I think I should start telling people that I’m not from anywhere. Because I’ve let slip to many people that I spent my high school years in South Carolina, virtually everything I say is tainted.
One time I was in school, just before a class, and I was explaining about stress to someone. “Well, English has variable stress, French always stresses the last syllable, Esperanto always stresses the second-last, and Japanese stresses all syllables equally.”
And some girl from across the room yells at me, “I’m Japanese and that’s racist!” No it’s not, madam, it’s a linguistic fact.
Back in college, I used to work at the front desk of a hotel in Florida. Every winter, we had the “winter guests”: old folks that came to stay in the hotel for 2-3 months in the winter. They were almost exclusively old Jewish women from New York. There was a handful of these that would cry anti-Semite every time they didn’t like something. They miss a phone call, it’s because I’m a Nazi. I was shocked the first few times, but after being compared to Hitler on a daily basis, I realized these were just a bunch of bitter, old ladies with nothing better to do than complain. I got used to it.
Well, not that I remember, at least until recently…
I had a client once who accused me of being racist and called me a “blonde white lesbian bitch”. I am, in fact, a bitch. The other stuff is false slander!
This one is a little more humourus, since the kid who did it slinked off in shame after the exchange. We were in line (waiting for longjump tryouts) and this kid we don’t really know (or like) asked to bud. My friend said no, politely, and this is the exchange that followed:
Kid: You’re rascist!
Friend: No, we’re both white, remember?
K: Well you’re classist, you won’t let me in 'cuz I’m not in your class!
F: Uh, the classes are supposed to be together, your’s is after ours.
K: I said ‘glasses!’
F: I have glasses too, idiot…
The kid then left to go back to his class. I still crack up over it.
ARG! I mean yours not your’s.
I feel so dirty.
There’s a guy at work who thinks I’m racist. I walked into a discussion he was having with a friend about Eminem. I said that I liked him somewhat, but I was more worried about his music being a bad influence for children and teenagers. They egged me on and I said that I didn’t think he was a good role model. They flipped this into, “Not a good role model for white kids? Because he acts black? You’re racist.” No lying, that’s exactly what I said and exactly what Jabari said. I was horrified, as no one has ever called me that, and duh - Eminem’s white! But we argued about it and the more twisted their logic was, the more they turned around my words. It got really ugly.
The oddest thing is that recently Ade and I ended up talking about music, and he was astonished to know that a lot of the music I love is by black artists - Jill Scott, Lauryn Hill, the Roots, Outkast, Erykah Badu, Janet Jackson. Hell, I even own some Tupac, Jay-Z, and Dr. Dre CDs, though they aren’t my favorites. It was horrible for me to realize that they weren’t joking - they really thought I was racist. I’m still dumbfounded that their completely off-base take on my words caused them to define me, as a person, when they clearly never bothered to listen to my explanation.
You can rebut, and state the facts. “No, that’s inaccurate and unfair. The issue here is not race, it’s your behaviour.”
I’m not saying this will always have the desired effect. People don’t always respond well, particularly when emotions are running high. But it IS worth stating the facts and not letting the ‘racist’ smokescreen prevail.
Another formula I’ve used goes like this: “If you [do what you’re supposed to do] that’s OK, whatever race you are. If you don’t, that’s not OK, whatever race you are. So race has nothing to do with it.”
If they repeat the allegation, repeat the rebuttal and the facts. And always, always, always remember the golden rule: the person who stays calmest, wins.
Great googly moogly, this thread is from early 2001!
When I entered ninth grade one girl in my World Civ and English classes was rather desparate for attention and had discovered that launching accusations of racism at everyone and everything was an easy way to get it. It went beyond trying to turn every single classroom discussion into a complaint about racism. She also pored through the English texts and basically insisted that any reference in poetry or whatever to a white woman being beautiful was unacceptable. Luckily for me, this girl (surprise, surprise) dropped out of advanced classes after just a few months, but I’ve always felt sorry for the teachers and classmates who had to deal with her in regular classes.
My freshman year of college, I had to take a course called “Values and Change in a Diverse Society.” (It was required.) This could have been an interesting class, and there are a lot of valid observations that could have been covered but ended up with everyone subtly accusing everyone else of racism, all the time. It was extremely uncomfortable. We ended up having a college panel at the end of the quarter to discuss the course, which practically turned into a screaming match. It was totally unbelievable. (They ended up totally revamping the course for the next year, fortunately.)
Anyway, after having to write papers about the times we had exhibited racism, homophobia, sexism, papers about how we had stayed silent while observing other people being racist, homophobic, or sexist, etc., one day my teacher assigns us a paper on classism. Not only are we all racist, homophobic, and sexist, but now we’re classist, too. I had had enough, refused to do it, and pulled out a book to read.
