I grew up arguing. I don't mean occaisonally--I mean the battle was on at my house pretty much every time my stepfather and I were in the same room for more than 5 minutes. We had at least one knock-down drag-out a week for about five years. We argued about a lot of things, mainly political. One of the most frequent was racism.
My stepfather is a wonderful man in many ways, but he is an undeniable racist, something which is magnified when he's drunk, which is often. I spent many, many, screaming, crying hours arguing with him over such subjects as the inherent tendancy Mexican men would have to rape me, whether or not the (semi)local Walmart intentionally had all white cashiers and all POC shelf-stockers, whether Jews are "greedy" and Muslims are "mean," and countless other gems. These arguments have taken place at family dinners and in front of visiting friends, they have ended in my walking (and later driving) out and promising never to return. They have ended in violence. They've left me embarrassed to be a member of my family.
Since I stopped living with my parents (eight years now), things have gotten better. Whether or not my stepfather has become less racist I have no idea, but we've both gotten better at avoiding subjects on which we might disagree (and yeah, that doens't leave us with a whole lot to talk about). But the memory of how awful years of this was is still extremely clear, and today I finally made the connection it probably has to my own racism.
It's too easy to say I have racist tendancies because that's the way I was raised. That's a no-brainer. We all grew up in a racist society, and that's not enough of an explanation. What struck me today was the connection in my life between discussions about race and arguing, discord, and even violence. It doesn't seem unlikely to me that my level of defensiveness when faced with my own racist behavior has to do not just with all the normal stuff, but also with my residual stuff from growing up this way.
None of that is an excuse, or at least it's not meant to be. It's more part of my ongoing thoughts about WHY I have these tendancies. Seems to me that figuring out why I behave the way I do around this issue should help me to overcome my failings.
At least I hope so.
Comments (3)
OK, so I totally get what you are saying about the BSL comment, and I agree that it was not really a good thing to say. I have to take issue with you choice of the term racist. There is, in my mind, a huge difference between saying a really dumb insensitive thing which has a bunch of implication that didn't occur to you at the time you said it, and being racist. Perhaps I just have a different connotation of that word, but I do think that it is important to draw distinctions between being insensitve and careless, and actually being racist. You did not mean to say you thought there were inherent differences between racial groups, it did not occur to you to think of it in that way. Like I said, it was a really dumb thing to say in retrospect (and I totally could have said the same thing, so please don't be too offended when I say it was dumb) but I thinkl it is important to draw distinctions between such things and overt, intential and believed racist statements. To do otherwise just seems like overly PC bullshit. Everybody on earth says things which have implication far beyond what they intended. Unless you actually believe that subconciously you meant that there are inherent differences, than you should be honest with you self and admit it was wrong to say, but don't make the overly dramatic leap to racism.
Posted by Anonymous | July 6, 2005 8:38 AM
It's really hard for me to respond to Anonymous comments, because I have no idea where they are coming from. I mean, if you are someone I know IRL who just isn't using a login, then that is one thing, but if you are truly anonymous, then that's another, you know?
Posted by Grace | July 6, 2005 8:49 AM
Sorry grace, that was me, I forgot to logon first.
Posted by wiley and elusive | July 8, 2005 1:11 PM