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blogging, faith, insanitybytes22, life, politics, racism, social media
I actually campaigned and caucused for Hillary Clinton back in 2008. I knew we were going to have a Dem president and I thought she was a better candidate than President Obama. I’ll never forget caucus day, I was on crutches, trying to assist a black woman with a walker. The blind leading the blind, limping in to join our friends and family, to do our civic duty.
Suddenly we were the enemy. It was so tense, the hostility so palpable, I was actually scared to write my address down. Than came the speeches, the ideology, the shaming, “are you a racist or do you support President Obama?” So we were huddled in the corner, a dozen or so of us Hillary supporters, pretty effectively silenced. There was a group of young white guys, bold, blustery, who came up to the only black woman in the room and got in her face, proceeded to lecture her about white privilege and civil rights. They told her she should be ashamed of herself.
Think about that irony, think about the juxtaposition of a tiny, elderly black woman, seated at a table looking up, while these white guys circled her, towered over her, doing everything they could to intimidate her. Oh, they didn’t cross any real lines, but the message was received loud and clear.
A woman I once baked an apple pie for, a woman I wanted so badly to be friends with, stood up at the microphone looked over at us and said just dripping with contempt, you disgust me.
I was so confused. It was my first introduction to ideology, to propaganda, to public shaming. I know politics can get heated, but up until that day I never really understood what it was like to be totally shut out, silenced, disenfranchised. Intimidated.
That night someone smashed my car window, stole my Hillary sign, and vandalized my flower bed. Probably completely unrelated, probably just symptomatic of the neighborhood I live in. Petty vandalism is not uncommon, but for the first time ever I began to look at people with suspicion, to ask myself, do you hate me like that?
That day I realized that anti-racism tactics had now been weaponized, that it was no longer about making the world a better place or creating justice or fighting for equality, it was now about using labels to silence and control people, to disenfranchise them, to dehumanize them and lock them out of the conversation. Such an effective tool, do you agree with us or are you a racist? Do you tow the party line or are you a racist? Are you going to cooperate or do we tell everyone you’re a racist?
Does your employer know you’re a racist?
The last few days the news, social media, has brought all of that flooding back to the front, as I hear the words, rural, racist, uneducated, over and over again, and the accusations being flung about, why do you hate the poor, the disabled, gays? Why do you facilitate rape? Why do you kill puppies?
You deplorable, despicable woman. “You should be ashamed of yourself,” says a young girl on social media, one I once taught how to use a potty. Think about that my bright, young friend. I was doing politics back when you were just learning how not to wet your pants. There’s a slight possibility I have the eyes to see the world in ways you cannot.
And another calls me a white supremacist, a gal who probably never met an actual white supremacist. I have. Many of them. If she had too, she would not be so foolish as to confuse me with one.
So another woman who is so good at shaming, at shutting down the conversation, at silencing people, lectures me about white privilege, accuses me of avoiding the issue. I’m not avoiding anything, I just trash canned the entire notion of white privilege long ago, being a woman who has never had much access to any sort of privilege at all. I also have the eyes to see how bizarre that is, what a declaration of epidermal superiority every time we say it, every time we speak such rubbish into existence.
Can you not see the irony of reminding people over and over again that their skin tone itself denotes an underprivileged status and that there is nothing they can ever do to escape that?
How can one little woman standing in line at the food bank actually oppress the leader of the free world flying overhead in his private jet? Or the lesbian in her Jaguar who moved here, got the highest paying job available, and bought a multimillion dollar house? And the homeless vet, the one with one leg that now begs for money, is he really the recipient of all this alleged white privilege? It’s a ludicrous concept, one that assigns worth and value to people based on a scoring system of superficial values that have nothing to do with the truth and reality of people’s lives.
It is not that I don’t understand the intersectionality of the oppression olympics, it is that I do, and I totally reject the entire notion. Try to contain your suprise, us “uneducated, ignorant, rural people” are not incapable of critical thought.
So you’re a racist… is an accusation, a concept I had to confront 8 years ago, a label being unfairly placed on me that I had to either embrace or reject. It took a lot of soul searcing, a lot of asking God to search my heart. Am I, Lord? Am I a hater? Am I ignorant? Uneducated? Stupid? Rural? Are the things they say about me true? Am I worthy of all this shame and contempt? Do I have nothing of value to add to the conversation?
The very fact that I even questioned it, that I searched my soul, that I doubted and wallowed in angst, should be enough evidence that I do care. I do care about the well being of people and the quality of their lives. Why would anyone look at me and doubt that?
In the end I came to understand not only the nature of racism, of what it actually feels like to be silenced, to be disenfranchised, to be forced to swallow bitter day after day, to be falsely judged and labeled based on nothing more than assumptions and stereotypes, but I also came to understand that I do have something to say, something to contribute to the culture, something important and vital and necessary.
Power is not oppression, power is not necessarily something you lord over others, power can be what lurks within, what allows you to reach down and lift others up. You don’t build a culture of success by tearing down those you perceive as “hogging all the privilege.” That’s a scarcity mentality, one that fails to bring about the abundance of opportunity that we we all want to see in the world.
I am not ashamed. I am optimistic, hopeful,and looking forward to the future.