The next class, my teacher pulls me aside at the end of class and says “You know, when you refused to do that paper, I had to wonder, do you think you think you would have done that if I weren’t a minority?”
It was like she’d punched me in the stomach. I sat there and cried for half an hour. The whole class was absolute paranoid bullshit, and I was now a racist for refusing to go along with it.
Yeah, that sucked.
I think my best friend handled this accusation exceedingly well.
While she was majoring in education, she took a job substitute teaching to get her feet wet. On her first day, she ended up breaking up a fight in the halls, and told the kids that if they didn’t straighten up and get back to their classrooms immediately, that she was marching them to the principal’s office.
One of the kids (the instigator) said “You’re just blaming me because I’m a minority!”
She laughed in his face and said “Honey, I’m an American Indian. I out-minority you.” He just looked sort of shocked and shut up.
I think it was Dennis Miller who said something like “Hating a person because of the color of their skin is stupid and wrong. All you have to do is take the time to get to know the person, and you’ll find dozens of perfectly valid reasons to hate them.”
I’m from upstate New York, and went to college in Mississippi. In my sociology class, I sat next to a young black man. He was friendly, intelligent, witty, and otherwise fun to sit next to; we never saw each other outside of class, but I enjoyed speaking with him while we were there. Towards the end of the semester he asked me to go out with him. I told him quite truthfully that I was engaged. He suddenly turned into Mr. Hyde, crying out that I was refusing to go out with him because he was black, and I was a racist like all the other white chicks. I was flummoxed, and arranged with the professor to sit in a different part of the hall after that.
Last week I fielded a call at the copy center where I work. The lady on the other end of the line wanted to know how much we charge for scanning things. Our scanner is a manual one - you have to lay each page down individually, load the program, hit “prescan,” select the area you want to scan, hit “scan,” “save image as…” and repeat for every page you want to transfer to the computer. For this we charge $4.99 for the first page, and an additional 1 for every page after that, although we have the authority to take it down to .50 for bulk pricing. I explained this to her, and she literally screamed at me - loud enough for my coworkers to hear through the phone - “THAT’S PREJUDICING PEOPLE!!! The bankruptcy court will only let me turn in my papers digitally, and I don’t have a scanner, and I’m not paying that much! I have a two-inch-thick stack of papers here! THAT’S PREJUDICING PEOPLE!!!”
No, I don’t know what the hell she meant either.
Wow, that’s unbelievable. Had I been in the same situation, I think I would have just laughed in her face. But yeah, college can be a cesspool of race-related hyperbole, with everyone eager to declare you a racist if you hold certain positions. And it’s not just the liberals, either. Reactionary conservative types have adapted that strategy to call people in favor of reparations or affirmative action racists. Now, I’m strongly against slave reparations, and find myself wavering on affirmative-action-related issues, but I think it’s ridiculous to call anyone a racist based on their position on those matters. I think it’s horribly immature, and dilutes the meaning of the term “racism,” to assume that everyone who disagrees with you politically is a racist.
I’ve always been into music. Not all music, mind you. I like mainly American and British popular music of the 20th century. I love the blues, but jazz doesn’t do anything for me. I like Tommy Dorsey and Tommy Shaw, Jo Stafford and Kate Bush, The Diamonds and Aerosmith, Doris Day and King Crimson. Kind of wide, diverse tastes in pop and rock music. I can’t get a feel for ethnic musics though, like zydeco, or bouzouki music, or Gregorian chants, most reggae, or music with lots of flutes and exotic drums, koto music, African or South American tribal music, stuff like that. I have no grounding in it, I don’t understand it much, and although I can surely appreciate it, I wouldn’t go out and buy any of it. One of my acquaintances said to me once, “I’ve finally figured out why you don’t like any of that music. You’re racist.” Well, how do you respond to a moron? It’s not like I had, or have, a single thing against any people of any race. Give me Little Richard anyday, but Los Indios Tabajaros, or rap music in Hindi… um, I’ll pass, thanks. This is my taste in music, it’s not a show of dislike or something worse for any people of another culture!
Hey, some of my best friends belong to one race or another!
Being a white Southerner, it is assumed I am racist just by existing so yeah, I’m a bit familiar with the phenomenon.
Back when I was at the end of my teenage years, when I was a poor factory worker, I was in the habit of purchasing a fair proportion of my clothes at the army surplus store. At around that time, I shaved my head entirely bald to raise funds for charity - a week or two later, when the hair was just at the crew-cut stage of growth, I was confronted by a fairly large group of men, who took a good deal of convincing that I wasn’t a neo-nazi. It was actually quite frightening.
Hear, hear.
It got worse when I moved from Kentucky to West Virginia. What’s funny is I see much less racism here in WV than I did growing up in KY.