that my “otherness” is generally hidden. I know that for the most part, people in the U.S. don’t look at me and think “Jewish,” they look at me and think “white male.” I have the opportunity to entirely avoid conversations about “the other” and about being part of an “other” group. Sometimes, I actively look to engage in that conversation, but more often or not, it winds up being a small educational discussion with like-minded folks who aren’t 100% like me.
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May 29th, 2008 at 10:33 am
Wow Sire, I went and read your blog post, and I was just stunned by the one commenter who you finally had to block. Indeed, there is racism everywhere, even in Australia, but to have a government official actually approve it in some fashion,… just amazing.
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May 29th, 2008 at 10:35 am
Very good point, Josh, about us preaching to the choir whenever there is a real discussion on race. That’s not always true when one does a diversity presentation, as there’s always someone who kind of stands out as the one who you know is trying to get out of it, but sometimes you’re stunned by a statement that comes out of nowhere because that’s not the person you had identified who might be holding something back.
You’re also correct when indicating that some people, because of how they dress, will make you think twice, no matter the race. Maybe those are the ones we should put in a room together.
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May 29th, 2008 at 12:10 pm
It’s said that when you read, if something pops out at you and makes you feel like you just tripped over a stone (rock or boulder), that particular passage may be in the wrong place. I’m not sure it’s that reason at all. For me, it could feel more like something abrasive in context, something I disagree with, something that needs fine tuning to get over that stone (rock or boulder). There were three times, as I recall, that this happened in the blog. First, your admission that you assumed the writer was white (paragraph 2) and the comment “…by a woman who seemed to think I was cutting Africans a break just because they were black…” Was the woman thinking Africans were black? I think white America tends to think of Africa still as the “Dark Continent” (actual words I learned when we studied about Africa when I was in elementary school) and other terms that reflected the concept of a continent where blacks, rather than whites and Asians and other groups, live. This country is still plagued with these misconceptions perhaps because we’re stuck in something along the lines of the Stone Age in the American school system. Again, my thoughts revert to what I call “the dumbing of American schools…” To make matters worse, it would seem that the American press hasn’t done much to correct many of these misconceptions. In fact, I think of African writers, and immediately the name Mark Methabane (Kaffir Boy, 1986) comes to mind. He’s a wonderful writer. He happens to be black. But I haven’t heard of him again in several years, and the last I knew, he was in North Carolina. I don’t have a clue whether he since returned to Africa or is still here. (There is a point to this.) One may tend to forget perhaps that Egypt is also in Africa, and that great writers like Ahdaf Soueif, an Arab woman, is also African. It’s a vast continent, but our American breeding tends to make us American-centric rather than global-centric–that is, that we think about whatever subject based on our learning through personal experience and the concepts being disseminated in the classroom or personal life lessons. (For what it’s worth, every culture, every race, every group of people tends to do this. It’s not about America from any other sense than this being an “American” forum.) That gets us all into some obvious trouble from time to time.
Obviously, the focus of my reply is not about who is from Africa, great African writers, or even that Africa is more than thatched huts, diamond mines and nations changing their names as rapidly as the rest of us wash our hands. But that stereotype about Africa lingers on–the continent where blacks live just as Asia is the continent where Asians live–and we may all be at fault for such things. People sometimes attack others in an effort to defend themselves, even when the individual being attacked didn’t do a thing to make the attacker feel the need to do so! We could be talking about Africa, race relations, the presidential campaign…I don’t think the subject matters as much as the reader identification does, and that’s across the board true whether we’re reading–or speaking aloud–about these subjects. Reader identification can be the cause of other issues cropping up to create the situation. We tend to put ourselves in the shoes of the writer especially when the writer has made it so easy to do, and the writing becomes analogous to a mirror that reflects these things and forces us to consider that it might be ourselves we are seeing in the descriptions. I’m not so sure that it’s a matter of who is right and who is wrong in these kinds of discussions. I think it depends on which side of the fence you’re sitting because you certainly can’t straddle that fence if you’re one race or another.
