Wow, plenty of views, no replies.
Boring question, or too hot to touch?
I’ve been mulling this over quite a bit. Issues of prejudice have always fascinated me; I was 9 yrs old when the Indianapolis Public School system started busing. I remember my friends’ white parents protesting and the angry, frightened black children who came to our school.
I also remember in 1981 when MTV was all-white, because (according to their executives) “There’s no interest in black artists.”
I’d watched Sesame Street, I new racism was silly. I was the kid who befriended the black students at our school, who complained about MTV not showing any Earth, Wind & Fire, who dated a teenager who was black (and paid for it, my choice was NOT well-received at our school). Heck, I worked at KFC where half of our customers, and all the senior employees who trained me, were black. I respected my co-workers and enjoyed trading dialects with them, we had fun together.
That’s where I learned that when a black person entered the restaurant and saw another black person in the lobby, that eye contact, nod and “Hey” they’d exchange was very deliberate. It’s something I adopted, just a moment of recognition that carries a bit of respect and makes the world a little less hostile.
I’ve always been confident I’m not at all racist - and yet, on a couple of occasions I’ve been accused of bigotry by people who did not know me well. It happened just the other day in an online forum when my attempt at a joke bombed badly; and, in light of the racist incidents that are happening in this country right now, it’s made me re-examine the whole issue.
And it seems like today’s youth are much more color-blind than I ever learned to be. My “liberalism” is dated, I worked at KFC back in 1982; making eye contact with someone who’s black because they’re black, nowadays I’m guessing that might be offensive?
I don’t know.
Are we racist if we associate any meaning at all with skin tone?
But doesn’t doing so ignore the extra burden that people of color usually have, and the extra meaning associated with some of their accomplishments?
How do people want to be treated?
I’m not positive about this, but I did think of an answer, perhaps, to that question and the one I posed in the OP.
The recent incident at that restaurant here in town reminded me of a time, 20 years ago, when I pissed off a patron at the public library by pausing on my way to help him.
As he stood at the desk waiting, I stopped to fish a pop-up book out from under the counter and handed it to a small child who was jumping up and down impatiently. This patron, a black man, read me the riot act. I stood there and took it, thinking “I’m not a bigot”, and from then on felt much more defensive about serving our black patrons, much more on guard.
That I could be so accused struck me as the height of unfairness, of “black power” asserting itself over “white power” just for the sake of doing so. NOW I knew what my family and friends were talking about when they’d complain about “those people” and how they wanted “special treatment”.
That was my reaction at the time, in 1987.
But you know what, the truth is, when I was 22 yrs old, I was a horrible Librarian Assistant. I did a terrible job at that job. I gave poor service to many patrons, not just that black man. He was the only one who ever chewed me out, and he did so on the basis of my presumed racism (which I still don’t agree with), but he was right that I didn’t serve him well and with respect.
That restaurant has the same problem - I don’t think they serve people well. I doubt that the owners are bigots, during the dialogue that followed on campus the owners were defended by a several black students whom they’d helped in other, low-key ways, apparently that couple is quite philanthropic. But I know my kids and I were treated poorly there the one time we went, a couple of years ago; the staff chatted up the regulars and ignored us.
I’m sure there are cases of outright bigotry and racism happening in our country, I know there are people who are hard-core big-mouthed prejudiced and also those who are cold-distant-afraid prejudiced. Like my Aunt, who went into a nervous tizzy the day we took the twins to the mall’s playland and happened to sit down next to a black father watching his children. Yet she did vote for Obama (don’t tell anyone at her church, though, they’d freak).
So I was thinking that I wondered what the NAACP says these days when they come to town and give the restaurant owners a talking to, in cases where the restaurant owners aren’t outright bigots.
It must be like chasing a fog, fighting soft prejudice in our country; where is it?
How do you advocate for better treatment of blacks without increasing the divide, appearing to ask for special consideration, making the problem worse? How does one make the world MORE color-blind, not less?
And it finally occurred to me – you treat it as a HUMAN problem.
Not a black problem.
Not a white problem.
We all need to treat each other better.
I’ll bet that’s what they came to town and said.
That’s like saying you feel like a target of the Santa Claus parade because you’re Jewish, or a target of the St. Patrick’s Day parade because you’re Mexican. Just sayin’.