Being American.

My voice is heard, but not listened to. I'm seen, but don't matter. What matters are things that do not define me, and what defines me are things that do not matter to society at large. What matters to society is that I'm white, I'm male, I'm a valued customer, a compensated employee, a good college student, and a citizen with no criminal background. I have a social security number. I have decent credit. I pay my rent. I know the pledge of allegiance. These are some of the things that matter to my country that do not define me.

What defines me is that I want to work to erase what comes with being white by working towards justice, that I want to keep my non-religious head raised whenever Christians bow and pray in my company and not be considered rude or immoral. I want the troops out of the Middle East, knowing full well that it damages our interests abroad. Is it because I don't want America to have interests that aid it? No. I want America to have interests that do not subjugate and supercede the interests of those in the region. I want to see capitalism compromised for the good of the earth, it's people, and it's future.

I want to make sure I'm the most well-rounded, educated, and capable person that I can be before I have children. I want to do more for the people I love. I want to teach people and learn from people - everybody, not just people who look like me, talk like me, believe like me, or have lessons that are going to be convenient for me.

I want America to be redefined, rethought, and replenished. I know this means hard steps, hard times, and doing without. I'm ready for that, as difficult as it might be.

Sick and tired.

I'm tired of this run-around, mealy-mouthed, PC crap.

Seriously, if the news shows me clearly that members of a certain ethnic group are insane and unstable in many ways, don't I have the right to say that generally there is a good chance they are all that way? I mean, when the two kids at Columbine, Timothy McVeigh, Ted Kazinsky, or the man who shot abortion doctor George Tiller have all been covered in the news for vast killings and terrorist activity, don't I have reason to believe any white male might do the same to me?

When I read that majority of rapists are white males, don't I have reason to worry if I see my girlfriend working alongside one at her job? Is the fact that most drug users have been white enough for me to suspect them of such activity upon meeting them?

Can I question the mentality of white leaders when one of them (Bill Clinton) made such a grave error as to bomb and kill many people thought to be dangerous when in fact they were simply in a factory making aspirin? How about when one of them decided to invade a country, be responsible for the deaths of untold thousands, simply because of what turned out to be a weak hunch and doctored intelligence? 

Can I assume most white males are alcoholics when it turns out the most common binge drinkers are of that ethnic group? 

Not so long ago, it was revealed that white people used up most types of welfare more often and in higher per capita percentages than black people, the group who are typically stereotyped for such actions. Do I have the right to speak about whites as a lazy, unmotived, hand-out driven group? 

Of course I wouldn't go and say all of that. However, it's so easy for us to speak in codified language, maintain stereotyped and racial myths, but I'm sure for many white people it's a little hard to swallow when the shoe's on the other foot. 

Link of the week.

http://www.theunapologeticmexican.org/glosario.html

Racial Code-Words, Part Deux

Disclaimer: I do not intend for this entry to be a bomb-throwing session towards President Bush. Instead, I want to focus on his words and why what he says is so embedded in our culture that the message is so much bigger than him and escapes our notice so easily.

Doing some research for a paper a month ago, I stumbled across this quote by President Bush. It wasn't until I read it a few times that I came across an interesting double message that was in his statement. Here's the quote:

"There's a lot of people in the world who don't believe that people whose skin color may not be the same as ours can be free and self govern. I reject that. I reject that strongly. I believe that people who practice the Muslim faith can self-govern. I believe that people whose skins aren't necessarily.. are a different color than white can self-govern."

Now, in this 2004 press conference, what President Bush was attempting to do here was show that he is confident in the ability of people from what we know as The Middle East to self-govern in a democratic fashion, and somehow imply that anyone who thinks to the contrary believes themselves to be superior to "other skinned people". This was the primary and most obvious surface message of what he said.

What I didn't realize until later, however, is that he was in the process of further cementing the idea of American and White being synonymous. That is, by using "people whose skin color is white" as the symbol for American in his sentence, he says it as if the most legit, generic Americans are those who are White. He furthermore uses darker-skinned people as the symbol for Muslim, and further states that Muslims can self-govern (true), but then using them as being some sort of autonomous group apart from Americans. 

This is a large example of how code words in our society come to still racially divide us, even when we're not aware of the institutional way in which they're employed. By using White people are the paradigm for legitimacy in a conversation on being Americans, and Muslims as the opposite, foreign people who need to learn and embrace the "American" (read: white) way, we push forward more ideas of racial superiority and inferiority, even if the person is not overtly prejudiced or racist. These are conditioned, institutionalised behaviors. 

President Bush is not the lone offender in this regard. It happens everyday, with different words or even attitudes. It's all over our mainstream media (CNN, FOX, ABC, etc.) It happens when we speak of "tragedies" in the suburbs when two (white) kids shoot up Columbine and seldom devote a fraction of that time to the weekly tragedies of the (predominantly non-white) inner cities. 

How about this video? The guy even in his opening statements sort of places that "drug related, inner city" violence as "old news" and this "new, suburban attack" against a white kid as a special story. 

Now, I'm not saying  that I don't feel empathy, regret, and sorrow for this mentioned family. It's terrible that this should happen to any parent, and the kids who did that to this boy should be punished severely. However, my beef is also with the way the media handled the story. It's the way we paint and hand-pick stories that can be rose-tinted and tilted to keep a certain racially coded "norm" as a certain way in Americans' minds. 

So, the next time you watch the news or read a speech, think a little about how words we take for granted have been institutionally crafted to hold double meanings for us about people in society.