Race ain't over.
Jul. 9th, 2009 11:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexandraerinI booted someone off my discussion community (and subsequently blocked a comment they tried to leave on a story) for saying, in a tangential discussion, that the word problems of racism left in the United States are "unscrupulous" minorities who play on white liberal guilt.
I've been told this joker went and whined elsewhere on the internet that I'm such a controlling bitch that anyone who dares to suggest there's been any progress regarding race relations will be subjected to a profanity-laced tirade and then banned. No, dude. Just you. And if you really had just suggested that there's been progress, I would agree. But I'd follow up that agreement with the observation that you don't win a long race by stopping after a really good sprint. In fact, to stretch that metaphor a little further, if you're not in great condition for running in the first place, that sprint can stop you in your tracks. Like when people exercise who aren't used to it, and they make a big show of cranking the treadmill up or putting a lot of weights on the bar and they make one big showy push and then go, "Whoo! That's enough of that." and then limp away, trying to pretend like they accomplished something huge.
The evidence this guy pointed to for the lack of actual, non-unscrupulous-minority-directed racism in America was the election of Barack Obama. Which, yay. Milestone. Achievement. Possibly a turning point, but it's far too early to say how big of one... especially when a lot of the folks who'd need to be turning the corner are actually stopping before they get there, limping towards the locker rooms, and slapping each other on the back while bragging about how darn fast they managed to run for that one little burst.
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karynthia:
A swimming pool kicked out a bunch of kids from a camp that had a contract to use the pool because they "changed the complexion" of the establishment.
The movie Beyond The Sea had a dramatization of Bobby Darin's advocacy on behalf of comedian George Kirby being allowed to perform the coveted opening spot as his warm-up act at the Copacabana Club, the crown jewel of the club scene. My understanding is that the broad strokes of the story are correct, but I can't pretend to know the actual details of any conversation or anyone's motivations, so understand I'm talking about the scene in the movie, not presenting it as real life. It works as metaphor.
The scene goes like this: the owner of the Copa tells Bobby Darin that it's not his policy to doesn't let colored performers perform. Bobby reminds him that Sammy Davis, Jr. just played the Copa. The owner replies, "Sammy's a headliner."
Sammy's a headliner.
A star attraction being allowed to do his thing isn't the same thing as an up-and-comer being given a fair shake, which isn't the same thing as anyone being let in through the door. When somebody achieves something, that doesn't prove that anybody can... it's when even the "nobodies" are treated fairly that we're really getting somewhere.
When "integration" means that a rich, successful man who is a darling of the media and who draws a packed house is tolerated for his ability to make a nightclub owner an awful lot of money, it's not integration. The same country that elected Barack Hussein Obama, Jr. to the highest office in the land... favoring him over the candidate who would have been succeeding an unpopular incumbent, against a candidate whose party as associated with a potentially era-defining economic crisis and a series of unpopular conflicts, against a candidate who ran a badly mismanaged campaign characterized more by a series of ill-considered stunts than anything else... also contains stories like the one linked to above.
And those are the ones that garner enough media attention to be noticed by a white person in the middle states.
I don't know how much it seems like I talk about racism, to you folks. It's not my "thing" in general, because... it doesn't have to be. If I were going to be a dedicated blogger against intolerance and injustice, I could probably think of five issues that affect me more than racism. I don't even have to think to come up with three. Any time one of us (i.e., "white us") hears the words "racial privilege" and says, "What privilege? I come from a poor background. My employer is an equal opportunity employer. I never had any advantages. What privilege?", there's a huge chunk of an answer for you: we don't have to care about this shit.
It doesn't have to matter to us that a bus load of kids can be told they're going on a fun outing and go through the trouble of putting on their swim trunks and their little bathing suits and lotioning up and finding their ear plugs and their nose clips and blowing up their arm floaties and going out into the hot sun... and then told the party's over, they have to go home.
Try telling a kid that America's "post-racial" after they've gone through that.
Of course, some people do...
It's not about race They were simply making people uncomfortable. There have been complaints. It's not that we're racist, no, see, we even hire minorities. But you're making the established clientele nervous. Wait, what? I'm sorry, but there is no need for that sort of insinuation... we're just trying to keep a happy customer base and maintain the atmosphere of our club. Why do you people always insist on making it about race? There are people with real problems in the world, and if all you have to worry about is not being allowed to go in a swimming pool, then I guess you don't have it so bad, do you?
