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]

Under this definition, people of colour cannot be racist. Racism requires power and privilege. People of colour do not, in general, have racial power or privilege.

Don't systems of power exist on every level and in every size though? If we are dealing with a country where non-white is the norm and the majority (Asian countries like Japan and China and India, South American countries like Brazil or Peru, African countries from Liberia to South Africa) then non-whites are the ones in government level power of their own domain. And they are capable in theory of strategically oppressing people of other shades within their domain (I'd like to think most of them don't because they know what it feels like or maybe they are just smarter/better).

It might never be as large scale because at the moment Western society/culture/milatary power still dominates the rest of the world (though I would argue that there are some "up and coming"s) but but it might be capable of feeling plenty of systematic to the people trapped within that system.

[tenninch.livejournal.com]

You know, I think you unintentionally made me think about something that I'm horrified I didn't realize. I was not even thinking on a global scale, which is stupid since the Internet is rather global. I made an assumption there that I should not have made.

And they are capable in theory of strategically oppressing people of other shades within their domain (I'd like to think most of them don't because they know what it feels like or maybe they are just smarter/better).

Yes, they are, in addition to classism, sexism, homophobia, ableism, and a whole other slew of oppressive crap.

Still, on a global scale, there is still a hierarchy of race (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/sep/20/race.uk). The lighter the skin, the better the treatment. When I think about global racism, I think about the marketing of skin bleaching products, representation of light skin in media, freedom of mobility (travel & tourism), validity of academic credentials, transnational corporations, and other things that I think are tied up with various systems of oppression.

[tielan]

Still, on a global scale, there is still a hierarchy of race. The lighter the skin, the better the treatment.

I was going to mention this in one of my responses but discovered i have a deadline so this will be short.

When I was a child, I didn't think much about 'colour'. I was Chinese Australian - both Chinese and Australian. I was teased at school because of my race, yes, but my father taught me to tease the other kids back because of their appearance, not because of their race.

eg. a tall, skinny boy with a shock of short hair called me "ching-chong". I called him "toilet brush" because he was skinny with short bushy hair. It wasn't about "race" per se it was about appearance. I looked different in one way, I got teased; he looked different in another way, he got teased.

I never had any major experience with discrimination - that I noticed. A few sneering comments when my friends and I caught the train home in high school: "Spot the Aussie!" To which my friends and I respond (in perfect Australian English), "Yeah, that would be us. Idiot."

But, yes, I remember learning about the 'hierarchy of race' via news about South Africa, and the whites being superior to the "coloureds" (people who weren't white but who weren't black either) and the "coloureds" being superior to the "blacks".

In Australia, there was once an outcry about the Greeks and Italians coming into the country - in the fifties and sixties. I don't think it really extended as far as legislation and organisation against them (other than the White Australia policy). In the seventies and eighties, that translated to "the Asian Invasion" - (although there've been Chinese Australians here since the days of the 1820s gold rush). In the nineties and noughties, it's been more about the middle eastern cultures - Lebanese, Arabs, and also the Western asian countries - India and Pakistan.

That's only fifty years, so Australian attitudes are changeable over that time.

More difficult to adjust - and probably consonant with the treatment of persons of African descent in the US - is the white settlers' treatment of the Australian Aborigines for the last two hundred years. While in land terms the Aborigines were treated by the white settlers as the Native Americans were treated by the US settlers, in legal terms their situation is more like the African Americans. They were once seen as "sub-human" and "unworthy to carry on their culture and lineage" - to the point where Aboriginal children were taken from their parents to be "brought up 'white'".

This is what I meant by a "get out of racism free" card. In Australian terms, the oppression that ensues from the system to a person of Chinese descent is fairly minimal - the worst outright oppression I'm going to find is some dumbfuck yobbo telling me to "go back home!"

For someone of Aboriginal descent, however, that card isn't an option. There's not just the history of oppression of their peopel by the Australian government, there's the perceptions of their culture, traditional stereotypes of "blacks" (Aborigines) being drunkards and wastrels, and the general inability to "whiten" themselves socially (ie. to successfully enter into "white culture" - academics, business, lifestyle).

This is just my (Australian) perspective on race relations - which, as thelana noted, is probably a very different teaching to the US perspective on race relations, or the UK/European perspective. Partly because of history, partly because of geography, partly because of culture.

Did I say this was going to be short? Bugger.

