One of the low points--other than my unHappy Meal encounter--was hearing not one but two joking references to "mixed marriage" while in Nashville. The first came through a mike, immediately preceding a prayer. And, while it did occur to me at the time that it was tasteless and grossly inappropriate (especially since I had, just a few minutes before, from my vantage point at a corner table, been struck by the fact that I could count the number of black faces in the room on one hand and still have fingers left over), it didn't outrage me nearly as much as it should have. It just sort of washed past me, an enduring legacy of having grown up in the South. It wasn't until the next day, when I heard it forthrightly named as racist by someone who was paying more attention than I was, that I realized the full depth of what it means to casually joke about "mixed marriages."
The next day, I heard another joke about while standing in the middle of church. This second time, it reverberated in all of its unintentional overtones. And the nervous wry bark of a laugh with which I responded to the first reference was replaced by simply a deep sadness, without any tinge of judgment, because I too had had to learn belatedly that this is nothing to laugh about.
Once in high school I heard a pillar of our church tell a joke, standing in the center aisle of the auditorium, with a punchline that ended with the n-word. Not even tempted to laugh nervously, I just stared in confusion. We can recognize racism in our midst when it comes packaged in blatant and socially unacceptable forms. But what's the difference between a joke with the n-word and a joke about "mixed marriage"? In the end, both rely on the same categorical racism--without it, they are incoherent.
This adds a new dimension to the discussion from the Dating Jesus session at CSC 2010 about the relationship of theology and justice. I suspect--as does my bro Robert Foster, whose comment was very insightful--that dismantling injustice in one context is a gateway to becoming cognizant of the need for social justice in other contexts as well. But one problem is, many people simply don't seem to see that there's anything unjust about the role or status of women in our churches. How could that possibly be? I dimly remember not being outraged by it, but I can no longer recapture the logic of that former point of view--I can no longer remember how it feels to not be bothered by this. This leaves me with the necessity of constructing some kind of coherent intellectual explanation for what seems now to be an inexplicable blindness to justice matters.
There are surely multiple factors in this, but here is the one that seems the strongest to me right now. Men and women are supposed to be ontologically distinct--this is the crux of "hierarchical complementarianism" just as much as it is straight-up patriarchalism. (To borrow a phrase from another CSC session, hierarchical complementarianism seems to me to be the theological construct justifying "benevolent sexism." Perhaps a post for another time, there.) So it's no biggie that men do X and women do Y; they are just essentially different kinds of human beings and therefore women could never do Y and it's stupid to get angry over it.
Like the logic of "mixed marriage," the concept of hierarchical complementarianism doesn't make sense without assuming categorical difference. And if we are still, as a church, joking and laughing about mixed marriage--demonstrating that on some level we still are not questioning the working assumption that white people and black people are essentially different kinds of people--no wonder we're not able to question the same logic when it shows up with regard to gender. These two things are linked at a deep conceptual level. We cannot have gender justice without racial justice. And maybe we're banging our heads against a brick wall with some people about gender justice because we've never adequately dealt with the generations-old sin of racism that still permeates our vision of the world, even as we bow our heads to pray and stand in the middle of our churches.
Showing posts with label racism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label racism. Show all posts
Wednesday, June 09, 2010
Friday, April 30, 2010
on what it means to be invisible, from the other side of the racial divide
In high school, I was invisible. But not in the way you might think. I don't mean that no one noticed me, or that I had no friends (strangely enough, I did have some friends, and very good ones, and how awesome is it that I am now Facebook-friends with almost all of them that I care to remember!), or that I felt some keen sense of not being quite counted as a full responsible person and citizen. I mean, my body was invisible: I never thought about the particulars of my body as having any sort of effect on my life or my future. My gender and my race were irrelevant to my ambitions. Invisibility was a privilege. And an invisible privilege at that: a privilege I never even knew I had.
I certainly wasn't racist. I mean, I had like, three black friends!