*barf*
Do you remember what it was like to be a kid and get all excited about something and then have it snatched away? Even when there was a good reason. God, I had a fingertip cut off when it got caught in a heavy screen door when I was pre-K. We were going to the playground, which was like two houses down from our house and which we consequently got to go to about every single day, but we were going there and I was excited and my brother was excited and in our mutual excitement we managed to get a door swinging shut on my finger. I got taken to the hospital and I had my first experience with stitches and I came home looking like I was 2% mummy, which was pretty cool... and then I asked my mom, "So now we go to the playground, right?"
I think I was more devastated by being told that no, after enduring that pain and that trauma and ordeal, that it was too late and it was dark and I needed rest. That was like adding insult to injury. I don't remember the names of the people I met Tuesday night but I remember that. Disappointment sticks like nothing else.
Of course, when I got even a little bit older, I could look back and know that my mother was only being sensible. Today, I see it as a kind of a cute kids-say-the-darnedest-things, oh-they're-so-resilient story when viewed from the outside. All that pain and injury, and what I really cared about was getting to play on the jungle gym.
But imagine going through something like that, being all excited about something, and then being told no, you can't... and being crushed with disappointment... and that it's not because of something that makes any sense when you get some perspective from it...
"Not being allowed to swim in a chlorinated and filtered commercial swimming pool" might seem like the epitome of what's called a "first world problem", but the lingering effects of that kind of incredibly pointed discrimination transcend any barriers of class or economic status.
And imagine being the camp counselors who got the kids all pumped up for their outing and then have to deal with the fallout. Gah. I can imagine that, in terms of excitement and disappointment, but that's as far as I can take it.
I thinkkarnythia had said all of this much better than I did, possibly many times, with much fewer words: "post-racial my ass".
But then, she's had a lot more opportunities to refine her message.
I've been told this joker went and whined elsewhere on the internet that I'm such a controlling bitch that anyone who dares to suggest there's been any progress regarding race relations will be subjected to a profanity-laced tirade and then banned. No, dude. Just you. And if you really had just suggested that there's been progress, I would agree. But I'd follow up that agreement with the observation that you don't win a long race by stopping after a really good sprint. In fact, to stretch that metaphor a little further, if you're not in great condition for running in the first place, that sprint can stop you in your tracks. Like when people exercise who aren't used to it, and they make a big show of cranking the treadmill up or putting a lot of weights on the bar and they make one big showy push and then go, "Whoo! That's enough of that." and then limp away, trying to pretend like they accomplished something huge.
The evidence this guy pointed to for the lack of actual, non-unscrupulous-minority-directed racism in America was the election of Barack Obama. Which, yay. Milestone. Achievement. Possibly a turning point, but it's far too early to say how big of one... especially when a lot of the folks who'd need to be turning the corner are actually stopping before they get there, limping towards the locker rooms, and slapping each other on the back while bragging about how darn fast they managed to run for that one little burst.
Found via
karynthia:A swimming pool kicked out a bunch of kids from a camp that had a contract to use the pool because they "changed the complexion" of the establishment.
The movie Beyond The Sea had a dramatization of Bobby Darin's advocacy on behalf of comedian George Kirby being allowed to perform the coveted opening spot as his warm-up act at the Copacabana Club, the crown jewel of the club scene. My understanding is that the broad strokes of the story are correct, but I can't pretend to know the actual details of any conversation or anyone's motivations, so understand I'm talking about the scene in the movie, not presenting it as real life. It works as metaphor.
The scene goes like this: the owner of the Copa tells Bobby Darin that it's not his policy to doesn't let colored performers perform. Bobby reminds him that Sammy Davis, Jr. just played the Copa. The owner replies, "Sammy's a headliner."
Sammy's a headliner.
A star attraction being allowed to do his thing isn't the same thing as an up-and-comer being given a fair shake, which isn't the same thing as anyone being let in through the door. When somebody achieves something, that doesn't prove that anybody can... it's when even the "nobodies" are treated fairly that we're really getting somewhere.