It’s a matter of pride. I struggle to find any other logical explanation for this kind of anomaly in our thinking. Tonight, I watched my son explode in a matter of a second after an accidental situation almost had a tragic ending. Certainly, quick reflexes were needed, but the salty language that flowed from his tongue was far from necessary. I waited till after the situation had calmed down and tried to say something to him not to criticize the *actions*, simply to caution him about the language. In fact, I was supportive of the actions he had taken. But he couldn’t hear. He was already on the defensive, and I believe this is the same kind of situation–accusatory tones, guilty responses, “I’m right, you’re wrong–even if you haven’t said the words.”
It’s not just among minorities or majorities speaking together or in segregated groups. I’m not sure the issue is race-related at all, when you cut to the quick. (Not that the thinking or the results don’t need explanation and desensitizing to create an understanding environment, mind you…) I think there is the same old “We have a failure to communicate” going on.
It comes back to the schools and their ability to teach the young how to communicate, an art that may be lost on a *majority* of people these days. I emphasized “majority” for a reason although it’s not just about majorities. (Over the last 25 years, I’ve noticed the communication skills of many teachers dwindling and in dire need of improvement, so please don’t think I’m even singling out educators versus the rest of the population.) The problem with communication plagues each and every one of us. If we want to talk straight, we need to be able to communicate. If the wish to do so is there, but the participants don’t have the tools for communication (interculturally or not), they will not succeed in expressing their thoughts, Look back to the Oakland, California, Board of Education about 10-15 years ago with their idea of teaching the teachers to speak what they thought was Ebonics. They didn’t even have a clue about the Gullah and Geechee cultures, but they were going to teach Ebonics as if black students had a different language than the “rest” of the students. It was a form of segregation again imposed by the system. But this kind of segregation is just as easily self-imposed since the same kind of thinking holds true with any number of cultures, races, ethnic groups. People in a workplace take offense if they hear a small group speaking among themselves in a foreign language. They may even assume that the small group is talking about them when, in reality, that small group may be making plans to go somewhere this coming weekend, discussing the current immigration laws and what it personally means to them or their families, or talking about something that’s usually best not to discuss in the workplace (politics, religion, sex). Want to befriend some East Indian students? Learn Hindi–or Telugu, or Marathi or one of the other vast dialects of India. Otherwise, they may wonder what you want with them if they’re trying to talk. So the wall is up: You’re not one of us and therefore you can’t possibly understand us, and the counterpoint to that idea lies in your (general) thinking “they don’t like me because I’m …” or some other form of what can be called paranoid thinking. I was brought to Howard University as a guest lecturer some years ago, and the moment I walked in the room, I felt the heat of what some could call hatred, but I’ll leave it at potential hostility toward me. It was as if I could read in the students’ eyes, “What’s she doing here? She’s white, probably a WASP, definitely not one of us, and what does she know about multiculturalism and race relations?” It hadn’t yet dawned on the students that I was also a minority–in more ways than one–and that “WASP” was far from an accurate description of me.
What I’m saying here is that the races themselves, even if someone is rejecting this notion, are creating the barriers because of an insistence that they can’t be understood because they are “different.” It doesn’t matter if the difference lies in race or religion or any other irrefutable fact of life. It exists, and therefore “you can’t possibly understand.” Add to it the abusive, accusatory remarks, and the defensive retaliatory accusations in return, and you have the situation you described. Some years ago, a teacher in AZ was discussing something with her class and had singled out a particular student and had mentioned that he was black. The student immediately became defensive and insisted he was not black. Here was a teacher telling a student that he was wrong about the color of his own skin! If you (general) want to call yourself sky-blue pink, nobody has the right to tell you you can’t. It’s not the teacher’s perceptions here. It’s the student’s perceptions. It’s self-perception. Communication can go a long way in creating that genuine effort to understand, but it If the student identifies himself with one group instead of another, that’s fine. So be it. The person making the effort–in this case, a teacher–had no way of knowing, for example, whether that student came from mixed origins and simply preferred to identify himself with one part of his roots and not the other. In this particular example, however, the situation was made worse because it represented an intercultural situation where the person observing was trying to tell the other person that his self-perception was inaccurate. In this case, the self-perceiver raised the barrier in protection against the observer, but it was done as a self-protective thing rather than a self-imposed “I’m different” wall.
