Killing Your Sacred Cows since 1992

In some of my BARW posts and other race discussions in the last week or two, I've seen people talk about how you can't change society as a whole or how companies are just made up of individuals, so focusing on indivuals is all you can do (I'm paraphrasing). Of course, it's true that companies and societies are made up of individuals, but I *don't* think it's true that all one can do is influence individuals to be aware of racial inequalities and making sure hiring and other policies are fair.

If you have an established Old White Guy Network at a company, even if every individual is committed to social justice and remedying racial inequalities, it's going to take active work on the company level to get to a place where racial minorities make up more than a tiny percentage of the workforce there. There are a myriad of confounding factors, including the fact that many racial minorities come from poorly funded schools and so, as a group, may not have the same educational background that a similar-sized group of white potential hires could have.

But, there is another issue: people tend to hire people like them. This is just simple human pscyhology, and it extends past race. Studies have shown that people who have the hiring power often hire people very much like them in temperment (laid back vs. go-getter, quick decision makers vs. ponderers, and so on). Even if you're committed to racial equality, if you're not hyper-aware of this tendency, you're not going to make that effort to seek out a diverse workforce.

I think that social movements like school busing and Affirmative Action are trying, in their ham-handed ways, to try to break the cycle and make an entry point for racial minorities (and women). I'm not saying I think they've been effective, just that I think the intentions were good and that the problem that was identified was a real one.

Really, I think at least part of the solution to racial inequality in the work force, government, housing, and so on, goes back to changing the way we fund public schools at the elementary and high school levels. As it stands, rich (predominantly white) neighborhoods have better schools and more up-to-date books and poorer (predominantly minority) schools have crowded classrooms and 20-year-old books. Until we find away to spread that around a little more equally, I think Affirmative Action and similar programs are never going to be able to make a significant dent in this problem.

This will probably be my last "Blogging Against Racism Week" post. I'm sure I'll post about race and racism again, just not this densely in a given week.

On some of BARW posts this week, some folks expressed an interest in talking about "reverse racism." To start off, I dislike the term, as it implies there is a normal or expected direction to racism.

Secondly, though I'm not sure I buy it entirely, I have some affinity with the idea that prejudice on the individual level is a different thing than instititualized racism. On this view, minorities can be "prejudiced" but they can't be "racist" because "racist/racism" implies the power and ability to affect someone on a fundamental level, such as denying housing or discrimination in employment hiring. Like I said, I'm not sure I entirely buy into this concept, but it seems a useful distinction that I'm going to use below: racial prejudice vs. institutionalized racism.

I don't have a lot to say about "reverse racism" because I haven't experienced much of it, and all of it has been on the individual racial prejudice level, and none of it has been on an institutionalized racism level.

Incidents in which I think I was a target of racial prejudice:
-One incident in Kalamazoo in which I was called names by young people sitting on a porch. I didn't hear every word they said, so it might not have been racial, but my assumption is that it was.
-One incident in Ypsilanti in which I was called names by young people sitting on a porch. They just called me a bitch, so maybe it had nothing to do with race.
-One incident in Ypsilanti in which some black teenagers asked J. and I what we were doing in "their" neighborhood. Possibly racially motivated, possibly not, as we were walking several blocks from our house and they may just not have seen us around on their street before.

Honestly, that's it. There may have been other incidents in which someone ignored me or didn't want to date me because I was white, but if that's the case, it wasn't overt enough for me to notice. And, to my knowledge, I've never been denied housing or a job because of my skin color or perceived race.

Compare that to the times I have been harassed or rejected for being fat: about 2,000 or more (seriously), if you count dating site rejections and being called names ("Go fatty, pedal that bike faster!") on the street. Or compare that to the times I have received street harassment or the like for being female: several dozens.

At times I have been racially insensitive or prejudiced, even though I'm actively trying not to do this sort of thing. Some examples:
-Talking more "street" when I was around racial minorities.
-On a dating site, rejecting a black man who wanted to be my submissive because the thought of having a black man as a "slave" made me insanely uncomfortable.
-Being extremely watchful and cautious of black men I encounter on the streets when I'm walking alone. To be fair, I tend to feel most young men under about 25 are barely-controlled sociopathic animals, so this is more a sexist thing than a racial one.
-Occasionally appropriating pieces of Native American culture in less-than-sensitive ways.
-Assuming that racial minorities will be grateful and positively-disposed to me because I'm exploring their music, religion, language, or culture in some way.
-Being surprised that black people eat Chinese takeout and like to go fishing.

