#ask poc questions! it's respectful! listen to them without adding your opinion! | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

everydayanth · 4 years

Text

Some Observations On Talking About Race With White People:

Context: I am a white person. I studied anthropology and then went and traveled all around the US and talked to a lot of people about race. With so many people urging white people to use their voice and privilege to begin discussions with other white people in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, here are some things that I’ve learned:

1. It is exhausting.

You have to start from the most simple kernels of truth and work backwards from there with a lot of people. Many of whom have never in their lives thought about their skin color and what it means or says, who have never questioned their position as a majority or been in a society that asks them to. You start with the basic pieces and talk in circles for them or else they dismiss you. You feel like shit but laugh at some of their jokes so that you can talk about the issues or else they’ll just leave and dismiss the idea as liberal or you as a millennial, you understand the push and pull and the tug-of-war game you’re playing, but it’s still exhausting. Maybe you have a breakthrough and it’s worth it. But it doesn’t end. You might make progress one day and the person reverts back to old habits the next. But you keep going. You keep trying.

Keep trying. People change.

2. Keep trying, but stay safe.

There’s a lot of psychology involved, and knowing how to get through to someone is a skill but can be dangerous. Facing that obligation to talk to people in the face of racism and violence can give your courage, but sometimes it can make you stupid. Sometimes walking away is important. Sometimes simply not laughing at the joke is enough because there is no place to start. Sometimes you wish you could peel off your own skin because you don’t want to look like them, you are horrified at the idea that someone might think you are like them, there is a dread and that’s okay. It’s good, it means you are not like them because of your fear. When challenging people, especially in their psychology and philosophy and the way they think about life and the world around them, it is enough to keep trying. Sometimes to keep trying, you have to walk away.

3. Context matters.

In order to romanticize eras and think nostalgically of times when they were not alive or don’t have full context of, some white people will ignore the extra efforts minorities had to go through to fit in, and the silenced violence and struggle. For many older white people, individualism is a threat and they value homogenous cultural identities, romanticizing pop-culture eras like the 20s or 50s without stopping to reflect on the media/historical interpretation vs reality. There is a pervasive view that there was less racism in the 80s, or another era around then, because there was a predominant popular culture, without ever taking the time to stop and consider the extra lengths minorities had to go through to fit that culture, or how they were limited in representation and ability by a larger oppressive system. I really like the quote going around by Will Smith that “racism isn’t getting worse, it’s getting filmed.” But for many white Americans, what they see in the evening news and on their personalized social media feeds does not challenge them, but reinforces their bubbles to say “no, it wasn’t like this in the 50s/60s/70s/80s.”

There are plenty of ways to trick our minds into believing our own world views to avoid challenge or growth, and for some white people, reminding them of the biases of their context with details like: in 1929, Martin Luther King Jr., Anne Frank, and Barbara Walters were all born; with something as simple as that, contemporary familiarity has been added and placed over two names so heavily associated with the Civil Rights Movement and WWII for American-educated white people. Or talking about Ruby Bridges walking into a white school in 1960 and how many of our parents and grandparents were alive at the time, helps recognize that this isn’t new and it’s not that old. Explaining why the southwest US is so “Mexican” because when the US bought the land there were people living there, and asking about why they thought the land was empty (”history books/class”) and what they thought happened to the people (”I never thought about it”) has been the beginning of a redemption arc for several people.

Talking to ignorant white people about what’s currently happening in the world when they ignore it forces them to think about it. Keeping police brutality and racism in conversation forces people to look into it for fear of not contributing to social conversations or not being in the know, and having those conversations face-to-face means they are more than random tweets or social media opinions. Talking matters, conversations matter, context matters, and challenging people (and yourself) and their ideas and world views matters.

4. Sometimes you lose.

There is a comfort in a homogenous society, an easy way to spot the outsider. Many of the most racist people I’ve met and chatted with retain an us-vs-them mentality that happily accepts POC who they know personally, while generalizing and labelling all others as a threat and outsiders. There is a fear perpetuated by false information and lack of context that takes so long to dismantle it hardly feels worth it.

This mentality is often recognizable by its discomfort with language it doesn’t know, obsession with brands and their perceived identity, and patronizing explanations of just about everything. It takes so much patience to get through the arrogance and sometimes the other person is “just having fun” or “playing devil’s advocate to see what you really think” or “you should read x, y, and z, then you’ll get it.” There’s an arrogance sometimes and wading through that muck to get to the bigger problems can take a while. Spotting the hypocrisy can be infuriating.

It’s okay to stop and take a step back out of fear that you might hurt someone else by changing the person’s limited-accepting view. For example: by challenging a racist person ranting about “China is bad” and asking then why they accept their kid’s Chinese friend, you may fear risking that child’s friendship as the racist person talks themselves into believing they shouldn’t be friends. Sometimes letting a person rant about the exceptions to their view is a place to start a conversation about diversity and tolerance and acceptance and culture, but sometimes walking away defeated is more important and okay.

