I feel like we are completely talking past each other. If anyone in this thread said that racism was entirely about personal attitudes and not about systems then I certainly didn’t mean to agree with them, I certainly never meant to say that myself.
But when you say that biases are primordial but racism is not, it’s just another way of saying that same thing: that we are using the word ‘racism’ wrong.
DA’s know that people are more likely to identify with a white cop than with a black defendant so they don’t even attempt a trial - that’s racism. Someone descending a staircase behind an indian parent with a small child mutters something about inconsiderate foreigners when if it had been a white parent they are understanding - that’s racism. A school in an aboriginal community burns down and it take 9 years of bureaucracy to approve a replacement - that’s racism. White parents decide to send their kids to the “good” school with all the other white kids instead of the "bad’ school with lots of middle-eastern and black kids - that’s racism (even though the good school really does have better academic results). White people get to decide who is white and who is not when they need more allies and differentiate themselves from those people when they don’t - that’s racism.
I certainly didn’t come here to argue that racism is not about systems. I just find it bizarre that people are trying to say that the most virulent, active racism - racism that is part of the life experience of so many people - isn’t racism at all.
I just can’t get my head around this. Not wanting to move into a neighborhood because of the property values is the kind of things that perpetuates racial inequality from generation to generation and supports systemic racism. But actively not wanting to live next to people because they have different coloured skin a different number of sides from you? That’s racist.
Since so far I’ve only been here to protest the language pigs, I thought I’d add something on-topic, that I got to at the end of my last post:
If I have one criticism of this blog post it’s that if you actually wanted to live in a place where 6 of your 8 closest neighbors looked like you - if that was an important criterion for you - that would not be a “small personal preference” that would be foaming at the mouth, crazy racism. Honestly, if one of my friends expressed to me in confidence that they didn’t like where they lived because none of their eight closest neighbors looked like them - that they would feel better if even one had the same color skin as they did - I’d have to bite my tongue for a minute while I found a non-hostile, relationship-building was of saying, “Oh, I didn’t know you were an evil bastard.” (And no one better give me any crap counterexamples where a black person doesn’t feel comfortable being surrounded by white people because that’s about how black people are treated by white people and the fact that black people have to live with racism, not about the fact that they have some problem with the color of the white people’s skin)
The thing is, I get that the post isn’t about where people live, and it’s probably a much better simulation of how kids sit in a cafeteria than it is of housing, since moving your house is a real pain in the ass. Also, the preference for people who are “like you” can be much more insidious - maybe you sit with the people you sit with because they like the same TV shows as you but that’s still keeping the white kids and the black kids apart. I also appreciate the point of the post that if we want to stop segregating ourselves it isn’t enough to be neutral, we have to actively seek diversity.
But yeah I definitely appreciated the scare quotes around the word “slight” in the title of this post. Nothing slight about it.
I think you switched the numbers around.
Is wanting to have 3 out of 8 neighbors be your own shape still shapist? 3 out of 80? Or is wanting that as valid as minorities wanting to be represented in media? After all, I think we have established that a black woman who wants to occasionally play a videogame/read a book/watch a movie with a female black protagonist is not automatically guilty of racism/sexism.
I spent a couple of years living in Canada; I felt very welcome, but it still felt great to meet other European expats (“people like me”) there. None of my closest friends there were European, however.
Exactly. Those black people you’re talking about are definitely not evil racist bastards, and still their (perfectly justified) behavior contributes to segregation.
And then there is the case where people hold the prejudice that they will be discriminated against, when in fact the “local majority” would be perfectly nice. This could make white people afraid of moving to a predominantly black area because they expect “retaliatory racism”. As a European left-of-center atheist, I’d be afraid to move to the American Bible Belt. And as a non-Jewish Austrian, I’d expect to be met with some historically-justified resentment against my country if I took a job in Israel. All those expectations might be unjustified and unfair prejudices in themselves.
So is moving away when 6 out of 8 neighbors are of a different race racist? I think it really depends on why you do it.
Things like that could be a real problem.
But… I reserve the right to “discriminate” according to interests. It wouldn’t be right to say to someone: “We’ve got no interests in common, but you have such an exotic skin color, so I’ll hang with you just for diversity’s sake.”
Can you point me to some US TV shows with a predominantly black audience? I fear the selection of shows that get shipped across the Atlantic is not entirely unbiased. How big is the disparity in TV viewing habits?
I honestly wouldn’t know, that was a complete hypothetical.
Of course you do and we all do. We aren’t going to be friends with people if we have nothing in common with them just for the sake of being friends. But it’s easy to see how that’s part of the problem.
Like I said, the reality is insidious. Of course a european ex-pat wants to know other europeans to talk to them about europe. We spend time with people we enjoy the company then because we have a racist history and a history of segregation that means we spend time with people who look like us. But if we actually don’t want to live somewhere because are neighbors are black, then we don’t need to go to the simulation at all - that’s just plain racist.
I see what you’re saying. Yes, that’s true. More interesting would be which shows have a greater percentage of black-vs-white viewership. I know I saw a list like that many years ago, when the offerings were things like “Bernie Mac”, which is a while ago now.