I've also witnessed a fair amount of racial prejudice and even some institutionalized racism:
-Working for a boss who wouldn't hire black sales agents because he was afraid they would intimidate the people in his market. It apparently didn't occur to him that he could hire black agents and send them to middle class and affluent black communities.
-Working for companies (nearly everywhere I've ever worked) whose percentage of minority employees was vastly smaller than the percentage of minorities in the community generally.
-Being told by a white neighbor that she was glad a white family had moved in next door.
-Dozens of instances of racial slurs and stereotypes used in conversation by my in-laws.
-Witnessing co-workers turning instantly prejudiced and hateful toward arabic people directly after 9/11.
-Witnessing the poverty of Pottawatomi Indians near where I grew up, and then institutionalized racism against them when they wanted to start a casino and attempt to improve their lot in life, even though white Catholics in the area had been running bingo for decades.

I can imagine some situations in which white people might feel very disadvantaged and even disempowered; I've heard of white teenagers being harassed in high schools with a majority racial minority population, and I can't imagine they feel very privileged by their white skin in that sort of situation. But on the whole, as I've said, I have experienced very little racial prejudice against me on the personal level, and none on the institutional level. If "reverse racism" is some huge problem, it's not happening in my world.

"Why White People are Afraid"

http://www.alternet.org/story/36892/

excerpt:
A final fear has probably always haunted white people but has become more powerful since the society has formally rejected overt racism: The fear of being seen, and seen-through, by non-white people. Virtually every white person I know, including white people fighting for racial justice and including myself, carries some level of racism in our minds and hearts and bodies. In our heads, we can pretend to eliminate it, but most of us know it is there. And because we are all supposed to be appropriately anti-racist, we carry that lingering racism with a new kind of fear: What if non-white people look at us and can see it? What if they can see through us? What if they can look past our anti-racist vocabulary and sense that we still don't really know how to treat them as equals? What if they know about us what we don't dare know about ourselves? What if they can see what we can't even voice?

--------

"I'm not afraid to talk about race; I'm afraid NOT to talk about race":
http://www.ferris.edu/jimcrow/essays/talking/

excerpt:
Many whites believe that talking openly and honestly about race and racism will lead to embarrassment and accusations of racial insensitivity, maybe even charges of racism. With these a priori assumptions, the conversations, if they occur, become defensive struggles, emotionally draining, sad attempts to avoid blame.

One more link:
Talking about race in the classroom (but applies to other situations):
http://life.familyeducation.com/race/parenting/36247.html

Continuing on with "Blogging Against Racism Week," I thought I'd share some optimism I have about racial issues, at least in my little corner of the world.

Living in Ypsilanti, Michigan gives me hope for race relations in our time. Never before, anywhere I've lived, have I seen white, black, and brown-skinned people living and playing together with so little visible rancor.

The cul de sac I live on is so well mixed that if you plotted the race of the people who lived here, it'd look a bit like a checkerboard. It includes the crazy white Cat Lady who lives next door to our right, the black man at the end of the block who has the most immaculate lawn in the neighborhood, a married couple consisting of a Phillipina woman and a Middle Eastern man who have an incredible oriental garden in their front yard, and the couple who live next door on our left- a black man, his blonde white wife, and their cute little caramel-colored toddler. When I've been to bars here, it's not uncommon to see working class black and white folk sitting down at the same table drinking beers together. The other day on my way home from work, I drove past a chubby little black boy pedaling his banana seat bike with his little white friend riding on the back.

It's not some paradise- that's for sure. J. and I have lived here since early in 2000 and have frequently walked and biked around our neighborhood. I remember some young black kids asking us what we were doing in "their" neighborhood. But those kind of incidents are few and far between. More commonly, our neighbors of all colors smile and wave and note that we're out for our usual "evening constitutional."

About three years ago, when I was volunteering at the Friends of the Library, a sensitive ponytail man came in and talked to me and another worker about how he'd gone around that morning tearing down racist fliers that were posted in his community, targeting a mixed-race married couple who lived there. The man was from englightened, liberal Ann Arbor.

I believe that all the rich liberals in the world aren't going to make the world share a Coke; I think that kind of change is going to come from working class folks living in close proximity, noticing that the things they have in common are much more important than the differences that divide them.