5. You are combatting fear and it isn’t rational.

The fear of losing authority extends a strong arm into political language, rhetoric, discourse and control. The fear of being controlled by masses and not having individualism, even while forcing others to conform, is an irony many willingly admit and agree with through that paternal view: I can be contradictory and demand free speech without consequence while telling you to stop with threats of government/legal action, but you can’t. There is a paternalism that stems from privilege and religion. It is exhausting to combat. It says drug users need to be locked up because it’s what’s best for them; it says abortion is wrong because I believe in a soul, because I am Christian, because my church says there is a soul present, and so my religion says it is wrong, therefore I want it illegal because of that and I know what is best for women. It says girls who are assaulted asked for it because paternalism requires a solid foundation of black-and-white truths in order to determine right or wrong and good or bad. That mentality struggles to see grey, to understand their own biases and why the political language matters in the first place.

This means it is often in favor of other black-or-white extremes such as strict gender roles, anti LGBTQ+, or anything else like race that involves a spectrum of identity values rather than a scale of one side or another. This also means there is more room for conspiracy and ungrounded theory to fill in, because a black-or-white mentality demands explanations for things it can no longer explain through the denial of spectrums – if you look at the color purple and have to decide if it’s red or blue and those are your only options, you have to have a reason to put it one place or the other, but regardless of the reason, both may be true since color doesn’t exist on a one-or-the-ther scale but a spectrum. This means there are reasons for their way of thinking, but they are often not logical or expressible in language that makes sense or discourse that can be dissected; it is devoid of introspection and often projects and lashes out at language and the way something is presented rather than the thing itself. Learning to get around that with simple examples of context and explanations that don’t rely on academic language is crucial to communicating with some people.

6. Being an ally is not easy, you have to listen and be willing to fail and grow.

I was ignorant at first, when talking to POC friends (and probably still am in some ways). I didn’t understand that I was unfamiliar, as a white person talking about racism and social issues, until a POC friend confided that they’ve never heard a white person capable of talking about race or understanding the complexities of the scale before. Suddenly I understood the generalization that white people are stupid and privileged. We built a bridge between us, simply by being open to a conversation about race, and then by later realizing and respecting that my openness will be challenged at first, because the majority of experiences for my own POC friends at the time were white people being ignorant or dismissive of race. I am not infallible, I make mistakes, but looking at how and why is the part that matters, and realizing that I also represent an experience and a race, and that I also have expectations, was an important moment for me. Understanding the balance of influence and being able to face it without the intent to take, but with the intent to understand, is important. Starting from the understanding that we all have biases, we are all racist based on our context in the sense that we judge people to protect ourselves, and that skin is a visible marker we often use for culture and heritage, we begin understand race’s role in modern society, and then we can talk about it.

I will also admit this was a point of pride for me. I am white, but I tan well and have dark wavy hair and my grandparents are immigrants so I know my heritage cultures. I have been mistaken for many ethnicities based on my location and other identity markers like clothing and body language, which initially made it easier for me to personally talk about race with others without waiting for permission, because I can relate. White women have walked up and grabbed my hair before, I have been in embarrassing situations where I didn’t match the expected environment or was judged for not properly coding-switching my language. I have been the only white person in many rooms, growing up in a black neighborhood; I have experience with poverty and was on the same free hot-lunch programs as my neighbors, and we avoided the same corners and colors together; I have been accused of trying too hard and not enough, talked to in random languages on the street with expected understanding, and I have a conservative family to remind me over and over again how hard I had to work at building this mentality and how oddly lucky I am that the world around me and my own curiosity made me constantly question those views.

It’s important to choose your battles and learn from your mistakes, to recognize your growth, to question and doubt yourself, but one of the most important things I’ve come to learn about being white and talking about race with POC is the ability to empathize without needing to relate. You don’t need permission to talk about race. You are one. Everything I said about my experiences just now? At the end of the day, I learned, none of it matters. It doesn’t matter where I grew up or what my experiences are, because I can’t relate to everything and knowing the limits is important. But the other side of that is knowing how to relate to the end emotion with empathy, even in your limitations. You can’t relate with everything and that’s true for everyone, but you can try to understand people and their emotion, you can empathize without first-hand experience by being vulnerable.

Many conversations that I’ve had with white people involve the insistence that they are more than white, like what I just did above, to prove that I can have a seat at the table: look at all these exceptions I have, validate my experience. That’s not important, and I’ve found time and time again that white people (myself included at one point) value that, first out of fear of being insensitive and racist, but also out of a fear of being rejected and invalidated. The best conversations I’ve had with POC about race had to start with me validating myself and my own experiences with an open mind, ready to understand theirs.

