If black people say they received bad service at a restaurant because of their race, some white people usually rush in to offer their own bad experiences at the same restaurant, or speculate that maybe the server might have been having a bad day. . . . to be black in working white America is to have your experiences constantly negated and challenged by whites who can't understand or don't want to understand. Part of this understanding is to remember that if the average black person is wrong some of the time when he says race is an issue, then that means that some of the time he's right. If there is anything more stressful to a black person than sensing that something is about race when you can't really know for sure, it's having a white person act like you're blameworthy to even consider whether race is an issue.--Michelle T. Johnson, Working while Black:
The Black Person's Guide to Success in the White Workplace
Friday, April 4, 2008
explain away racist incidents
White people are often anxious to assure non-white people that their perceptions of racism are wrong. If they hear a non-white person say that an earlier incident probably involved racism, they're quick to assert that there surely must have been something else going on. Even though the white listener wasn't there when the incident happened, he or she will usually question the other person's common sense:
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I believe this is a byproduct of being "colorblind". It extends to the point of believing that race is no longer a concern and any assertions otherwise are a relic of days gone by. The idea of racism has taken on the meaning of burning crosses and separate drinking fountains and its unfathomable that it could appear in day to day polite interactions. Race and racism is an uncomfortable topic, and if it can be explained away, and therefore shut out of the possibility of conversation, it will be.
ReplyDeleteI hope you don't mind if I link back to here from my blog (www.feminocracy.wordpress.com). You've got some interesting things to say--I've actually taken a course that involved the construction of whiteness, Critical White Studies is a really excellent collection of essays on the topic--I just wish it weren't so expensive.
http://www.amazon.com/Critical-White-Studies-Richard-Delgado/dp/1566395321/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1207541429&sr=8-1
Please feel free to link away, OCO--and I hope you don't mind if I call you that? Your name is so much to type!
ReplyDeleteThank you for the book suggestion. And I look forward to perusing your blog.
I prefer OCO to the "outcrazy" I've seen this handle abbreviated as--I guess I never really thought of how long it was. I'm used to LiveJournal where you can reply directly to comments and didn't think to make a shorter handle.
ReplyDeleteI think it's really interesting
ReplyDelete1) that Outcrazy does exactly what your post describes - she *leaps* in to explain the phenomenon; and
2) that she really misses the point that "being 'colorblind'" in North America is just another way to erase part of a non-white person's heritage and personhood.
I find it all particularly ironic in light of the fact that she says she "hangs out on livejournal", and yet seems to have managed to have
missed
all
this.
- ru
some white people usually rush in to offer their own bad experiences at the same restaurant, or speculate that maybe the server might have been having a bad day. . .
ReplyDelete--Guilty as charged!