Fucking yes, you should assume that. It would be pretty fucked up and immature to do otherwise.
I call out the Mormons or JW’s or anyone else on their bullshit, and mainly when it’s harmful to other people, but that’s not mocking them. Oprah is not my thing, and like most grown-ass adults I can let other people have their thing as they let me have mine. As far as people who pay for bottled water… what is this, the 90s? Are we also mocking people who drink cappuccino or shop at the Gap?
Mocking “magical thinking” because one is supposedly above it is some real neckbeardy mom’s-basement bullshit.
I was trying to wrap my head around why she isn’t trying to get someone, or many someones, fired, and maybe you’re on to something. She’s probably experienced enough to know that trying to find a teachable moment is better than having someone who’s already a jerk just remember “that indian woman that got me fired”.
There was a Samantha Bee political bit where they were talking to people on the street and they spoke to a black woman who was remarkably forgiving about some or other racist thing that happened. And the interviewer said, “Don’t you ever get tired of being the bigger person?” and the woman said, “As a black woman in America you’ve always got to be the bigger person.”
I look for ways in which my unconscious prejudices tell me to expect women and minorities to be the grown ups in the room. Like I might think (and you see it in threads all the time) that you shouldn’t fire someone for an incident because making them unemployed isn’t going to improve the overall situation of society, but I’m cautious about whether that’s a way in which I allow white people to use non-white people’s oppression as “teaching moments”.
So I don’t want to impose being a bigger person on someone who has been the victim of racism. However, when I see Houska say:
It hurt my spirit; and
I don’t want to get them in trouble
I behaviour that I should be trying to model in the way I treat other people without expecting it of others. I think sometimes we see a conflict between being arrogant/aggressive on one end of the spectrum and being a doormat/pushover on the other. Expecting people to understand exactly what they did and how they made you feel without expecting vengeance seems like a synthesis I could learn from.
As for the “I don’t know if this is racist” people. Think about that you aren’t just saying, “I don’t know if this is racist” you are saying, “Not knowing that this is racist is so important that we ought to be having a long conversation about whether we know it’s racist or not.”
Let's look at the evidence
There are five million Native Americans in the united states. Their median income is less than two thirds of the median of all Americans so it’s safe to guess they are under-represented in airport lines. So let’s put a rough estimate at half a percent of fliers are Native American.
In order to assume this wasn’t racially motivated we are assuming this TSA worker:
Doesn’t know that pulling peoples braids and saying “giddyup” (that is, implying they are horse) is unacceptable;
Is equally likely to do this to all people
How many white women do you think would have to have their hair pulled and be told they are a horse before the manager would hear about it? I doubt a sensible person would guess it’s more than one, so we’re probably pretty committed to the idea that this was the first person they did this to.
Of course we’ll also assume they’d only do this to a person with long hair. Maybe Native American women are more likely to have their hair long? Maybe they are more likely to have the kind of hair that the TSA agent wants to pull? But that’s racism. If you are more likely to assault a group of people because of an ethnic or cultural trait that is tied to race, you are racist, so we have to ignore this possibility.
So the null hypothesis is that the person did this at random without regard to race. How likely is it that they would happen to do it to a Native American? That’s some damn easy math: 0.005.
So how about instead of saying it was racist, we all agree to say “It was racist (p < 0.005).” Would that satisfy your complaint?
So now you’ll have to excuse me when I say that the idea that you want more evidence is bullshit. The evidence that this was racially motivated is already past Benjamin Franklin’s “better for one hundred guilty people to go free than one innocent person suffer” threshold and we aren’t even talking about imposing a criminal sentence here. Your perception of what counts as evidence is tainted by racist thought and white supremacist logic.
If you want to argue with the crudity of my analysis, please take it to another thread and I actually will argue with you until the end of time. I don’t think any amount of Bayesian work is going to bring the probability that the TSA agent was acting in a racist manner to anything other than near-certain. And if we were going to go down that road, please be sure to think hard about the threshold probability before you call someone racist. Would you be comfortable guessing a stranger is racist if they have an 80% chance to be? 90%? 95%?
Now imagine you are Native American and detecting racist people is an important skill for keeping physically safe, what would you set the threshold at then? 20%? 10%?
Why is it so hard to see racism when it’s right in front of us?
Because to acknowledge it is to face the fact that unless one is actively consistently fighting against racial injustice, bigotry and fascism, then one is passively complicit… whether they think of it that way, or not.
Such a ‘bitter pill’ really fucks with people’s personal mythology of being “inherently good and decent,” so denial, aversion and/or marginalization become defense mechanisms.
This is the part of the narrative that you’ve fictionalized. This is exactly why I’m not OK with saying, “Yes, the TSA lady is a racist.” If this were a completely isolated incident, it would be very cut and dry. What we’re lacking is that information. You’ve created this storyline where this lady has only acted this way to POC but you don’t have the information to support it.
I’m not trying to say what she did was OK or appropriate however this group has come to a conclusion and is willing to label somebody without all of the facts. This is in no way a dismissal of how Houska felt. I’m glad she spoke out about it and I hope the TSA takes the message to heart and provides better diversity training for their employees.
What part? The part where she acted like a dick, or the part where the person she mocked and humiliated using a distinctive part of her looks was a person of color? Or the part where you’re perfectly aware that if she had done this before to other passengers it would have been reported already because it’s such an immensely dick thing to do?
Also, I kind of find it funny that you bring up fictionalization while at the same time trying to excuse the agent’s behavior with “oh maybe she’s just extroverted” (as if that mattered, also how do you know?) and implying that if she means no harm (how do you know she didn’t?) it’s not racist.
Not this white guy. I keep my long hair tied back and it seems the body scanners aren’t expecting that when they’re set to “male”. My ponytail gets patted down almost every time.
I asked “what if” questions. You’ve stated undoubtedly that she wouldn’t have acted this to a white person. You don’t know that. If it’s truly is the case I have no problem lumping her with all the “Karens” calling the police on POC for merely living, the smug MAGA hat kid (I watched the full video and my mind wasn’t changed whatsoever), and every other bastard that forces their privilege upon marginalized groups. I’m merely seeking clarity on this matter before passing judgment.
Unfortunately in any organization there is a tremendous pressure to conform and very few have the intestinal fortitude to buck that. Most either go along or quit. When your whole schtick is to dehumanize the very folks you are “protecting,” the consequences are fairly predictable.
“Hey, I don’t agree with you so can you stop talking?”
That’s fine. I really have only repeated myself over and over anyway. I find no fault in understanding both sides of a situation before making a judgment call. As I’ve stated the TSA agent was inappropriate in her role but I would like more information before I slap the label “racist” on her. Some people are just…assholes.
I used a very crude analysis in the details of my post above to estimate the odds the TSA agent was behaving in a racist manner based on the evidence we have. To believe more evidence is necessary is to believe we don’t have enough evidence to rule out that this was a mere coincidence. But I don’t think you are actually thinking about what the odds of that are or what the threshold would be that would be sufficient evidence. I think if your own personal safety depended on your ability to determine who was an was not likely racist then you’d have a different calibration.
Overestimating the odds that something was not racist is a way to prop up racism.