But I did notice, and fume, those times when my smarts and talents and invisible privileges were not enough to get me what I wanted and totally deserved. Like the time I was nominated for the North Carolina Governor's School, for Choral Music, and made Darren drive me all the way to wherever that audition was. I didn't get in. And while I knew, and knew right away even during the audition, that I had bombed the sight-singing test (I was so nervous I didn't even sing the octave jump right, and sang a fifth instead), what I focused on in my rejection letter was a sentence inserted, I suppose, to make the let-down easy: something to the effect of, you were a qualified applicant with the necessary skills but due to other considerations like diversity of race and ethnicity, we cannot invite you. The invisibly privileged high school kid that I was translated that into: a black kid got my space. It's not that I'm not good enough; it's that I'm too white, thought I.
I know now--actually I knew then, but now I am grown-up enough to admit it--that my nomination was a sort of fluke, and that a completely untrained singer like myself really just wasn't good enough, and I bombed the audition. There's no mystery here. No conspiracy. No systemic social dysfunction.
But I fumed. It was easier to believe that someone else got a space I deserved than accept that sometimes I would come up against a challenge I couldn't automatically ace.
A few years before that, a much younger and more naive teen, still new to my NC junior high, I auditioned for the senior high school musical (Finian's Rainbow, if you're curious, and yes, I still have the bright yellow T-shirt). During that fantastic experience, the 14-year-old me met a marvelous guy with a speaking role and crazy trumpet-playing skills, as well as a sense of humor, incredible smarts, and an unaccountable habit of paying attention to me. He was fun to talk to and easy to hang out with, despite the fact that he was a couple years older than me--a significant difference after all exists between 9th grade and junior year of high school. My first clue that he "liked" me was that all of a sudden he was kissing my ear, on the stairwell between scenes (definitely the first time anyone ever kissed my ear. I didn't know quite what to think about that). All of a sudden that put the easygoing relationship into new and strange and exciting territory.
But that territory didn't get explored. Because he was black.
And it wasn't that I cared. I was thrilled--I already liked him, and was floored that he was even paying attention to me at any level--but I got confronted, by a boy a friend was dating. And told that if I dated that n*** that I would be ostracized and I would certainly never speak to my best friend again. And he meant it. And I knew that because he was in my face, with the crazy eyes.
And so I told that marvelous boy I really liked that it just wouldn't work. I believe the phrase I used was, "it would just be too difficult."
My senior year of high school--and why this happened is still somewhat of a mystery to me--I would eat my lunch out on the lawn in good weather with a few friends. And for whatever reason, we started being attacked by flying fruit. I mean, someone or multiple someones were throwing apples and stuff at our heads--hard baseball throws that really hurt if the aim happened to be right. It seemed to be coming from a group of black guys not too far away, at least, they were aware of what was going on and found it amusing, so they were easy to blame as the culprits. I went and found the assistant principal inside the cafeteria to complain after it had proven to be a regular menace and not just a one-time thing. His suggestion was that we go sit somewhere else. I found this inadequate.
I was pissed. And I was the op-ed editor of the school newspaper, and I launched a full page spread on violence in schools and let the venom fly. It was a symbolic and impotent protest. It was also--I know now--subtly racist, in ways I was completely unaware of, though I suspect that's why Mr. Cockerell made me re-write that thing more times than I can even remember at this point. But what bothers me most, in remembering my outrage, is that I never once thought to ask, why is this happening? I never reached a point where it could even occur to me that there was some reason that might make sense--if not from my point of view, from someone's point of view. I never questioned the assumption that we were lily-white innocent victims of undeserved ire. It wasn't just that we personally were completely innocent--it was that even if it were nothing else than an explosion of racial tensions, that was their fault and had nothing to do with us.
Why tell these stories? Just to publicly confess? To make myself feel bad because white guilt is addictive? To make other people involved feel bad, or to publicly plead for forgiveness or prove, hey, I'm different now?
It's not that, although, of course, the whole premise of "rude truth" is that truth is best shared, crude and unvarnished. It's that I would have been horrified if anyone had ever called me a racist. Or the slightly less condemnatory, "prejudiced." Or suggested that I carried around some bias. Or, suggested none of those things, but pointed out that I was privileged in ways others were not.
