racism: not my problem

[tielan]

I get the feeling that some folks don't think racism is their problem.

On one hand, I feel the agreement bubbling up within me. I'm not overtly or intentionally racist. I try to judge people by who they are not what their background is. I don't have problems with people as racial types, I have problems with people as individuals.

On the other hand, the questioner within me demands to know: "If racism isn't my problem...whose problem is it?"

I considered that this morning and here's how I laid it out.

I guess I have a 'get-out-of-racism-free' card, in a way. I'm a Person-of-Colour but I tend to think of myself as being brought up white - the old banana joke. It would be nice to see more Asian heroes and heroines in mainstream TV but I take what I can where I find it - and sometimes my connection isn't with 'the Asian' character at all. My racial type has a different history of oppression, one that involved being looked down upon but doesn't involve slavery and the denigration of humanity. (And these days, all your university place belong to us. Muahahahaha! *cough*)

Still, just because I can use the 'get-out-of-racism-free' card doesn't mean I should.

If racism isn't the problem of the people who aren't racist - if it's the province of the people who are racist, then we're putting a lot of faith in humanity's ability to self-criticise. Abusers are not generally inclined to admit to being wrong, let alone likely to change their behaviour to accomodate the victim.

So, if racism isn't the problem of the people who aren't racist, and it's ignored by the people who are racist...that leaves racism as the victims' problem.

And I disagree that abuse is the problem of the victims; that bystanders have nothing to answer for.

So...racism is my problem, too.

Comments

[thelana.livejournal.com]

I don't think anybody doubts that. But just because white people can oppress even better doesn't mean that others can't and don't. As in "non-white people can't be racist" and implying that non-white people can never have power of any sort. Maybe not the same amount of power that a white person can achieve (at least not now, maybe not ever). But if you are for example in charge of a country of over a billion people or in charge of an arenal of nuclear weapons, that's already a pretty powerful bubble to live in, even if it isn't as all pemeating as the white bubble.

I think that saying that there is a world encompassing situation out there doesn't really excuse us from the reality of having to deal with each other on a personal level, in our own back yards, where race is again mixed up with a million of things, like sex, class, economic needs etc...

I tend to think of it as two Bell curves showing the amount of success you can get in your life and how likely you are to get it. The two curves are displaced from each other. With the non-white peak/median being much more to the right (meaning that amount of power/success the average non-white person can achieve is further down than what the average white person can/will achieve). It is possible for some non-white people to have more power than some white people. It is possible for some non-white people to be born into more personal privilege as some (few) white people.

If you asked some Ukranian sex worker she might agree that if she had the choice she would prefer to have been born as the daughter of some educated black intellectual in the land of the free, USA or as the daughter of some Chinese bureacrat even if it meant having to deal with race. However if you asked her whether she would prefer being born black in the same situation she is in (meaning the all things staying the same and only race changing), she might think she was still better off being white.

And yes, I think we completely have the obligation to try to get the medians of the two Bell curves closer together and to even the odds with whatever tools we have (whether it is affirmative actions, or a clean social system or development aid to third world countries).

The lighter the skin, the better the treatment.

I have always been really weirded out by that. Supposedly there are some poems etc that indicate that lighter skin was considered an advantage in India even before the British officially need one. Makes one wonder exactly what creepy glitch inside us makes us think that way (because usually those kind of distinctions can be traced back to Europeans, like in colonial Africa where tribes who looked less black often got the less bad jobs in the white administration and therefore created an economic divide which of course sometimes lead to antagonism between the tribes [which I understand was the reason for the genocide in Rwanda]).

It's also interesting to see the few cases when that doesn't apply, which usually seems to be related to issues of economic statue. Like I get the impression that in the UK black has a better reputation in white people's eyes than being Indian/Pakistani, but only in this area and because of the specific history of that place (the UK).

Or situations where white people insisted that people who by current ideas would be considered white two were some inferior race just because they insisted they were when no outsider would consider them non-white/different.