[tell me... again.. of this "post-racial" era in which we live...?]
Sharing some more links today. File under “why do white people speak of racism in the past tense?”:
- First, at Womanist Musings: Classified Ad Calls for the Assassination of Obama
- Chauncey DeVega at We Are Respectable Negroes posts satirically about black privilege in the age of Obama
- Macon D posts another thing that white people do: perpetually think of Asian Americans as foreigners
- An off-duty black police officer, pursuing a suspected car thief, was shot and killed in Harlem by a white officer who mistook him for an armed criminal.
- More on this in a post at the RaceWire blog: Mistaken Identity
- And at Racialicious: Of Thin Blue Lines, Race, and Stereotypes
Seriously, my fellow white people, can we stop thinking of black and Latino men as dangerous criminals before we even see anything that hints at that?
I remember something that happened maybe ten to twelve years ago. I was a young teen with my parents, visiting my older brother, who had moved to a big city a few hours away. We were in the car and had just parked on the side of the street outside my brother’s apartment. It was dark out. A small group of young black men, maybe in their 20’s or 30’s, were walking by on the sidewalk, just kind of talking among themselves, whatever, not acting menacing or scary at all, not even really looking at or otherwise giving more attention to us than you would anyone else you see on the street. I started to open the car door to get out, but my mom quickly and somewhat harshly snapped at me to close the door and wait until the men had passed by. I was puzzled, surprised, and rather offended by this — after all, my parents claimed to be non-racist and had criticized overt racism in their peers and family members before. This was such a blatantly reactionary, racist thing my mother had done. I was shocked. [Edited to add: Part of the reason I was shocked was that she didn't realize she had acted in a racist way; it just seemed all too natural for her to assume that urban setting + night time + small group of black men = DANGER! DANGER WILL ROBINSON!, and she didn't understand how that was a racist assumption.]
Which is not to say that I haven’t had my own busted moments of racism. Every white citizen of the U.S. is racist, to varying degrees. No one gets a “get out of jail free” card on this.
It’s funny, how many white people view racism only as a thing you’re conscious of, that you must purposefully and knowingly partake in. It can be like that, sure, but more often than not it’s just not something we think about. We don’t even question all these internalized messages we’ve been getting since birth, we just assume That’s The Way Things Are. Racism is not something where you wake up one morning and think, “gosh, I sure hate people who aren’t white, I think I’ll go find one to harass.” Well, it just… doesn’t work that way.
I’ll take this opportunity to say something that I’ve been wanting to scream at the radio and TV lately. Can’t these people see how racist it is to call Sonia Sotomayor a racist? All she said was that Latina experience is a perspective that white males don’t have. I’ve heard some people suggest that she should put aside any discussion of her unique perspective and stick to the law. Law written by white males from a white male perspective! GAH!!!
Oh definitely! I don’t think Sotomayor meant that she just plain has better judgment than all white men, I think it’s more like that she meant she knows more about what it is like to be a Latina woman than a white man could ever know. And yet somehow that just EXPLODED into a lot of wailing about “reverse racism”. Ugh.
of course we don’t live in a post-racial society just like we don’t live in a post war world either. I’m sure that Ms.Sotomayor will get her appointment to the supreme court but that said I think her statement-though not racist-is racial in nature. What is it about the term Latina that makes so special? after all how long has she lived in the USA-most of her live! So how does she know what it’s like living in a mostly latino/latina culture?
I did find this from the American Spectator:And I wonder whether by ignoring our differences as women or men of color we do a disservice both to the law and society. Whatever the reasons… we may have different perspectives, either as some theorists suggest because of our cultural experiences or as others postulate because we have basic differences in logic and reasoning….”
– Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor in her speech delivered for the Judge Mario G. Olmos Law and Cultural Diversity Lecture at the University of California (Berkeley) School of Law in 2001.
Now if she mean that we think differently due to race or gender-that’s one thing-but if she postulates that one race/ethnic group/gender thinks better than the other; then we have problems.