When "integration" means that a rich, successful man who is a darling of the media and who draws a packed house is tolerated for his ability to make a nightclub owner an awful lot of money, it's not integration. The same country that elected Barack Hussein Obama, Jr. to the highest office in the land... favoring him over the candidate who would have been succeeding an unpopular incumbent, against a candidate whose party as associated with a potentially era-defining economic crisis and a series of unpopular conflicts, against a candidate who ran a badly mismanaged campaign characterized more by a series of ill-considered stunts than anything else... also contains stories like the one linked to above.
And those are the ones that garner enough media attention to be noticed by a white person in the middle states.
I don't know how much it seems like I talk about racism, to you folks. It's not my "thing" in general, because... it doesn't have to be. If I were going to be a dedicated blogger against intolerance and injustice, I could probably think of five issues that affect me more than racism. I don't even have to think to come up with three. Any time one of us (i.e., "white us") hears the words "racial privilege" and says, "What privilege? I come from a poor background. My employer is an equal opportunity employer. I never had any advantages. What privilege?", there's a huge chunk of an answer for you: we don't have to care about this shit.
It doesn't have to matter to us that a bus load of kids can be told they're going on a fun outing and go through the trouble of putting on their swim trunks and their little bathing suits and lotioning up and finding their ear plugs and their nose clips and blowing up their arm floaties and going out into the hot sun... and then told the party's over, they have to go home.
Try telling a kid that America's "post-racial" after they've gone through that.
Of course, some people do...
It's not about race They were simply making people uncomfortable. There have been complaints. It's not that we're racist, no, see, we even hire minorities. But you're making the established clientele nervous. Wait, what? I'm sorry, but there is no need for that sort of insinuation... we're just trying to keep a happy customer base and maintain the atmosphere of our club. Why do you people always insist on making it about race? There are people with real problems in the world, and if all you have to worry about is not being allowed to go in a swimming pool, then I guess you don't have it so bad, do you?
*barf*
Do you remember what it was like to be a kid and get all excited about something and then have it snatched away? Even when there was a good reason. God, I had a fingertip cut off when it got caught in a heavy screen door when I was pre-K. We were going to the playground, which was like two houses down from our house and which we consequently got to go to about every single day, but we were going there and I was excited and my brother was excited and in our mutual excitement we managed to get a door swinging shut on my finger. I got taken to the hospital and I had my first experience with stitches and I came home looking like I was 2% mummy, which was pretty cool... and then I asked my mom, "So now we go to the playground, right?"
I think I was more devastated by being told that no, after enduring that pain and that trauma and ordeal, that it was too late and it was dark and I needed rest. That was like adding insult to injury. I don't remember the names of the people I met Tuesday night but I remember that. Disappointment sticks like nothing else.
Of course, when I got even a little bit older, I could look back and know that my mother was only being sensible. Today, I see it as a kind of a cute kids-say-the-darnedest-things, oh-they're-so-resilient story when viewed from the outside. All that pain and injury, and what I really cared about was getting to play on the jungle gym.
But imagine going through something like that, being all excited about something, and then being told no, you can't... and being crushed with disappointment... and that it's not because of something that makes any sense when you get some perspective from it...
"Not being allowed to swim in a chlorinated and filtered commercial swimming pool" might seem like the epitome of what's called a "first world problem", but the lingering effects of that kind of incredibly pointed discrimination transcend any barriers of class or economic status.
And imagine being the camp counselors who got the kids all pumped up for their outing and then have to deal with the fallout. Gah. I can imagine that, in terms of excitement and disappointment, but that's as far as I can take it.
I think
karnythia had said all of this much better than I did, possibly many times, with much fewer words: "post-racial my ass".But then, she's had a lot more opportunities to refine her message.
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no subject
on 2009-07-10 09:27 am (UTC)Can I give them the benefit of the doubt and assume instead that they're reasonably intelligent people who simply have a blindspot about race?
If not, then why would this company sign a contract to allow 65 swimmers into their pool? We can assume they crunched numbers, they looked at their capacity and the money they make off a group rate like that versus their odds of attracting that many individual members using the pool on those particular specified days. And they offered the deal.
o what changed when the kids showed up? What new information gave them the power to recognize their mistake? Why were these sixty five children... who had already been slotted for and allotted for... suddenly "crowding" the pool?
