A World of Cheese, For your Pleasure

The All-Seeing Eye

Researchers have shown that we are more honest when we think that people are watching us. Sounds trivial, except when you realize that this works whether there are real people watching you or not. That is, people tend to be more honest when there are pictures of watchful eyes within sight of a high "crime" area. Humans are so simple sometimes. They are testing the theory in actual crime spots in England right now.

Cool white trash

Why is white trash cool? Probably for the same reason that major race issues are short-lived in most people's minds. It's what's on. And that's probably why it is okay to use the term in mainstream TV in North America. I've always wondered why it is acceptable to say that when it isn't acceptable (as far as I'm concerned) to use the term nigger in everyday parlance. When you dumb people down with entertainment, pretty much anything goes.

Holy vagina!

Originally from August 22, 2006

Doesn't it look like a nun with her hands by her mouth?

A terrible instance of shirking your civic duty to not be an asshole or...

...yet another typical example of black youth? I suppose it depends on your point of view, doesn't it? A Filipina was beaten by a group of 13 black students for "looking Chinese". I am not bringing race into this story. It's already there. I am commenting on it.

First the obvious. If it were 13 white kids beating up on a black kid, or any non-black group for that matter, what would this be? Racism at the very least. A clear example of how America (or whatever) hates blacks. The black kids that did the beating would probably shout from the rooftops about how wrong it is (not that the person got beaten, but that they got beaten because they were black). Yet somehow it's all right that they can beat the crap out of some girl because she "looks Chinese". How did they get to the point where they think that this is justified? I strongly suspect that justification of their actions has nothing to do with it. You know, Jena 6 comes to mind.

These incidents piss me off because like it or not, black people need to act better than their peers because of the position that we are in in this society. Crap like this just sets us back and makes people justify their own bigotry.

What they do not realize is that their actions affect me, sometimes directly. Clarification: Even if they did realize, they certainly did not care. They were kids, but you cannot possibly tell me that they didn't know better. If they didn't, they shouldn't be walking around free, they should have been under strict supervision. Now, they should be in a detention center.

How does this affect me? When you are not fully part of the majority culture, everything other members of your group does reflects on you, personally, unless you are well known to some of the members of that culture. I get suspicious looks from certain store owners because of the actions of some people that look like me, even though even at a glance, I look nothing like the ones that get in the news for foolish reasons. This is why some say that I am "not like the others". This might be true, but it also means that the others, the ones that apparently represent black North Americans as a whole, the ones you see on TV, are undesirables. Let's look at that a little.

Even though there are somewhere around 350 million people in North America, there are still around 45 million black people. 45 million. And yet there are still millions of whites who have never seen (and may never see) a non-white person in real life. This means that every single notion of who I—ME—who I am comes from the news, sports or music. And you cannot tell me that that is supposed to represent me in any way. But I am not well-known, so it's entirely possible that when a white person sees me, they might assume that I am aggressive, not that smart and pretty physically endowed (in various ways).

The actions of these teens only screws things up for everyone else. They are ambassadors. It wouldn't surprise me if people close to them protested any punishment that came to them. I understand that there may be a collective black trauma going on, but it still does not explain what happened to this girl. And the level of blind hatred! Can't they see that this is exactly what lynchings are? Maybe they don't even know what that is and why it's important to them. I am told that the civil rights movement in the US is very much a distant memory, and nothing that young people need to care about. This could be part of the lack of responsibility that so many of them feel.

We don't need white people making and hanging nooses for us. We can do that on our own, thank you.

Comments

I know that you can't leave comments. I am still working on that. I am having different problems there compared to the other blog. I strongly encourage you to register in order to bypass these problems. I know that it's a bit of a pain, but at least you only have to sign in once every two weeks in order to leave a comment.

Is racism over?

Tami has made an interesting commentary on race relations in the US. She describes herself as "wife, feminist, writer, stepmother, black woman, sister, nappy advocate, American, yogi, daughter, student, Midwesterner, progressive, gardener, eccentric". I encourage you to read the whole thing to really get an idea of what she is talking about. She begins with discussing the incident with Don Imus, a former CBS sports personality who was dismissed for making racist comments, but then got a cozy radio job just a few months later. (I am not saying that he should never work again, by the way.) Why do racist incidents provoke little reaction once they leave the headlines? Is racism over, like a reality TV series, or a season of 24?