If you are white and you look to join or start a conversation about race with validation from others, that’s not starting from vulnerability or the potential that you’re wrong, it’s starting with the expectation that they give you something, and that never invites understanding or sincerity from either side. You have to be willing to learn and be wrong and know where you stand on your own, with your own validation, before you can begin to talk with others about their experiences or understand and empathize and grow.

You have to be willing to shine a light instead of be the voice. The best example I have of this is the 1968 Black Power salute. Sympathetic to the cause of fellow athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos, Peter Norman, the bronze medalist and a white Australian, asked what he could do and he listened. They asked him not to raise his fist. In solidarity, he wore a pin, opening himself up to the harsh criticism of conservatives at the time. He was willing to suffer the backlash without demanding a role in the symbol, and I think that by doing that, he shows how to be an ally, how to talk about racism and listen and understand the meanings behind things. When Peter Norman died, Tommie Smith and John Carlos were pallbearers at his funeral, and I think that says a lot about friendship and alliance. Sometimes, you can’t relate to POC experiences, but you can listen, and you can understand.

7. Fear is the root.

Fear of sharing, of not having enough, of being tricked or taken advantage of. It is manufactured and created through our own context bubbles and media, and some of it is naturally culminated because of those propagating pieces, so people think it’s okay, that their racism is important, that it protects them.

We fear unfamiliar things, but pointing out to people that they are the ones who are ignorant and naive is tricky. The psychology that makes people deny and exist on a black-vs-white spectrum is nearly 100% a protection from feeling out of control, based on fears and a lack of personal context. Meaning that the most racist and judgmental people often rarely see people who are different from them in skin color (or when they are different in skin color, they blend in economic class or religion, etc.). They don’t have context to things outside of themselves, their familiarity is limited.

This is where the issues of white people thinking all [insert any minority here] “look alike.” Because of their lack of context, the key traits they notice are those in contrast to other white people rather than other people in general; rather than noticing a pointed chin or square face, a heavy brow or long nose, a white person without diverse contexts of faces or people might simply notice skin complexion or epicanthic folds and nothing else, they might not even consider body shape, because they are around other people of diverse shapes and heights. This is not an excuse, it’s sad, but it helped me understand where to start several conversations with racist people ranting about race, by considering their own lack of personal context. Starting with race being a cultural construct often, in my experience, does not work here, though I often found myself starting there and working backwards until I learned more about fear and politics and how people use them together to retain control in their lives.

Explaining how minority cultures are “good” can help, but often there is that rebounding psychology that says familiar is good, unfamiliar = bad. The fear of losing the majority, the upper-hand, the paternalist authority of determining right/wrong based on their views and forcing assimilation on others is deep-seated and rampantly unconscious, and that’s the dangerous part. In some conversations a simple “oh, you’re scared of losing your power” has changed an already-introspective person for the better in such an epiphany moment that reaffirms starting at the very basics with many white people - do you recognize that you have power here? And in many cases they recognize the existence of privilege but not the details of it, discussing those details can also add important context. But fear often makes people reluctant to understand, so looking at their own fears can be a place to start.

There is also a fear of losing parts of the self. For some white people, their travels or appropriative behaviors are the most interesting things about them (according to them), and so the idea of talking about race becomes a conversation challenging their own identities, which encompasses a fear of losing those identities. This is a tricky road for me, because I understand the exciting allure of learning new things and exploring new cultures. I think I can be susceptible to exoticism and tokenism, but that’s also what makes it important to talk about, because I challenge myself at the same time. That becomes a conversation about intent and meaning and culture, and I think it’s important to remember, as a white person talking to other white people, that you do not wear a badge of honor giving you permission to accuse and assume.

It can be easy to generalize and build assumptions about people, but there are other white people willing to talk about race, there are people who look white and are not at all, and by assuming people’s fears or intentions or consequences, you can easily become the asshole. For example: shamefully, I will admit that I talked to a “white girl” who was really into yoga once, and I made an internal judgement about her, but in conversation, it came up that she grew up in India, speaks Hindi and a bunch of other languages, and works as a translator. That was embarrassing for me, though I never said anything out loud, and I think that’s important too – that we analyze our internal judgements and think about them. I spent some time thinking about my initial judgement, what changed, and what I considered “acceptable” appropriation or identifiable appropriation and “acceptable” displays of culture and value, and I found that it’s complicated. It’s important to be aware of ourselves and not fall into a self-righteousness that ends up demanding to be the voice of others, but to listen and have conversations with those around us.