As for it being a "reasonable realistic non-racist complaint"... I would bet if we had a perfect psychic brain wave examining machine, we could go to most of the parents/members who complained and scan their brains for the answer to the question, "Is racism wrong?" and the machine would have gone, "YES IT IS WRONG", and then the answer to the question, "Is it okay to deny people access to something based on the color of their skin?" and the machine would tell us, "NO IT IS NOT OKAY"... and possibly the same would even be true of the people who made the decision to expel the camp and cancel their contract.
And that doesn't prove it's not racist. People who know it's wrong to steal still do so, in what they think of as tiny and incidental ways that don't count and that no one will know about, ways that aren't so bad compared to others. That's how we end up cheating on tests and on our diets and on our lovers. A person can be morally and ethically opposed to something and still indulge in it. We are, as a species, geniuses at self-justification.
Racism does not consist solely of people who say "I HATE THE BLACKS AND I HATE THE MEXICANS AND I'M GLAD WE THREW THEM OUT." I would hazard that the tiny core of die hard racists who actually think, feel, and act that way are probably not the biggest or worst component of racism in America.
Sure they were kicked out because the pool was crowded. Certainly it was a rude shock for the patrons to show up on what was probably a previously slow day of the week and find the pool filling up with noisy, rambunctious kids. But so much goes into our perceptions of what it is to be "crowded", what it takes before X number of people in Y amount of space press upon you to the point that you can't help be intensely aware of them, what behaviors we notice to the point that they register as disruptive.
The club members didn't know that camps were allowed in? What the fuck does that even mean? The club allegedly had open enrollment. That means that supposedly all sixty five of these children could have been signed up as individuals by their parents, and assuming the pool was not over its rated capacity (I think that's a fair assumption since if it had been we'd be hearing that as the official excuse) they could all have shown up to swim on the same day.
But this is a "predominantly white" club, we're told... possibly this has to do with the neighborhood it's in, possibly it has to do with economic factors, possibly it has to do with a general perception that it's a "predominantly white club", a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts, and possibly--likely--it's a confluence of all of these things. Whatever it is, it means that these particular kids wouldn't have been showing up in numbers without the group deal for camps.
Whether or not the people who complained ever thought to themselves, "I DON'T WANT TO SHARE A POOL WITH BLACK KIDS", this is still racism in action. It's not as simple and clear cut as "GOSH I HATE THOSE PEOPLE", which makes it harder to acknowledge and less satisfying to denounce.
no subject
on 2009-07-10 05:56 pm (UTC)That actually IS what I'm saying. Not that they like losing money, of course, but that they made a mistake in offering the deal then taking it away. Shitty businesspeople are everywhere and when they screw over a customer it's not always due to racism. The members may have been racist, but does that make the owners racist by association?
I've recently been a little screwed over by a car accident. The police wouldn't talk to me to get my side or explain things to me. The insurance company wouldn't call me back after I left message after message and the body shop delayed taking even a LOOK at my car til a month later. I've been lied to, treated condescendingly and rudely, and just been plain SCREWED OVER.
If I were black, I bet I could claim I was discriminated against. But I'm not. So I just get screwed over and it may just be for no reason at all. Not every inconvenience is to blame for racism, and to be treated like I'm not as inconvenienced because I'm white, well... frankly it sounds like racism.
no subject
on 2009-07-10 06:08 pm (UTC)You know that it would not be credible that you were inconvenienced in that situation for being white... not plausible to the point that it's something you have any reason to actively wonder or worry about on a day-to-day basis, when you encounter inconveniences... when you get singled out for attention from officials... when you get turned away or scrutinized. You don't have to waste brain cycles trying to decode the meaning and cause of such interactions. You don't have to shore up your will to keep going and to continue doing the things you were doing when you encounter such obstacles against the possibility that it will happen again because of your skin color.
In short, you are not as inconvenienced because you're white. Oh, no, does that sound racist? Try not to drown in the river of tears I'm crying for you.
AND HELL FUCKING YES IT MAKES THE OWNERS RACIST, NOT BY ASSOCIATION BUT BY DINT OF THEIR OWN ACTIONS.