- Maybe I'm braver because I actually live and work with more blacks. I live next door to a black family and we're very friendly because they reached out and I responded. In the medical field, I work with a lot of black folks as patients and as co-workers.
- Maybe it's because I live in a town that's safe, suburban, fairly integrated, and not a powderkeg of racial resentment and anxiety.
- Maybe it's because at the age of 22 when a prospective landlord asked whether I was married to a black or a white, I wasn't brave enough to throw back the question. I decided later that day not to participate in someone else's racism, but confront it. (... And I've lived in those safe, suburban towns where speaking against racism is safe and unridiculed.)
- Maybe it's because my exposure reached a critical point that I could start talking.
Monday, April 23, 2012
Open thread: (For the brave) Race relations
Is anyone brave
enough to talk about race? I've written a bit about race and haven't gotten many comments. Am I really braver than my readers?
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1 comment:
Super!
Let's talk about race. What is it, exactly? From a technical point of view, its a genetic and biological divergence of discreet human populations over time. In this regard, racial diversity with the homo sapiens species has fallen precipitously since the 15th century, and the pace of racial integration seems to be acelerating decade by decade. You can attribute mobile populations and natural interbreeding for that.
What people think about racial diversity is another thing entirely. There's that prejudicial aspect -- assigning to someone who obviosuly or even partially shares certain physical or cultural aspects of a traditionally understood difference between previously segregated human populations as having ALL or MOST of the traditionally understood differences of that assigned race. There's no doubt that many people think that way around the world, both of those within their perceived population and those outside of it.
Outward appearance has always been important to human beings, so it's not surprise that we jump to conclusions about others based on what we see. Skin color or eyelids -- the result of certain genetic markers common to previously discreet human communities -- is much harder to hide than, say, blood type. Nobody I know thinks that everyone with B+ blood (like mine) is lazy, prone to violence, good at math, is a lousy driver, or deserves favorable consideration for a job or college admission based on that genetic aspect.
What we really face with the notion of race is whether race-blindness is possible in human beings, and to the extent that it isn't and those with favored racial characteristics reserve the goodies for themselves and those like them, what can we consciously do to alleviate those bias -- if that's what we want. Nobody wants to experience discrimination. It's an extra cost that party is forced to bear. Usually, exhibiting racial discrimination costs one nothing -- provided it's not obvious or performed in the wrong company.
I, for one, treat racial issues a lot like I treat someone's blood type. It's not like I don't notice that someone is "black", or female, or asian, or short, but it matters to me about as much as their blood type.
To that end, I suppose any initiative that recognizes the prior cost racism to those who may have experienced it -- hence my support for affirmative action and total lack of sympathy for those who feel that they were thereby disadvantaged from it -- whil encouraging all initiatives that seek to eliminate the attitudes that create those costs in the first place.
In defense of affirmative action, I'd say that anyone who now feels that racially black, or asian, or Native American got an unfair advantage today, that party can blame the racial attitudes exhibited for generations by others. If they don't want it to continue, and have the societal costs of racism (or sexism, or credism) to float around and strike in expected ways, then don't practice it yourself, don't teach it to others, and don't condone it.
We will never achieve a world where obvious racism traits don't elicit prejudicial judgments, not will all of the costs of those human weaknesses fall on those who display them. But we can try.
DL -- Pennsylvania
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