It's embarrassing how long it took for me to put all these things together. The turning point was a moment in an ACU prof's office when a classmate came in, typically cheerful demeanor very subdued. Why? Apparently he'd been driving home, past campus, the night before and had gotten pulled over by a cop. Not just pulled over, but asked to get out of the car, and was patted down. Why? No particular reason. He didn't get a ticket, he hadn't done anything wrong. It's just that it was late, and he was black. I realized, listening to that story--told in a completely resigned tone of voice, not particularly angry, just sort of defeated, because after all, it had happened before and it happens all the time--that this would never, never happen to me. I've gotten pulled over. I've even gotten pulled over for no particular reason. But I have never been asked to get out of the car. I have never been searched or patted down. And if I were, I would sue the pants off of whoever violated my rights as a citizen. Because I have the privilege of expecting that these things won't happen to me. I'm not a black man.
A couple years later I tried to lead a discussion about race in my summer "Christianity in Culture" class. One memorable moment: having to stop a comment that began with the ominous phrase, "I'm not racist, but..." I know that phrase. I know what comes after it. "I'm not racist, but, I didn't date a black guy in high school even though I liked him, because he was black." "I'm not racist, but, it was totally unfair that I didn't get into Governor's School just because I'm white." "I'm not racist, but when scary black dudes throw apples at your head for no reason, it's clear that they have a problem and something needs to be done about it."
This is not new stuff, people. This is just my personal version of a conversion story that ought to be everyone's.
This week I've gotten to see the best and the worst of our difficult public discourse on race. The same week that Arizona passed what is, to my mind, an undeniably xenophobic and racist immigration law, I attended a forum at New Brunswick Theological Seminary hosted by the ARTT (Anti-Racism Transition Team) group. It's a weird, schizoid week for me on this issue, and it has me wondering, how do we get from AZ to ARTT? How did I get there? How can we talk about these things directly, honestly, personally, narrativally, in ways that get people to see the invisible?
I certainly wasn't racist. I mean, I had like, three black friends!
But I did notice, and fume, those times when my smarts and talents and invisible privileges were not enough to get me what I wanted and totally deserved. Like the time I was nominated for the North Carolina Governor's School, for Choral Music, and made Darren drive me all the way to wherever that audition was. I didn't get in. And while I knew, and knew right away even during the audition, that I had bombed the sight-singing test (I was so nervous I didn't even sing the octave jump right, and sang a fifth instead), what I focused on in my rejection letter was a sentence inserted, I suppose, to make the let-down easy: something to the effect of, you were a qualified applicant with the necessary skills but due to other considerations like diversity of race and ethnicity, we cannot invite you. The invisibly privileged high school kid that I was translated that into: a black kid got my space. It's not that I'm not good enough; it's that I'm too white, thought I.
I know now--actually I knew then, but now I am grown-up enough to admit it--that my nomination was a sort of fluke, and that a completely untrained singer like myself really just wasn't good enough, and I bombed the audition. There's no mystery here. No conspiracy. No systemic social dysfunction.
But I fumed. It was easier to believe that someone else got a space I deserved than accept that sometimes I would come up against a challenge I couldn't automatically ace.
A few years before that, a much younger and more naive teen, still new to my NC junior high, I auditioned for the senior high school musical (Finian's Rainbow, if you're curious, and yes, I still have the bright yellow T-shirt). During that fantastic experience, the 14-year-old me met a marvelous guy with a speaking role and crazy trumpet-playing skills, as well as a sense of humor, incredible smarts, and an unaccountable habit of paying attention to me. He was fun to talk to and easy to hang out with, despite the fact that he was a couple years older than me--a significant difference after all exists between 9th grade and junior year of high school. My first clue that he "liked" me was that all of a sudden he was kissing my ear, on the stairwell between scenes (definitely the first time anyone ever kissed my ear. I didn't know quite what to think about that). All of a sudden that put the easygoing relationship into new and strange and exciting territory.
But that territory didn't get explored. Because he was black.
And it wasn't that I cared. I was thrilled--I already liked him, and was floored that he was even paying attention to me at any level--but I got confronted, by a boy a friend was dating. And told that if I dated that n*** that I would be ostracized and I would certainly never speak to my best friend again. And he meant it. And I knew that because he was in my face, with the crazy eyes.