When you talk about racism and racists to white people, it seems that these days there is one of two main reactions: either they try to give examples of racism against white people as if that responds to the specific topic or excuses the behaviour of racist whites, or their body language says, "What, that again? That was, like, dealt with already!" The second reaction is the more sinister of the two, I think. I believe I've mentioned it here before, but what we are facing is either the reduction of racism to some-minor-thing-that-happens-once-in-a-while-to-someone-else-so-who-cares, or a backlash against minorities because

1. White guilt sucks, so fuck that;
2. I'm not a bigot but these X people are flogging a dead horse because these incidents happened way back, like fifty years ago
3. I AM a bigot and there ought to be more laws against these X people "taking over".

It's quite probable that part of the cycle of incident, media hype, silence, no progress, repeat exists because no one believes that the problem can be solved. And I suppose this isn't necessarily an unreasonable position. If it cannot be solved, then why should a person actually care about further incidents? Why shouldn't the person just carry on the way things were? If this happens, then the very best that meaningful debate on race issues could hope for is prime time hype. And this, of course makes meaningful action hard to come by. I certainly have no real solutions.

But that is a very poor attitude, especially since the truth is that people are affected in profound ways by racism, past, present and even future (expected and anticipated). I would feel pretty desperate if I believed that I could not get a decent loan for a home anywhere because I am black, and desperate people do desperate things. This happens all the time, just not nearly as often to certain members of society.

Which brings us to what I think is the crux of the issue: white privilege and hegemony. In whites, there is usually complete ignorance. I bet that most people, often enough (in my view) known as Canadians, never give it a second, or first thought. And I bet that most non-white Canadians often feel it every day, but can't verbalize exactly what it is that seems off even if no one is calling them names or refusing them entry to establishments or what-have-you. This person has listed 50 ways in which white people benefit where others either do not benefit, or suffer. One way in which this privilege manifests itself is that white people can treat racial problems as nothing other than a nuisance, or entertainment, but nothing they really need to worry about. Until it could affect them, that is. And who controls the media? Some say the Jews, some say whites, but I can say with certainty that it isn't blacks, not even in black American media. (Respect to francophones in Quebec, who control their own media AFAIK. Correct me if I am wrong.)

But what do I know? I'm not American and I have never lived there. I know it sounds crazy, but sometimes I wish I could really experience "racial America" in my daily life. I have never felt very close to the American racial divide, which is definitely not the same as it is here. I wonder how I would consume the hype racial realities if I moved there. I often imagine wrapping myself in a Canadian flag, dodging arrows from whites and blacks alike, and speaking French just to watch their heads explode.

As I mentioned before, there is also the issue of not taking responsibility for past atrocities (the Canadian government really comes to mind here) or simply declaring that it is time for minorities to "stop milking the victim cow". Let's look at what I hope is an extreme example of this, the example of South Africa. Here we find a man that shot 101 black people and killing 39 serving 12 years and being treated as a folk hero. And the attitude of not taking responsibility for atrocities that happened within everyone's collective memory shocks me. Imagine the same attitude in North America and Europe about actions that occurred more than 60 years ago for a few years, with many of the actors dead or dying off? Or what about the similar atrocities and racist policy that occurred for centuries where almost all of the actors are dead. (I say almost, because Alabama had an anti-miscegenation law on the books until 2003. There are not many words I hate more than that one.) It's no wonder that there are so many people that just figure that it's all over.

It isn't, of course. Post-traumatic stress disorder manifests itself in many ways. Collective memory is a concept that is gaining acceptance in academic circles, although nowhere else that I can see. It is essentially the idea that we as individuals may not have specific memories of our ancestors, but our cells do, which explains certain traits and behaviours amongst groups of people. This would include collective trauma. It has been studied extensively in Holocaust survivors and their families. There are even theories about traumas passed down through generations in 20th century Jewish families. I haven't done the research myself and I am not an anthropologist, but I suspect that the research hasn't been done on descendants of slaves, and not just because the slaves themselves are long dead. It seems hard to deny that if it could happen to the Jews and at the least the academics can point to evidence to support that, that it would not happen to black people all over the world, or any groups that suffered extensive trauma due to the actions of another group, like Native North Americans and many Asian groups.

This, of course, means that North American racism is NOT over if you aren't white. It's a daily reality for many, enough that this issue be taken seriously by the hegemonic culture, which is getting harder and harder. Many assert that the battle has been won, but until no one has to worry about their race working against them, the fight will continue.

Big Lie

Well, maybe not THE Big Lie, but A Big Lie. Or perhaps a reformulation of the Noble Lie for this day and age. I read this through Patrick, and commented there.