----------------
PART ONE
----------------
I'm black. And I'm loving it! It's great! You should try it. Actually, maybe now isn't the best time!
But I'm also fortunate to be big enough for racists to reconsider being nasty to me to my face because of my colour. I've also been blessed with a scowl which turns me into a big angry baby that helps scare the racists away. The last person who was openly racist to my face got kicked up their arse and landed several metres away, back in school!
Actually, that's not strictly true. Children who know I cannot and will not hurt them are the only people these days bold enough to launch an 'N' bomb at me, but again, fortunately even this is an extremely rare occurrence.
Anyone can be a racist. It depends upon the environment the individual is in at the time. If I was white, and living in an all black neighbourhood, and was greeted every day with constant and unrelenting levels of privileged ignorance that attempted to render me an exotic curiosity that could be quizzed and questioned about their providence at will, ridiculed with impunity and poked and prodded just for fun - then I'm pretty sure I would be able to relate to the prejudice and racial discrimination a lone black person might endure at the hands of their ignorant all white neighbours.
The interesting thing for me is that there is a clear structural element at play in the racism we, here in the 'developed' nations rarely devote any thinking time too, because we simply don't need to. A deep structural configuration which has been maintained over eons by white people, either intentionally or inadvertently because it is a habit which affords great social advantages.
I tried being racist once. Maybe twice. To my white friends. As a fun experiment. I have very accommodating friends! I found that it was very hard to hurt them with words about their lack of colour. It was almost as if there were no words in existence I could brandish that could convey the same immediate derogatory impact as say words like nigger, coon, sambo, monkey, ape, golliwog, piccaninny, jigaboo, jungle bunny, nig-nog, spade, tar baby, rubber lips... I could go on here to labour the point, but do you even see my point?
It's like that scene from The Matrix where Neo is being interrogated by Agent Smith in the interview room. Agent Smith wishes Neo to spill the beans on Morpheus' whereabouts, but Neo instead opts to flip Agent Smith the middle finger before demanding his mandatory prison phone call. Agent Smith, with a wry smile calmly replies "What good is a phone call, if you're unable to speak?". Black people and ethnic minorites simply don't have words of equivalent force at their disposal to fight fire with fire, because they don't exist.
And I wonder why that is? How could this be? Who governs the language with which we all communicate? Mixed race disabled transsexuals? I'm not certain, but I don't think so. Orwell's 1984 just sprang to mind all of a sudden.
So can only white people be racist? No. But only white people possess the tools to be excellent at being racist.
----------------------
INTERJECTION
----------------------
A long time ago I went to a school where I was one of only three white children - and was beaten up by the other kids on a regular basis for it. But even at the age of 10 it was apparent to me that I was not directly experiencing racism.
Being new to the school, I was a convenient target for the other kids anger and resentment. They were reacting to the constant messages being relayed to them by the rest their world - TV shows, advertising, probably the curriculum itself, and the rest of the city in which they were not considered or felt like equals because they weren’t white, or white enough.
Were those kids jerks? Sure! Were they racist for yelling “Kill the white bitch!”, as they ran at me with kicks and punches? No. Having to move schools a lot helped me to see that most other public spaces and ways of living my life were accessible to me, but not for them.
When white people (intentionally or unintentionally) discriminate against others, it cannot be considered a defensive response to wider social forces on the basis of race. That’s one of the things which makes white people the real racists.
----------------
PART TWO
----------------
I agree with you to a certain extent, but I think the issue of an individual's personal agency needs to be factored in here, or at least, its role clarified somewhat. As Tina Turner once sang, what's personal autonomy got to do, got to do with it? Is it indeed present at all in the examples of racism we choose to examine more closely or is it wholly absent or perhaps somewhere in between?
To what degree should the onus be on us as conscious choice making entities to rewrite the narrative we each inherit? Should the issue of the capability to be racist be ignored until we reach a certain age? Also, what is the extent of the impact of one's surroundings in shaping our prejudices? Should we automatically accept that a person who has lived their entire lives in a closed room, detached from all the persuasions, biases and influences of the press, media and social life, be considered completely incapable of being racist?
For me, colour is completely arbitrary with regards to the question of who can be racist. What matters is which race has all the power at a particular moment in time. I wonder if it had been black people that had enslaved whites for 400 years instead, would you feel just as comfortable making the exact same claim you are making here now? I also wonder whether the music created by white people under the yoke of slavery would sound anything like the blues and negro spirituals we have today? I would so love to hear it!
So to sum up my roughly thought out position - having nearly all of the power, white people have the greatest levels of responsibility to exercising it fairly and therefore are at most risk of proliferating racist practices as a result of this de facto privilege. But is racism solely the domain of the white person? No. Anyone can be racist. It depends on whether or not you are a member of the race which holds all the power.
I'll try to find a piece I began writing a while back in which made the rather audacious claim (perhaps foolishly) that there was no such thing as racism, using as an example the final scene from the original 'This is England' film where the white right-wing yob 'Combo' batters his black English friend 'Milky', who has a Jamaican heritage, to death, while repeatedly shouting racial epithets at him whilst doing it. How can such an act NOT be considered as being racist I thought at the time? But then a friend who I was watching it with made a really interesting observation which I ran with for a while...
No comments:
Post a Comment