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Let’s Blog Against Racism
By Dave Klecha | August 8, 2007
I’m racist.
And yeah, it’s kind of that simple. Every day, you and I and everyone else makes snap judgments regarding things like fitness, potential behavior, and so forth, based on someone’s appearance. At the most simple level, it means things like, if I see a person in a police uniform, chances are I can go to that person for help in a crisis. Someone dressed in baggy clothes, with a wallet on a chain, wearing a t-shirt that says “Skate Free or Die” probably knows where to get a good skateboard. At its most pernicious, this kind of snap judgment makes us think we know a great deal about that person based on very basic visual cues, such as skin color.
Although I don’t know, I’m going to jump out there and guess that this is based on an evolutionary survival mechanism because, really, what isn’t? Okay, that’s too flip. But there does seem to be a hard-wired fear of Other in humans that, when it goes unchecked, turns really nasty. Lynching and Jim Crow nasty. At one point, that was probably pretty healthy when humanity was as red in tooth and claw as the rest of the world. But we’ve achieved this marvelous state, now, where the option actually exists for everybody to just get along, to reuse a well-meaning, but much-mocked phrase.
Uniformly critical to this process, of course, is facing up to it. In the course of this blog against racism week, I ran across one discussion which posited that people of privilege (such as my white male self) shouldn’t try to offer their own stories of oppression as it is an attempt to bring the focus of the conversation back to themselves. I took some issue with this, as I think more often it’s just an attempt at empathy. Elizabeth Bear, in an excellent post on the subject, suggests that part of the problem is that many people who enjoy the privilege cannot fathom what life is like without it.
I say, then, embrace these attempts at empathy, however feeble and ill-informed they may be. They’re the moral opposite of relating one’s own stories of oppression as a means of dismissing those who do deal with being Other on a daily basis. They’re valuable, because they’re an entry into a dialogue about racism, how to confront it, how to deal with it, especially within oneself.
I am racist.
But that does not mean I cannot overcome it, and work toward eliminating its effect on society.
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