And so I told that marvelous boy I really liked that it just wouldn't work. I believe the phrase I used was, "it would just be too difficult."
My senior year of high school--and why this happened is still somewhat of a mystery to me--I would eat my lunch out on the lawn in good weather with a few friends. And for whatever reason, we started being attacked by flying fruit. I mean, someone or multiple someones were throwing apples and stuff at our heads--hard baseball throws that really hurt if the aim happened to be right. It seemed to be coming from a group of black guys not too far away, at least, they were aware of what was going on and found it amusing, so they were easy to blame as the culprits. I went and found the assistant principal inside the cafeteria to complain after it had proven to be a regular menace and not just a one-time thing. His suggestion was that we go sit somewhere else. I found this inadequate.
I was pissed. And I was the op-ed editor of the school newspaper, and I launched a full page spread on violence in schools and let the venom fly. It was a symbolic and impotent protest. It was also--I know now--subtly racist, in ways I was completely unaware of, though I suspect that's why Mr. Cockerell made me re-write that thing more times than I can even remember at this point. But what bothers me most, in remembering my outrage, is that I never once thought to ask, why is this happening? I never reached a point where it could even occur to me that there was some reason that might make sense--if not from my point of view, from someone's point of view. I never questioned the assumption that we were lily-white innocent victims of undeserved ire. It wasn't just that we personally were completely innocent--it was that even if it were nothing else than an explosion of racial tensions, that was their fault and had nothing to do with us.
Why tell these stories? Just to publicly confess? To make myself feel bad because white guilt is addictive? To make other people involved feel bad, or to publicly plead for forgiveness or prove, hey, I'm different now?
It's not that, although, of course, the whole premise of "rude truth" is that truth is best shared, crude and unvarnished. It's that I would have been horrified if anyone had ever called me a racist. Or the slightly less condemnatory, "prejudiced." Or suggested that I carried around some bias. Or, suggested none of those things, but pointed out that I was privileged in ways others were not.
It's embarrassing how long it took for me to put all these things together. The turning point was a moment in an ACU prof's office when a classmate came in, typically cheerful demeanor very subdued. Why? Apparently he'd been driving home, past campus, the night before and had gotten pulled over by a cop. Not just pulled over, but asked to get out of the car, and was patted down. Why? No particular reason. He didn't get a ticket, he hadn't done anything wrong. It's just that it was late, and he was black. I realized, listening to that story--told in a completely resigned tone of voice, not particularly angry, just sort of defeated, because after all, it had happened before and it happens all the time--that this would never, never happen to me. I've gotten pulled over. I've even gotten pulled over for no particular reason. But I have never been asked to get out of the car. I have never been searched or patted down. And if I were, I would sue the pants off of whoever violated my rights as a citizen. Because I have the privilege of expecting that these things won't happen to me. I'm not a black man.
A couple years later I tried to lead a discussion about race in my summer "Christianity in Culture" class. One memorable moment: having to stop a comment that began with the ominous phrase, "I'm not racist, but..." I know that phrase. I know what comes after it. "I'm not racist, but, I didn't date a black guy in high school even though I liked him, because he was black." "I'm not racist, but, it was totally unfair that I didn't get into Governor's School just because I'm white." "I'm not racist, but when scary black dudes throw apples at your head for no reason, it's clear that they have a problem and something needs to be done about it."
This is not new stuff, people. This is just my personal version of a conversion story that ought to be everyone's.
This week I've gotten to see the best and the worst of our difficult public discourse on race. The same week that Arizona passed what is, to my mind, an undeniably xenophobic and racist immigration law, I attended a forum at New Brunswick Theological Seminary hosted by the ARTT (Anti-Racism Transition Team) group. It's a weird, schizoid week for me on this issue, and it has me wondering, how do we get from AZ to ARTT? How did I get there? How can we talk about these things directly, honestly, personally, narrativally, in ways that get people to see the invisible?
Friday, October 10, 2008
we want Barabbas
Seriously? "Terrorist" and "bomb Obama"? People are shouting "Kill him" at Palin rallies?