[tenninch.livejournal.com]

I don't know ANYTHING about race and racism in Australia, so I'm learning a lot from your comments. I really should read more about Australian racial politics because, from what I understand, the Aboriginals in Australia face a similar, though not equal, situation to Natives/Aboriginals in Canada.

I'm South Asian, and even though I live in Toronto (we love to talk about our multiculturalism like its always a good thing), I get those overt one-off "go back where you came from" comments too. I think a lot of my misunderstanding came from the fact that I don't understand the way race operates in Australia on the same level of understanding how it works in Canada. For instance, the Aboriginals in Canada face racism

Even though Toronto is this immigrant hub, there is a heightening anti-immigration sentiment that's uh, really disturbing. If you're white, then you were always here, and if you aren't, then you came from somewhere else. That's why I was totally missing your understanding of the 'get out of racism free' card. No one in the city gets a pass like that unless their skin is white and their accent is Canadian. There's a hierarchy of race, but a hiearchy of racism doesn't fit what I've learned about Canada. In my understanding, racism manifests itself differently in different contexts for different people. For myself, I will be affected by aspects of institutional racism that another person of colour from another race will not be affected by, and vice versa.

For instance, after 9/11, I am read as Muslim even though I'm not, especially because of my last name (until I changed it legally), and somehow Muslim is becoming equated with terrorist. There's this notion that Canada is harboring terrorists, so when traveling abroad, I'd be stopped at airports, my luggage slashed, and so on. For a time after, I didn't feel safe enough to google anything about Al-Qaeda because I thought no one would believe I'm not a terrorist.

But an Aboriginal, or Chinese, or black or whoever else might not get this type of treatment - at least not for the same reasons - the racism won't manifest in the same way. Even so, I don't have to face the same kind of racism that Aboriginals face that is embedded into our colonial laws (The Indian Act is one hell of a piece of legislation). The "Asian Invasion" is still mentioned here at times. Some of my friends get stopped on the street with random comments like "there are too many Chinese people in this city" even if they're not Chinese at all.

So, I keep getting long winded in why I completely misunderstood where you're coming from. (By the way, I'm not countering you - I'm just exchanging words.)

[thelana.livejournal.com]

I think in a lot of non-US countries in particular there might be additional confusion (or just a difference in how people define it) because there the issue of ethnicities is heavily related to issues of immigration and other economic issues.

(where every new wave of immigration is hated until the next wave when people are busy hating the new wave)

I think racism still exists (as in the darker your skin is, the less likely that the penalties are going to go away even though you have been replaced by a new wave of immigration) in addition to it but anti-immigrantism manifests itself in many similar ways (less education, poorer, discrimination on the job market, offensive jokes, ranted against by politicians, being physically attacked by hostile locals, not being let into certain places).

The US has a different perspective because they have two groups (former slaves and Native Americans) who have been around in their country for centuries and they still haven't been properly assimilated (as in have grown into being accepted as a full part of the country/population). Meanwhile a lot of non-American countries they have always been white for most of their history and the concept of non-white immigration is fairly new (like 50 or 100 years only). So they aren't really used to the idea of a community within a community and are more likely to see it in the context of assimilation of immigrants.

(btw, I still think that economics or rather exconomic expectations play a lot into racism. For example, in Austria, if you are (Chinese/Japanese type) of Asian, people are going to have the blind expectation that you are either 1) a tourist 2) a musician 3) a restaurant owner. They might still treat you in a creepy manner, but tendencially people are going to be more likely to see you as somebody who has to be served (like a tourist) rather than as somebody they have to threaten. Meanwhile, if you are black the default position is going to be that you are a drug dealer and that they are going to be suspicious/hostile.

Meanwhile, Germany supposedly has a higher percentage of not as rich Asians and as a result Germany is supposedly slightly more default hostile to that group.

Similar with Arabs. Do they default to "You are probably a sheik or carpet salesman"? Or to "You are probably a terrorist" or to "You are probably a poor fucker who is coming to steal our jobs and talk in a heavy accent"?)

[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.

[thelana.livejournal.com]

As in "non-white people can't be racist" and implying that non-white people can never have power of any sort.

BTW, that wasn't meant as an attack on your statement in particular. I'm not bothered by your statement or that it is wrong to make it. It just feel that it is factually wrong, that it's more a questinon of degree than of "is impossible".

Besides, if the system gives advantages to lighter skinned non-whites (like Arabs or Chinese/Japanese) don't they profit from the system just as they suffer from it, too? Making them part of the system just as they know its downsides?