Encounters

Recently in a discussion with a a new acquaintance, I found myself discussion my time spent in central Texas. I commented on how much I enjoyed the Austin Film Festival when I've had the chance to go as well as how much I enjoy the Pecan Street Festival, amongst other things like the Spaghetti Warehouse. When I started to share some other unique personal experiences, my time spent in a band arose, followed by my attendance in 2006 to an immigration reform rally in downtown Austin. I mentioned how much different I saw the tone, rhetoric, attitude, and political ends when compared to the (small) Tea Party gathering I hung around on for a bit one day.

The other person asked me, "That's strange. I wouldn't peg you for being someone to go to a Tea Party rally." The truth is that I typically wouldn't, but it was assembled in downtown San Marcos where I lived and couldn't help but indulge a bit, albeit sarcastically, as I walked by. Anyway, during the discussion on this, I mentioned how I found the tone of the event driven by very racist mechanisms of behavior and speech, although I seldom heard overtly racist language used (slurs, classical stereotypes about black people, etc.)

This prompted the person to engage me in how non-racist they not only felt the group is/was, how they identified with the group, but then a litanty of personal facts that they felt qualified them as "anything but racist". The list of details was pretty predictable.

"My black friend Patty wouldn't say that I'm...", "Read their platform! It doesn't say one thing about race as a protest reason...", "They don't think of themselves as racist, and many of the members are Jewish and a good number are Hispanic or Black."

All over the place there are the "I have a black friend!" excuses for their behavior and "The prescence of one non-white person per setting means it's not a racist driven movement or ideology." Best of all, the person or the others have never "thought of themselves" as racist, leading to the assumption that therefore they aren't or couldn't possibly be.

I laid out what I thought to the person in a pretty straightforward way:

1. Just because you have made a friend who is Black/Asian/Hispanic does not mean you do not harbor racist views or tendencies. Period. Invoking your friend as some kind of card to prove your worth does nothing about that. It is possible for white people to have friends of different ethnicities and still harbor racialized attitudes that can result in bigoted actions.

2. The inclusion of a person or persons of color in a group does not mean it doesn't have institutional white supremacist motives. Historically, in the setting of power, many people on the side of the oppressors have accepted the employment of oppressed exceptions who wish to separate themselves from what they see as a disdainful membership of the victimized. Just because the Republicans chose Michael Steele as the head of their party, for example, does not mean that Republicans as a group do not have racialized and bigoted mechanisms behind their behavior in regards to immigration, foreign policy, or domestic policy. Same goes for Democrats and having chosen Barack Obama to be their cantidate for President. Chris Matthews oozed Obama-worship for months when he wound up saying after an Obama speech, "He spoke so well and did a good job, I forgot he was black for an hour."

3. A person who has perpetrated a racist action does not get to choose the consequence of, and subsequently, the prescence of racist feelings or tendencies. This is not to demonize the humanity of someone who has done so, as more often than not people who say or do racist things do not even realize they have, as much racism has become coded, conditioned, or subversive into cultural norms and attitudes. This does not excuse the racism, but it should rather be an incentive for all of us to probe and deconstruct these things, even if it means a blow to the psychological investment many of us have in whiteness and a blow to our own pride through what we perceive as cultural normality.