metraboy online: august 14, 2000
i just had one of those everyone-is-being-stubborn-and-i-feel-like-i-am-being-shoved-agasint-the-wall kinda arguments with my co-workers. i'm not sure why i always feel that way when i argue, but i even get a picture in my head (have you ever wished that you could physically see the things that you picture visually in your thoughts? i wish that all the time) of me being an animal, pushed against a grey, brick, dripping with dank water wall.anyway, we were arguing about how much you can expect (key word here) people to know about race relations. we talked about how people say that they are "jewed" down (something i used to think was just a run-together way of saying "chewed"), or "gypped" (which is a racial epithet, too), and how people don't know the anti-Irish sentiment of "Paddy" Wagon. This was in relation to a co-worker referring to a predominantly black neighboorhood of Chicago as "spooky," which I saw as meaning scary and a co-worker thought could be meaning "a bunch of spooks" (another racial term).
We also discussed a cartoon that was published in our daily paper this year where an adult living as a kind of watchdog in then dorms was portrayed as a king-kong-like gorilla. it was later found out that the man being lampooned was black and so this could be seen as a racist cartoon. i know the guy who did the cartoon and i know that he did this accidentally--he would never have done it on purpose.
i would not, and did not, get the racist message out of the cartoon because i never knew that calling blacks "apes" was something that can be historically documented. i told my co-workers that "you can't expect everyone to know every single thing that offends everyone" (he said, "i can, and i do")and tried to illustrate how many things fly under your radar when you grow up white in a white town where you never even talked to someone who was black until you were 17 or 18 years old.
i would consider both of my parents to be racist. i think that perhaps i am, perhaps anyone who is afraid of being beat-up in a crime infested part of the city because they are white is.
but what i tried to tell my co-worker is that you can't expect people to know better. there isn't a class that eveyrone takes about what is offensive and what isn't, no one can fault you for what you don't know. if you are ignorant, truly ignorant, you don't know better and are as innocent as the child ho gets told that they can't have someone over for their birthday party because she is black even though you don't ee her as a black girl you see her as your friend. i don't think that you can fault someone for not having the initiative to be self-taught about all of the years of oppression and the history of race relations in this country anymore than you can fault the child who calls a movie "gay" who doesn't know that this is not something that should be done.
you can defintely shake your head in disbelief. you can get angry, you can ask why and how people can be so ignorant.
but i don't think that you can fault that person. some people just don't know better.
love,
metraboy
p.s. i would love email on this topic. hook me up.
last updated august 2, 2000
When I see you a blanket of stars covers me in bed"
--counting crows, "mrs. potter's lullaby"