8. Context matters part II.

Talking proud white people through the history of European cultures before Rome, and explaining their own heritage, if available, has continually seen those white Americans stop and question what they know of their history and timeline. Talking about tribes and clans and nomadic groups, basically anything during the Roman Empire that wasn’t Rome, has forced many people to pause and question what they know of empire and colonization and conquest and all that they know of “right” and “good” and resource stockpiling, because suddenly there is a before, where they had only ever learned of the after.

Positioning their own heritage in a perspective that adamantly opposes the idea that guns and colonization were a natural progression of society, and instead asks why and answers: because they were built to invade and take, has made many people pause, and others simply nod and say yes, and that’s why it’s mine now. Which is chilling and frustrating, but does shed light on where to go next. Many white Americans were taught history in the context of victories and kings and presidents and drama, not slavery, servitude, or lives of normal people. Positioning their heritage as one of a conquered people enslaved by Rome suddenly has them questioning that same story they learned about the Trail of Tears and Native American history. And those moments of questioning, of being offered new information that challenges their familiar order of thoughts and cultural context, that can make all the difference.

9. People look different for #reasons.

The single most efficient tool that I have found to really make a difference in the way people see other people is educating them on what the differences mean. Because, in the same way that understanding why someone hurt you makes forgiving them easier, understanding why someone looks different from you makes seeing them as a whole easier.

Explaining to people things like: how skin color works, what it does to protect us, how history and culture and things like slavery and migration impact it, how hair works, what coils, kinks, and curls do for heat dispersion, what big lips or rounded jaws or epicanthic folds or big noses or curvy booties mean, how a human population’s general shape is impacted by their environment, and that it’s ALL IN THE NAME OF THERMOREGULATION, has made so many people go “oh wow, I never knew that, that’s so cool!” And suddenly skin color, hair texture, body shape, etc. are not longer a single reflection of a person’s culture or heritage, but an organ their body is using to maintain their health and keep them alive.

Telling someone that, based on genetic diversity of populations and a bunch of other stuff like migration and cultural mating habits, they are more likely to find a doppelgänger that looks most like them in another race, has also helped. Out of all your human traits and phenotypic markers, you are more likely to find another human with your similar body/face shapes and structure, but with a different skin color. Showing people these pictures and talking about two friends I had in college who looked exactly alike but one was from Afghanistan and the other from Mexico generally gets people interested in looking at people more intently.

[Note: sometimes it can be harder to find obvious pictures of women/LGBTQ+ individuals with different-race doppelgängers because of the use of makeup, cultural expectations of beauty, and general oppression and erasure of minority cultures, POC, and women, so these are mostly white men who look like other men.]

There you go, some observations about talking about race with white people as a white person. This is all I can do right now, in the midst of the suffering and grief, the fear and continual horror. A few observations stitched together, a little encouragement, some hot tips that have worked for me, and a whole lot of defeated sighing that I know isn’t fair. At the end of the day, I know it’s not all I can do, that it is what I can do. It is a position I take up because I know how easily I can walk through the door of the “white club,” and I have accepted the responsibility of stirring it up and getting people talking about social issues like racism.

It’s a strange thing, to automatically belong and hate it, to not fit an ideology but be expected to from the outside; I suspect we’ve all felt that one way or another, since it’s the subject of pretty much every popular franchise and story, it has to resonate in a big way somehow. So I know I’m not alone there, I know we’re all exhausted and feeling that there is no progress, that there’s nothing to do, that talking isn’t enough, that we’re stuck inside while people outside are suffering and there’s not a goddamned thing we can do, but it’s a lie.

We can talk to people. It takes a long time, and you can be tired, and you can be down about it, and you can be frustrated, but it matters, so you can’t give up. The urging of white people to talk to other white people is important. It makes a difference. You might not see it right away, but it matters.

If you keep at it, you’ll see some of the changes you can make: one day, that racist person starts to tell a joke and you see them stop and think for a minute and then say “you know, actually maybe that’s inappropriate.” Or you see that racist person start to get uncomfortable around their racist friends, or they start asking more complex questions about society, their opinions take longer to form, they ask for sources on information, they slowly grow more comfortable talking about social topics. There are some people I’ve been talking to regularly about this stuff for over a decade and they have not changed in anyway, but in the process of talking to them, in person or on social media, people around them noticed and began to think and question, messaging me to talk more or to say thank you. Changes happen, and people change.... slowly.

It can be scary to talk to white people about race, but if you are white, it is what you can do. Because no matter how you feel about it, at the end of the day, you walk in the door of the white club unbarred. That is a privilege, and that’s what people mean when they say “use your privilege.”

I hope this helps someone a little bit, because even though I keep at it, even though I know it’s what I can do, it still feels like all I can do, and it never feels like enough.

#racism #race #identity #culture #society #anthropology #cultural anthropology #observations #white people #philosophy #psychology #fear #privilege #white privilege #social science

53 notes · View notes