How literally are we going to take that misguided Christ-reference in the old McCain ad, anyway? All the way to "Crucify him, crucify him"?
How literally are we going to take that misguided Christ-reference in the old McCain ad, anyway? All the way to "Crucify him, crucify him"?
Wednesday, October 08, 2008
disturbing thoughts.
Yesterday I heard about the most upfront racist statement I've ever heard on the radio. No, I wasn't listening to some kind of shock jock and the n-word wasn't used. But the sentiment was palpably racist.
But what's been disturbing me today is not so much the spectre of implicit and unacknowledged racism or all the talk about "the Bradley effect" and how that may undermine Obama come election day.
What's disturbing me today is the realization that, for my own part, I dislike McCain because I recognize that McCain is Not Like Me. (He's hawkish, I have a peace dove tattooed on my foot. Etc.) Now, I hasten to assure myself, "Self, I have good reasons for being Me. So it's okay, there's nothing wrong here. It's a matter of principle and thoughtful rationale, not knee-jerk not-like-me-ness." I'd like to believe myself. But then there's Sarah Palin. Who is also very, very much Not Like Me.
And Obama is, perhaps surprisingly, Like Me. ("professorial!" oh, that warms the cockles of my heart, people!)
"I never really thought about whether or not that I was racist, or however you want to put it," said Tina Graham. She fears Obama would focus on African-Americans at the expense of poor white people like herself. "It's just the fact that I think that he will represent them, and what they want, and what they need. ... They're his people, they're his race." (You can listen to the NPR story here.)While looking up that hyperlink, I was confronted with this story on the NPR homepage: "Searching for a President 'Just Like Us.'" This story is less about implicit racism than the populist appeal at work in both campaigns, but the title arrested my attention; for this is exactly what is at work in the aversion to Obama expressed in the above quote. He's not like me, this VA voter is saying. He is Them. And They are something to be afraid of--what They want and need is different from what We want and need, and we better make sure We elect someone who's going to work for Us. Not Them.
But what's been disturbing me today is not so much the spectre of implicit and unacknowledged racism or all the talk about "the Bradley effect" and how that may undermine Obama come election day.
What's disturbing me today is the realization that, for my own part, I dislike McCain because I recognize that McCain is Not Like Me. (He's hawkish, I have a peace dove tattooed on my foot. Etc.) Now, I hasten to assure myself, "Self, I have good reasons for being Me. So it's okay, there's nothing wrong here. It's a matter of principle and thoughtful rationale, not knee-jerk not-like-me-ness." I'd like to believe myself. But then there's Sarah Palin. Who is also very, very much Not Like Me.
And Obama is, perhaps surprisingly, Like Me. ("professorial!" oh, that warms the cockles of my heart, people!)
Friday, September 26, 2008
update
Go visit Feminary and read awhile. She is always consistently interesting but her last three posts raise some major questions, and quite coincidentally, dovetail with the issues I've been thinking about and discussing the last few days: white privilege, "otherizing" Obama, and the censorship (or attempted obliteration from existence?) of women clergy. Wow. Are we experiencing some weird hormonal synching up of our mental flows?
Clare and I fly back home tomorrow after a couple days hanging out with Granddad and Grandmom and Unkie Brandon. Hopefully, I'll be able to blog a bit about ACU's Summit after arriving. There was some impressive stuff happening there this year, not all of which I was able to attend (sometimes parallel sessions suck! how do you choose btw classes on violence, women & politics, and racism & white privilege? or when friends are teaching simultaneous classes?).
And a shout out to the Kendall-Balls for their hospitality and excellent scotch. Gracias!!! Hope to return the favor someday.
Clare and I fly back home tomorrow after a couple days hanging out with Granddad and Grandmom and Unkie Brandon. Hopefully, I'll be able to blog a bit about ACU's Summit after arriving. There was some impressive stuff happening there this year, not all of which I was able to attend (sometimes parallel sessions suck! how do you choose btw classes on violence, women & politics, and racism & white privilege? or when friends are teaching simultaneous classes?).
And a shout out to the Kendall-Balls for their hospitality and excellent scotch. Gracias!!! Hope to return the favor someday.
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