Yes, I admit it, I’m a racist. I have crossed the street late at night when I saw a poorly-dressed black man walking towards me. I’ve cursed under my breath a little more fiercely when a tricked-out lowrider full of Hispanic-looking gangbangers cut me off on the freeway. I’ve rolled my eyes when trying to understand an Asian woman on the phone, whose heavily-accented pronunciation made her speech barely comprehensible to me.
So yes, I’m a racist, and I’m sorry. But I’m working on it.
(Follow me over the fold.)
I’m white, and I was raised in a white, suburban tourist town in the UK. The town was so lily-white that almost everyone in town (even the tourists) were white. One day as a teenager my friends and I saw a perfectly ordinary looking black family walking towards us, and one friend muttered in a low voice "Uh-oh, here come the Gippos." Never mind that "Gippos" is an old insulting term for Egyptians, which this family almost certainly was not. I was so stunned by my friend’s comment that I didn’t know what to say. So I didn’t speak out or say anything to him, and I didn’t end our friendship (though I didn’t ever discuss race with him again). Does that make me a racist? Maybe - I don’t know, but I think it does make me a flawed human being.
When I was younger, maybe 9 or 10, I was on vacation with my family at a hotel on the Mediterranean. I was out on the terrace watching a beautiful sunset, when an older, slightly drunken British man started talking to me and telling me his life story. It was punctuated with his experiences of working in the Gulf, working in some kind of industrial plant, and how lazy the Arab employees were. He started on a rant about the "damn Arabs" and how they were well paid ("for Wogs"), but useless, punctuated with liberal doses of random racial slurs. I was too young to really argue with this idiot, but I was into poetry at the time, so I simply talked about how the Arabs had given the world some amazing poetry, and quoted a line or two from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (yes, I know Omar Khayyam was Persian, but I’m pretty sure the ignorant fuck had no idea). When I told my Dad about it afterwards he wanted me to point out the guy so he could give him a big ration of shit, but we never saw his face again. I wished I had had the presence of mind to just tell the guy he was a racist pig. But I didn’t.
I was in a Baptist Sunday School at the age of 14. Each week we were given these leaflets that were printed by some affiliated Baptist Church in the States, and mostly they were the usual stuff, parables from the Bible with nice little line drawings of Jesus, that kind of thing. But one week, there was a whole "Armageddon" story line, about how the Antichrist would come and unite all of the Middle East and Africa (i.e. all the brown and black people), and they would rise up and try to destroy Israel and the West (i.e. all the white people), until Jesus came back to save the world (of course, in the drawings, Jesus was white). It had all the scary, menacing language and images you would expect, and perhaps worst of all, used very creative interpretations of certain Bible verses to justify this thinly-veiled racist garbage. Now I’m not a Bible Scholar, but I can read. So with some help from my Dad, I used the same biblical quotations from the leaflet to write a short essay on how the Bible accurately predicted that England wasn’t going to win the next World Cup (soccer). I showed this essay to my Sunday School teachers, and they made some lame excuses that they didn’t print the leaflets, couldn’t help the content, etc. I should have pointed out that the leaflets were racist and offensive, and that they could choose to distribute them, or not. Instead I left the Sunday School (and the Church) shortly afterwards.
Fast forward to Cambridge, MA, in 2009; Henry Gates is arrested on his own front porch. As I wasn’t there, I truly don’t know what happened and I don’t know how much race was a factor in this incident, but I can understand that for anyone who has ever experienced the kind of routine profiling, denigration, exclusion and harassment that a minority person in America surely knows all too well, this was a wholly predictable and familiar outcome, and one which must foster much pent-up frustration and rage. I also think it’s hard (even impossible) for me with my background as a white person to truly know what it must be like to be born with a different color skin from the "preferred" one.
But maybe I don’t have to. My point in telling these stories about racism is to show how we always have a choice of how we respond to it, even when (perhaps particularly when) it’s not directed at us. With the election of a black President, the Gates arrest, and the ongoing not-even subtle racism of the teabaggers and birthers, the issue of race is being raised right now in this country. I am choosing to speak out because the racism of others is not someone else’s problem - it’s mine. It’s ours. All of us. It’s about what kind of country we want to create, and what we will and will not consider acceptable discourse and behavior. Every time I remain silent and fail to name, shame, and defame racism, I am complicit in it. I will be silent no longer. I will confront my own racism first, and anyone else’s second, but I won’t ignore it. I hope you will do the same.
Thanks for listening.
~ Trendar.
(This diary was written inspired by the excellent recommended diary posted this morning by Deoliver47. Let’s keep this important discussion alive in here).