Check Your Own Biases

Last week, a friend posted a powerful story on Facebook about an incident that happened to her on the train.  She described the scene and told the story of someone who had been wronged, outraged, spurting profanity and racial slurs, being ignored, and how bravely she came to the person's aid.  She  cleverly told this story without any mention of the persons race and at the end of the story, asked what the person looked like in our mind's eye.  She also asked us to fill in the blanks for the racial slurs he had spurted.  Maybe because of the current BLM climate, I assumed the person was black, which was wrong.  In fact the scene she described and the picture in my mind was very different.  We often incorrectly label things in our minds to try to make sense of things...

And we make assumptions. This is what jumping to conclusions will do.  When people make decisions with their emotions and fears.  My mother and I immigrated from Japan and I grew up in St. Louis.  I learned about this country from a southern states perspective.  I learned English while using racist vocabulary against black people without knowing I was doing it. It was learned.  I knew that when people called me "chink" or told jokes such as "how do you name a Chinese baby?  You drop a metal bowl down the stairs", it was hurtful and wrong, but in my eight year old mind, it was more hurtful because I was being called Chinese.  And in the learned racist mind of a Japanese child, the Chinese are inferior to the Japanese. The levels of racism are very complex.  

Racism is learned and ingrained. It happens when one group of people think they are better than another.  My mother moved us out of University City so that I could go to a "better "school.  Sure, Ladue looked good on paper, but in my mind, the diversity of the U-City school system was much better.  We lived in a lower economic neighborhood than most of the other Ladue High School students, but there were always worse.  The worse was a neighborhood within walking distance called Indian Meadows- renamed as "Indian Ghettos" by local kids probably so we could feel superior. Indian Ghettos was primarily a black neighborhood, and I never though twice when referring to it by that name.  There are so many things we've said and say still that we are clueless or and have nefarious origins.  If you are curious there is actually a website" http://www.rsdb.org/ though some of them don't make sense to me.  For example why would it be bad for a white person to be called Abe Lincoln? 

I took an American History summer school class between my Junior and Senior year, and was fascinated and sickened by the Civil war.  What stood out for me at the time was how even poor white people in the North actually supported slavery, because if there were slaves, they would never be the lowest man on the racist totem pole. White trash trumps having dark skin apparently, which seems to be a thought most Racist Asshole supporters have.   Privilege comes in so many forms and no matter how small that privilege is, one tends to hold onto it at all costs. It's like the ridiculous separations that airlines make with cloth stanchions to make one group feel more superior than another.  You are fooling yourself if you feel superior because you get to walk down the left side of the barrier 30 seconds before everyone else.

Over the weekend on NPR's Weekend Edition, there was an interesting discussion on race, racism and allyship, with commentators Jay Caspian Kang and William Garcia-Medina.  Where do Asians and Hispanic American's fit in the BLM movement?  

People tend to say,  "I cannot be a racist because...

I have dark skin

I have been discriminated against

my wife is black

I have black friends

etc...but is that enough to be an ally?

Latinos And Asians Grapple With Racism, Allyship Amid Ongoing Protests