Belated IBARW-07: Right Action, Right Thought
Tuesday, August 14th, 2007
In the movie theater that night as the credits from Hairspray were rolling, my friend and I exchanged stories of modern day racism. His stories and mine were fairly similar. They tended to center around the shock each of us felt to discover that, in this day and age, racism was still alive and kicking and being perpetrated by people who were close to us. Family members, friends we thought we knew, giving unashamed voice to racist thoughts.
The logic goes something like this: Some moral issues are very important to you, so you choose your friends partially based on whether they agree with you on these issues. And for the most part you assume your family shares your views on those issues, because otherwise where did you get those views from? And then your cousin or your uncle or your best friend’s boyfriend starts in with n-word this and n-word that, and it’s like once more being an infant who’s just learning the difference between “me” and “not-me.” Someone who you instinctively regarded as one of your tribe has explosively proven themself a stranger.
At this point, some of you reading this may be wondering how I can be so shallow as to define “my tribe” based on attitudes towards race. “Love me, love my issues” is a phrase commonly voiced with derision. The expectation that blood is thicker than water, and certainly than speech, goes almost without saying: no matter how virulently racist a family member is, he’s family first and you will respect that, dammit!
But here’s the thing: why are aspects we don’t choose supposed to be so much more important than aspects we do? What says more about a person’s character–the accident of their being born into my family, or the way they choose to relate to other human beings? No, I don’t cut someone out of my life the first time they start using racial epithets. But it’s certainly a factor in how much, or how little, I choose to respect them.
So my friend tells me that the last time he really lost his temper was when someone he knew shocked him that way. A cousin, I think. We’ll say it was his cousin. His cousin started in with the n-word crap, and my friend pretty much “let him have it.” And when the yelling was over, they were no longer on speaking terms.
And I told him how a guest at our wedding rehearsal dinner was gleefully engaging in racist speech right in front of the caterers. Absolutely unashamed at being overheard by the very people he was denigrating. I have to assume that, being both black and “hired help,” they were virtually invisible to him. Were I to assume he was intending them to hear him, I’d have to think even worse of him than I do now. In any case, my soon-to-be mother-in-law laid into him: “It’s bad enough you talk like that here, but if you go out on the streets talking like that later on tonight” (we were in New Orleans, and the plan was to finish up the evening in the French Quarter), “I wouldn’t be surprised if you wound up dead.”
Neither my friend nor I are under any illusions that getting yelled at makes a racist less racist. Not even when the person doing the yelling is family. “Love me, love my issues” cuts both ways–as quickly as I might lose respect for someone who proves himself a bigot, that same person may easily lose respect for me for not sharing his idea of racial superiority. I fell a notch in one family member’s regard when she discovered that an ex-boyfriend of mine from my high-school days was black. She told me that I obviously had no “racial pride.” And she fell a notch in my regard when she revealed that she expected me to have “racial pride.” (What’s “racial pride”? She wouldn’t say. “It’s pointless to explain it to one who hasn’t got it,” she said. I think the Corny Collins show spelled it out nicely, though. “Nice white kids who like to lead the way…”)
No. Making it clear that you don’t approve of racism doesn’t change a friend or family member’s mind. It might, however, change their actions. They might at the very least stop acting that way around you. Maybe they’ll be more careful about where they do act that way–they’ll stop just assuming that a white audience gives them carte blanche (sorry) to get all n-word happy. They may define “their tribe” as comprising fellow white-superiority pushers, but they’ll have to stop assuming that all white people are members of that tribe. If nothing else, a white person voicing disapproval of their racism will make them think twice before assuming that Any Random White Guy is an automatic ally in their bigotry.
It’s circular. The less they feel it’s socially acceptable to act like bigots, the less they’ll act like bigots. And the less they act like bigots, the less they give others the impression that it’s socially acceptable to act like bigots.
For a generation or so, people who are still racist inside have pretended they weren’t (I’m talking about a subset). Their children have had this example, and are less racist than their parents…. There are still a lot of forms of racism that do their own harm, but progress is still progress.
—Kip_W, commenting on one of elisem’s wonderful IBARW posts
I feel like a right self-righteous git blogging on about this. But I think it’s needful to do so. Just as it’s needful that we draw the line and say, “This is not OK,” it’s needful to reassure each other that saying “This is not OK” is, by and large, good work. Sometimes it’s easy work. Sometimes it’s the hardest thing in the world. But it’s work that needs doing if we want to see change for the better.