The photo at the top is of “The Cosby Show”, which is listed at #2, so apparently the page hasn’t been visited in a while. But the top shows look right, at least in general: I remember “A Different World”, for example, had only a tiny following among whites.
Hahaha, no need for all that, just go have an uncomfortable conversation about racism with someone who doesn’t share your politics and we’ll call it even! Well, jumping into traffic might be less painful, come to think…
Actually I was trying to mock the label put on me…my sarcastic attempt at owning what I considered a trite and inacurate insult…seriously, wtf is a “language police”?
I feel the need to defend myself position in regards to this.
Hate is hate. It exist regardless of the reasoning/logic/emotion/etc. that fed into it or was used to justify it. Hate is. Racism is. Hate is not equal to racism. Racism is not equal to hate. One is a system, one is an emotion. This is not the same as me saying that one doesn’t inform the other or that they are not interdependent. They are linked, but linked does not mean A = B.
I feel that you are oversimplifying what I am trying to discuss. Racism is a much greater, more insidious, and evil thing than skin color discrimination. It is much, much worse! It is a bigger, more invisible, and more pervasive system than you are describing. Skin color bias is the easiest part to identify and address, hence why it is so easy to label people racists when they use the most blatant forms of descrimination (like affluent euro-american police murdering multigenerational americans of african descent). But the truth is anyone born into the comfort of modern western society is racist. Anyone existing while another suffers is benefitting from racism in some form. Anyone with power is racist because that is how power is created. So it is our obligation to confront that very uncomfortable truth head-on instead of the privelaged “white” * view that racism a solvable problem of stopping discriminatory violence, or other expressions of bias/hate. Of course those are issues that need addressing but they will never stop unless we admit that The entire system is built around racist ideology. Our entire structure of modern life is built to accomodate and reinforce a racist program of control.
Like the idea of ‘owning’ land. We assume things because someone else assumed it. We have to think beyond the racist, to how and who created the abilty for the racist to exist. To eliminate racism we have to rebuild modern human society completely and that is no easy task. If we view it as anything less immense we are lying to ourselves and perpetuating the harm.
[White is a socioeconomic AND skin tone based classification. Italians and irish immigrants were not considered ‘white’ until it was socially necessary to reclassify them as such in order to quell the uprising of the enslaved].
Skin Tone is a simple & convenient opportunistic manifestation of codifying master/slave domination, with that added terror of horrible ramifications for dark skinned people. It is a terrible by-product of the evil of enslavement. But more fundamentally it is used as a screen to hide the deeper gravitational level of basic life assumptions that has been perverted by the powerful over all of us. It is this version of racism that harms us all. When the majority is scapegoating only those who cross that invisible line of “ill-mannered” racism, they are only stopping a sliver of what is truly going on, and now even that pretense has Disappeared.
Manifestations of racist behavior and the concepts brought to life by the invention of Racism are overlapped. They exist concurrently, but there is a nuanced difference; like the strong and weak nuclear forces. I just want you to see the bigger picture. It is scarier and more distressing and makes me cry because Racism is a true manifestation of Evil. Racism is a pervasive dimension of thought that cannot be un-existed. It is a system of rationalized presuppositions that are now loose in the human universe of terrible ideas that exist in spite of us. But we can decide to not give power to this evil dimension and that takes continious willful mindful daily effort at a level of dedication beyond measure. But we can try, but we have to admit our culpability to this larger thing of racism that is bigger than any of us individually, otherwise nothing is going to change.
Please read:
Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? By MLK Jr.
Angela Y. Davis
Assata Shakur
George Jackson
Selected Speeches of Malcolm X
Cornel West
The Condemnation of Blackness
The New Jim Crow
On the Run
W.E.B. Du Bois
Tim Wise
I feel like our entire discussion, from your point of view, is premised on the idea that you know more about this than I do, that if I only understood how deep racism goes then I’d start using the word right.
My complaint is that you came in here to basically say that actual people who are subject to manifestations of racism in their day-to-day lives are wrong if they say it is racism. When I brought up the idea of a homeless man yelling a racial slur at a black man in a suit you called that ‘my hypothetical’ as if that wouldn’t actually happen in the real world. You apparently didn’t take offense at my suggestion that you don’t think beating up a person for their skin color is racist.
Theory might be important to understanding things (these days I’m not really sure), but the jargon used in theory discussions absolutely does not override the common language that people use to talk about their life experiences.
And how do we do that? Do you have a mind control ray? Or are we doing this by voting, writing letters to politicians, organizing protests, volunteering with organizations, talking to our families, calling our friends out when they say or do things, etc.? Are we doing it by listening to people who are most affected by racism and asking them how it affects them and what they would like to change?
I’m sure if you asked a lot wide group of people what they would most like to change to ameliorate the situation with racism, they would not put having academics tells them they are using the word ‘racism’ wrong on the list. People are much more concerned with real issues that affect their real lives.
When MLK said:
I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists
Would you have interrupted him to correct him that those being vicious were merely bigots, not racists, and that racism was a complicated underlying structure?
