One of the helpful, although painful, things I read during RaceFail '09 was that pretty much everyone is racist to some degree.
The thing is, you don't get much of anywhere by crouching in your own corner being afraid to put a foot wrong. You just have to try to engage sensitively, and usually people will accept goodwill if you've made some effort to educate yourself first.
The biggest thing of all is (I read) that white people tend to react to the statement "that thing you said was racist" by flinching and saying "I'm not A racist, OMG, you called me a racist, racists are horrible people," when the other party was pointing to an action and not calling down a condemnation of the person's whole character. White people react to the words racist and racism as fighting words, because we don't tend to see it as requests to examine what we just did but the nastiest thing anyone's ever said to us.
So I've been trying to learn to take deep breaths and relax and talk about it without getting so excited.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2009-07-31 08:49 pm (UTC)The thing is, you don't get much of anywhere by crouching in your own corner being afraid to put a foot wrong. You just have to try to engage sensitively, and usually people will accept goodwill if you've made some effort to educate yourself first.
The biggest thing of all is (I read) that white people tend to react to the statement "that thing you said was racist" by flinching and saying "I'm not A racist, OMG, you called me a racist, racists are horrible people," when the other party was pointing to an action and not calling down a condemnation of the person's whole character. White people react to the words racist and racism as fighting words, because we don't tend to see it as requests to examine what we just did but the nastiest thing anyone's ever said to us.
So I've been trying to learn to take deep breaths and relax and talk about it without getting so excited.