Even with the dawn of the Civil Rights movement, the images and the mindsets take more time to adjust. When Martin Luther King was a young man, he visited a Jewish congregation in the South. I’ve forgotten now whether the story was set in Washington or Atlanta, but I think it was Atlanta. Rev. King was just becoming known, and he apparently hadn’t been married long when he accepted the invitation to speak. He and his wife had arrived after dark, and Mrs. King had gone to the door first. MLK later explained that he was concerned about the neighborhood and didn’t want any trouble, so they had come separately to resemble a maid and a butler so there would be less chance of their being accosted by anyone observing from the street. Roughly 30 years passed between MLK’s experience and observations of that particular evening, and Jesse Jackson’s perceptions of walking at night. And just 5 years before MLK’s assassination, he said in that famous “I Have a Dream” speech, “In the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline.” It saddens me to think that Jesse Jackson forgot even more famous words from King’s speech, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
The other stone (rock or boulder) I fell over was toward the end. “…I can say that with my friends I never see race, and hopefully they don’t either…” It reminds me of those old stories we’ve heard, “Some of my best friends are…(black, white, Muslim, Jewish, Catholic, Irish, German, Arab, etc etc etc). If a white says “I never see race,” how many people of color will chuckle? I prefer to see race, Mitch. I see race and am reminded of the beauty of nature in each of us, not unlike the earth itself from white sands to the deepest richest soil to the red clay found in parts of the world. I see race and am reminded of history because we’re all in this together. I see race and am reminded that I am responsible for my behaviors, that I am committed to making this world a better place by working side by side with other people who genuinely care about the world, no matter what “color” those ‘other people’ are. The challenge isn’t to “never see race,” but rather to see the beautiful hues of the family of humanity.
As long as we talk about the differences without acknowledging who we are as individuals of whatever color, religion, gender preferences, and so on, we will continue to have these issues that prevent mutual understanding. Shirley Chisholm made an interesting observation when she was running for office. She said overcoming gender issues and prejudice during her campaign was far more serious and difficult than overcoming racial issues as a black politician campaigning for office. We can make ourselves overly conscious of our hue, theological beliefs and so on and then become obsessed with the idea that we need to be more xenophobic. After all, that’s the bottom line here: Expectations of mutual success with these issues require us to see ourselves for who we are, to accept and value who we are, to recognize that our basic human bonds can create the bridge to other cultures and races because we then grasp the concept of others possessing the same basics as we do. Then and only then can we stop playing games with walls and others not being able to understand because “we are different.” The fact is we are all different. And that, dear friend, is what makes this a beautiful world.
So allow me to see race. It’s beautiful and textured, just as the heavens and the earth, the trees and the grass and all the beasts of nature itself is. For people belonging to one race, one set of ethnic origins, one religion, and so on, perhaps this is more difficult to do. I should think it would be easy to realize that it starts with each individual in self-observation than with each individual looking at everyone else. If you can’t get your own life/house/perceptions in order, how can you possibly get the lives/houses/observations of others in order–and what would give anyone the right to do so if they got that far?
Gee, I’m glad I’m a mix that can’t be defined so simply by race, ethnicity, race…
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May 29th, 2008 at 1:57 pm
Here’s something else timely to add to the discussion, from CNN.
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May 30th, 2008 at 8:46 pm
Thanks for the words, Mich. I actually got through the entire thing, and it’s quite insightful. I actually thought about the “I have best friends who are,…” line when I wrote that one part, but decided to go ahead and put it in. Of course, your statement about communications, and most of us lacking the art of communicating with each other in this day and age, still leaves the question unanswered as to whether or not we can really have a conversation on race; at least a safe one.
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May 31st, 2008 at 12:18 am
Of course we can. When people learn how to communicate, crossing bridges to attain that common ground is easier. Through sound mutual communication, people can come to see that we share common human bonds. People are so busy looking for the differences, which is great, but you still have to find the similarities first. Those similarities offer the means through which the common ground is established. From there, branching out to explore the uniqueness of each person/group becomes much less daunting.
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