I don’t know if you’ve been following this recent story, but every now and then a story of racism hits the main story lines, and then suddenly everyone starts acting like they’ve just discovered anything race-related can possibly exist. And then people act horrified, shocked, angry and intellectually assaulted that such a thing could be happening in this day and age. In this case, a woman working for the USDA told a group of people at an NAACP Freedom Fund banquet meeting that she, an African-American government employee, took great pleasure in NOT helping a white man who DARED to come to her for assistance at her government office. So, she went out of her way to make sure that she made his request both painful and impossible for him to gain any success. And she took great pleasure in it.
Well, obviously the people now discovering this You Tube video of her exploit are now going nuts distancing themselves from her, firing her and doing all sorts of posturing about how evil this really is, which is all understandable, but what needs to be acknowledged is that this really isn’t all that surprising. What it tells us is that racism still exists, and it doesn’t matter what side of the coin people hail from, there are still people who treat others with disdain mainly because they can. Instead of dealing with this as an actual issue that needs some kind of resolution, we’ll deal with it as a unique occurrence, as if it doesn’t happen all of the time, and when the next one gets discovered, it gives us room to keep compartmentalizing such incidents and never do anything about fixing them.
Face it. Some people are dicks. It doesn’t matter what color they are, what nationality they are, how much intelligence they have, how much money they have, whether they voted Republican or Democrat, or anything else. People are still dicks. What we need to do is get together as a collective and talk about this type of behavior in a clear-cut fashion so that everyone hears our voices. But we won’t. Instead, we’ll treat it as a one case wonder, and we’ll allow others to continue to hide in the shadows, doing this sort of thing over and over again, until they get found out and we repeat the cycle yet again. We’ve never really been all that good at bringing bad circumstances to light. It would mean discussing difficult topics, and if we can’t act holier than thou, we really don’t want to talk about it.
Racism is all over the place. So is ethnic profiling. So is reverse discrimination. But what should be focused upon is not that these things exist, which is important to know about, but to figure out why. Why are people still treating other people with disdain, placing some people in subcategories of humanity in comparison to others?
I say it has a lot to do with the complex intricacies of identity politics. People like to think of themselves as part of a collective, but at the same time, they’re incapable of indentifying themselves as part of a group without identifying others as outliers from their group. As long as there are people who don’t belong, their justification for all of the things their “group” believes in become all that much stronger. What good is a group of white males if they can’t look at another group of non-white males with some type of ridicule or condemnation? Think about wars we have fought. World War II was all about identifying the “evil Jap” or the “violent Kraut”, or whatever derogatory name one can remember. By doing so, we were able to rally around ourselves and fight against “foreign” aggression. It helped in that situation that those opposing forces ALSO saw themselves with identity that conflicted with us as well. But not always does it happen that way, and that’s where our problems are really starting to emerge.
Look at the War on Terror. It started after 9/11 with condemnations of anyone who was Arabic. And then immediately there was a realization that there were a lot of Arab-Americans who AREN’T our enemies, and that is still pretty hard for a lot of people to grasp. When you are so good at creating identity distinctions and placing people in another camp, it is very hard to realize that your enemy is a lot like Pogo first proclaimed: “We have met the enemy and he is us” or some variation of that phrase.
An interesting example of this problem hails from an unlikely source, and that’s a computer game, the most popular one around, World of Warcraft. In that game, without having to learn much about it, all you have to know is that there are two sides, the Alliance and the Horde. You choose one side or other based on your choice of race you pick for the character you are going to play. From that moment on, everyone who is automatically allied with the other side is your enemy, and you are automatically identified with the races that you were allied with as well. Think of it as living in a country where you were born, and everyone in that country hates the people from another country. You may never have a single dealing with a person from that other country, but one day you’re going to meet one somewhere, and you’re expected to hate him or her, and if possible, kill him or her, or contribute to that person’s personal demise. That is the kind of thinking that the game sets up, and it’s not that much different than how we deal with other countries in the world today.
When I was younger, I was working for a hotel chain as its investigator, and I befriended a young man from Iran (who happened to always refer to his country as “Persia”). He wanted to be an American, and he was as pro-US as you could be, including a fascination for all things Madonna (including a long protracted attempt to get me to buy for him the new “Madonna book” because he was too embarrassed to buy it from a store himself). But whenever her talked about Iran, he would then immediately start drawing sickles and pointing at the US, as if he understood that he had to hate the United States whenever identifying himself as an Iranian. No amount of common sense conversation ever broke him from this thought process, and even though he was good friends with every American he came across, when it came to national identity, I would not have been surprised to see him turn against those same friends and take up arms at a moment’s notice.
This is the kind of mentality we have to deal with whenever we discuss the ideas of ethnicity and race. Some people are locked into their beliefs because of an entire life, or a societal set of lives worth of time, spent thinking one particular way, automatically thinking bad thoughts towards people they know nothing about, nor have they ever had the opportunity to even gain a single negative action that would cause them to feel that way from a logical perspective.
In this country, we really need to discuss race because the only people talking about it right now are race-baiting people who see the world in, for lack of better terms, black and white. I watched an interview the other night with Al Sharpton about his response to the NAACP’s rift with the Tea Party and the NAACP’s allegations of racial tensions stemming from the Tea Party. At first, Sharpton sounded logical, and then he fell into talking points, where he wanted the Tea Party members to automatically have to condemn their own members in order to be taken seriously by Sharpton. Sharpton didn’t like racism from the Tea Party, but he had no problem condemning an entire organization because of their membership, effectively arguing that membership in the Tea Party meant you were a racist unless you were willing to codemn everyone else in the Tea Party as a racist. Use that argument to say that you if you’re a member of the NAACP, you must condemn all racist members of the NAACP, of which they do exist, or you’re a racist yourself, and look at where that might get you.
The problem is people want to equate posturing with logical actions, and no one wants to be baited into a stupid battle of words. And that’s what keeps happening.
Which brings me back to the original point of this post. I don’t think calling this woman a racist solves anything. Sure, she probably is one, but who cares? What is more important is to use her really stupid mistake (whether or not she would do it again is irrelevant to me) and try to open up a dialogue on this whole issue. Otherwise, we miss a great opportunity just so we can make stupid, irrelevant, political points. Unfortunately, that’s all that’s going to come from this moment. That, and that woman being out of a job for doing and saying something really stupid. It’s sad that we can’t get a better result that just that.