Part three of a three-part series of issues surrounding racism and inclusivity I felt like writing about somewhere other than social media. A lot of what my friends are posting about is emotional, and I don’t feel like hijacking that as a place to thrash this out. But like the kid in Dear Mr. Henshaw, sometimes we need the exercise of even an imaginary audience, and so, this (hopefully for now) anonymous blog.
What is it that keeps getting us in trouble? Nobody I know will admit to harboring hatred and bias in their hearts and minds, even me, and yet we still say things that get met with a chorus of angry boos. I recently started thinking about how often the divisive things we say, that are viewed as –ist or –phobic, can be split into two parts, and how it’s so often the second part where our troubles really begin.
One way of splitting speech in two seemed fairly obvious: when we say something, we have an intention for our speech, and then that speech has an effect. If you don’t care about the effect, you’re liable to do something stupid. The proof that you just don’t care happens the second part, when you’ve utterly failed to get the reaction you expect. Maybe it sounded smart and sexy in your head, but when the rubber hit the road, when the words coming out of your mouth connected with the ears of an audience, something turned ugly, and you’re looking at a room full of people demanding to know why you would say something so horrible. This is all too often my life.
The weird thing is, most people will probably give you the benefit of the doubt, perhaps note something in response then just let it go because most people are actually okay with you being in the wrong. What we regard as ignorance in others really doesn’t bother most people that much unless it’s somehow intrusive in our lives. I don’t care how bad it is, most people will still ignore it, out of generosity or just a weary lifetime of practice born out of being “one of them” in a society that prefers to speak to an audience that are each and all “one of us”. I think this is mostly true, and that there is a division between those unaffected by foolish speech and those who hear it so often and have so few allies that they learned to cope.
I once saw the N-word cracked out at full volume at a stadium, and all the white people shuddered and commented, while the people least outwardly affected were the people of color who all clearly decided this wasn’t a unique enough event to let it ruin a decent football game. This utter stupidity would remain far below their attention: as one man remarked, “I didn’t hear nothing but the wind going by.” On a milder scale, I don’t know a single white person without an awkwardly racist relative with whom they’ve decided to selectively edit their conversations. If we can ignore all that, people will gracefully ignore you inadvertently stepping in a conversational pothole too, and they actually only speak up because they think deep down you know better. You’re getting a second chance… which we so often completely blow.
Some people choose to act like the whole problem lies with their intended audience, who refuse to process their obvious eloquence. This was probably me in my younger days. It turns out acting like everybody was too stupid to keep up with what you were actually saying, and this is not a failure of the words coming out of your mouth, is what psychologists, anthropologists and other social scientists who study human culture describe as a “classic dick move”. Even if it’s true, it’s still a dick move to point it out. No winners there. But most of the time, there’s that magic moment when you can say, “I’m not explaining this very well, I’m clearly stumbling into some bad phrasing,” and lean on the benefit of the doubt. Or, like the younger, coiled-up like a tense spring version of me, throw it out entirely and insist that you’re not speaking badly, everyone is hearing badly… it was the second part that really cemented being an asshole.
The worst second round performance isn’t just being an arrogant asshole, the worst is suddenly deciding you’re the real victim and everybody has ganged up on you. There’s a consistent theme, the classic iteration of which is, “But I’m not racist!” Speaking for myself, I am racist. I am sexist. I am ablist, I am heterosexist, I am so many things I am striving not to be. I will not claim to be the only person who grew up in a society with strong norms and violent ways of reinforcing them without ever absorbing any of it. But I still don’t enjoy being called out on it, because nobody in their right mind would. And sometimes I do think things go too far… in a classroom discussion I witnessed somebody brought up a peer-reviewed anthropological study of primate behavior that was intended by the authors to better understand analogous human behavior, and I thought it was a huge irresponsible leap to accuse that person of “speaking in code” about a certain group of human beings. Sometimes a monkey really is just a member of a closely related non-human primate species. Occasionally there is cause to be defensive.
The problem is, before that response, figuring out what has been actually accused of racism (for example): you yourself, or your words. There are racial slurs I had no idea were in common usage before I was able to speak, that still resonate with those whose communities have heard them. Brown paper bags, the verb to shine, various fruits, the list of things racists have turned into something ugly is boundless. It’s quite possible to stumble into something that makes a fellow human cringe without realizing it. And of course sometimes we should know better, like the idiots, usually artists for some reason, who decide having a lot of black friends qualifies them to talk about the N-word or BPT or any of the other hallowed classics of American racial slurs and stereotypes. So sometimes things get said by people who think they know better, who think they’re one of the good ones.
And here’s the problem: most of the time nobody cares if you’re one of the good ones, who has some sort of non-racist credential stamped on your heart. At least at first, they care more, and respond to, the words that just came out of your mouth or off your pen. So there’s this magic moment when maybe you can change those words or acknowledge the difficulty of clear human communication, and maybe an apology or retraction will be accepted or maybe it won’t. But instead so often it turns into a debate on the essential character of the speaker whose very person is now under attack. Common expressions by onlookers include, “And, here we go.” If you make the whole thing about you, things like, “But I’m not racist!” seem like valid counterpoints to, “That word has a long and ugly history, makes some people uncomfortable, and frankly isn’t appropriate.” Maybe a certain interjection of “ouch” is called for after that, but the only way to stay on the moral high ground is to keep the second round focused on how to move forward, maybe reach out and apologize for your ignorance, consider rephrasing, apologize for the impact, accept the paradox that sometimes one must lower oneself in order to stand higher, and just generally give some indication you were actually listening with your mind and not entirely with your heart that feels only the pain of being called out.
That emotional reaction leads to one of the other awful second rounds. In But I’m Not Racist! Kathy Obear describes this through the lens of “white women crying”. When somebody is so affected emotionally by the topic that they just cannot keep it together, that’s actually okay. I have friends (especially actors) and also relatives who just feel everything, wide open all the way down, tears well up easily… and it’s beautiful. I would never change that. When these people hear a story of hatred and bias and exclusion, they may really feel it almost like it happened to them. It’s not having this reaction that’s the problem, it’s what happens next and who else needs to be involved. Sometimes the entire room needs to get up and go over and be consoling, and rub the person’s back, and bring tissues, and now the whole inciting incident (and whoever it actually happened to) has been left behind, because there’s a new problem and she’s crying.
Recently I’ve also tried to become more cognizant that sometimes we’re starting at round two. It may feel colossally unfair, but it happens. We can say things that to us sound innocuous but are landing on a historical context and usage going back decades or centuries. This is the hardest for me, because I try not to surround myself with people who are inventing or reviving new ways to be horrible and alienating to other groups of people, so I’m not always aware of their continuing work to deface our language. And there are the days when asking a friend a question about a Spanish-language song would be fine on a Tuesday, but on a Thursday it’s hitting all the awkward buttons because the world has just spent two days throwing micro-aggressions at your friend. These are the times when it’s not really about you, and it’s certainly not about your good intentions, it’s just about the legion of assholes who came before you, and have helpfully worn some of our friends and neighbors and colleagues down to their absolute last nerve. Fair, unfair, I don’t know. But it is up to us what round three looks like, and to understand how much of this mess was and will be crafted for us by other people.
And so I just wrote this all out to remind myself that while I will foolishly step into conversational bear traps, again and again and again, I can try not to let my ego and my own feelings stop me from trying to restart and do better.
Coq au Vin 