Racism... now there's a complicated and sensitive subject. I've been thinking a lot about racism in the past few months. I recently moved from a more suburban, heavily white inhabited area to a lower-income, heavily not-white inhabited area. And this has affected my comfort level.
Looking back, I (as a middle-class white girl) have been raised to fear and avoid: #1- people who look rough, who are obviously not of my social class, #2- people who have a different skin color than I, and #3- strange men. So the scruffy looking men of African descent in my new neighborhood have hit all three of these criteria. I've found myself automatically, without conscious thought, walking faster, not making eye contact and simply reacting to people who I don't know. People who have never given me any reason to mistrust them, simply on the basis of my past indoctrination. And I hate this part of me. I hate that I've been made to react this way to people around me.
Now there are multiple sources for this education. When I was a college student, I spent a summer in Israel, Egypt and Jordan and one of the most upsetting and scaring experiences I had involved the pre-trip orientation. The white men who were leading this trip spent hours telling us horror stories about pretty little white girls who had been accosted and had been taken advantage of. Their goal was to scare us into dressing and acting in ways that would not attract attention. After the orientation, I went home scared to death, not wanting to go on the trip. The big scary world had become very real.
I did go on the trip, and
there were definitely situations were I did not feel safe because of
first, my gender and second, my skin color. But did I feel unsafe because of actual circumstances or because I was programmed and preconditioned to feel that way? Either way, actual misogyny or socialized misinformation, I got the short end of the stick.
Despite all of this, it was a great trip and I was physically safe.
But even more involved and central to my understanding of human interaction has been the influence of my family. My mother has told me stories about how her grandmother was outrageously racist. My father is an interesting story in race relations. He grew up in California and went to high school in Hawaii, where he was one of the few white kids in a school predominately Polynesian. Apparently he experienced racism as a white minority in that situation. To this day, he is extremely sensitive to race relations, often taking offense when other groups accuse Caucasians of acting racist. He deeply believes that he, the middle class white man, is the victim in current United States culture and government.
Recently there was a cheerios commercial which caused a huge uproar because it portrayed a little girl with a white mother and a black father. I was amazed by the intense reactions of people to this commercial.
Within my feminist community, there has recently been a discussion about race within feminism. The idea that feminism focuses too much on the white female as opposed to other racial groups that experience misogyny in addition to racism, a double dose of prejudice and discrimination. I very much agree that non-white females deal with misogyny in different and often more challenging ways. In the same way, economic status affects a woman's ability to be successful in patriarchal society. So the reality is that the factors of gender, race, economic status are so intertwined and dependent on each other, making the conversation about any one of these inequality factors very complicated.
I feel like at this point I should say something very deep and resolute, shouting my solution to these world problems from the rooftop. But from a practical standpoint, I still haven't even gotten up the courage to talk to my neighbors at this point. Which is so stupid! I want to be that brave cosmopolitan, adventurous, uninhibited person. I don't want my socialized background to define me. I want to push boundaries. So how does a person overcome who society has made them?
(Wow... I went pretty existentialist there. Kind of Matrix, Brave New World and Farenheit 451 ish :)