Salvageable said:
All of us have a tendency to favor people who are like us–the same appearance, or the same language, or the same gender, and so forth. That is not the same as being racist, being a hater, and sinning against our neighbor. We can enjoy diversity while having pride in our own culture. As you say, real racism and hate are expressed by those who choose sides and intimidate those who disagree with them, those who demand special privilege for the groups that have, in the past, been victims of bigotry and injustice.
If you were to visit the cafeteria of a certain famous high school that was desegregated sixty years ago, you might notice that black students for the most part eat lunch with other black students, and white students for the most part eat lunch with other white students. That does not mean that desegregation failed. It merely means that we like to be comfortable, and grouping with other people who resemble us makes us comfortable.
In my lifetime, the USA has made great progress combating prejudice and bigotry. We still have room for a lot more improvement. Two groups are blind–those who think that no problems remain, and those who think that things are as bad as they ever were. I don’t have any answers to offer. I do the best I can. J.
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insanitybytes22 said:
“I don’t have any answers to offer. I do the best I can.”
Yes,amen! In the end that’s all we can do, our best.
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Susan Irene Fox said:
I must admit I have hope, but I also have huge concerns. Trump ran not as a republican or democrat but as an autocrat. I think we must be vigilant, and congress, as a republican body, must be extra-vigilant. We must be vocal and they must provide the checks and balances he will need to hold him to the line.
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dawnlizjones said:
Thank you for articulating this so clearly.
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Pleasant Street said:
I’m good with people disagreeing, I just wish they would hear me out, since I heard them out. Listening is really important right now. Say one wrong word and some people can’t hear you. My mom would say if she was here, that hurts only them. But I guess I”m still a little soft inside.
Thank you for your thoughtful comments.
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Julie said:
This is excellent IB. Your caucus story is very well told – imagine those white youngsters lecturing a senior black woman. Shaking my head. Just goes to show when it comes to politics people almost never know or care to know who they are talking to.
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ColorStorm said:
Hey, didn’t we bump into each other at the market earlier? Oops, not you? Sorry. ha ha. Isn’t it something the scars that are handed to you without blood? Geez, you shouldn’t need band aids for doing what is right.
If you are a racist, then I suppose water is not wet. For what it’s worth msbytes, I have come to see that the greater the accusation, usually it’s the shallower of thought.
Example? Sure. ‘Away with Him. Crucify Him.’ They had no clue. Pretty strong accusation. Pretty shallow thought. Or, ‘you need to stay away from children…………….’ Again, egregious, shallow, and positively insecure.
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Rebecca LuElla Miller said:
This reminds me of a story you told in a blog post some time ago, but I don’t remember the details. I just remember a rich, white (why is it OK to identify European-Americans by our skin color, but not African-Americans, Asian-Americans or even Native-Americans?) woman who was carrying on about some social justice issue in the presence of her Asian (I think) house maid. As I said, I don’t remember the details, but I remember the irony, the disconnect between what the woman said she valued and how she actually lived. I suppose we all do the same at some point, but it’s especially noticeable when someone is making it a Cause.
Becky
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deborahbrasket said:
Beautifully expressed. I had a similar experience when as the director of a small nonprofit that advocated for social justice i attended a workshop on diversity training. I went in as a white woman who embraced diversity and equality and was fighting to end racism and bigotry, and came out feeling shamed and attacked because members felt I hadn’t adequately owned my white privilege and acknowledged that just being white made me part of the problem, not part of the solution. i came out feeling for the first time in my life ‘prejudice” against these people of color who were trying to make me feel so guilty and unworthy because of my skin color.
It’s true that feeling that way helped me to better imagine how awful it must of been for them to have felt that way all their life because of their skin color, and perhaps that should have made me feel more sympathetic to the cause. But I had already been sympathetic to the cause! I was already actively working for the cause, trying to combat racism and intolerance! So the question was; Was did I have to do to have them accept me as an equal, a fellow-activist, a comrade-in-arms? And it was clear that at least to those in that room that day, there was was nothing I could do to earn that trust and sense of being totally with them, if not one of them–one of the good guys. My skin color denoted a privilege that would always taint me, set me apart. We could never be equals.
I was devastated. I was hurt. i was filled with resentment. I questioned whether that resentment against these people of color made me a racist. Had I always been a racist and just hadn’t know it? i struggled as you did. And then I realized that I had good cause to feel resentment, and it didn’t make me a racist. I had been one of the “good guys” and a workshop of diversity should have helped people feel more empathy, more connected to each other, not made us feel silenced or shamed or guilty. The workshop format was faulty and it did an injustice to all the people there, whatever their skin color–it divided us and did not bring us together.
But unfortunately, that kind of shaming of white people for white privilege goes on and continues to divide us.I don’t know what the solution is. I would never be invited to the table to help find a better way to conduct a workshop on valuing diversity. I’ll continue to fight racism and intolerance in the best way I know how, but it’s a shame that these kinds of workshops and attitudes make that much more difficult.
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insanitybytes22 said:
Thank you for sharing that story. I can so relate. What strikes me as sad is that you say what I too say all the time about so many issues in our world, ” I would never be invited to the table…” That’s what it’s like to be locked out and shut down. Sometimes I wonder if we shouldn’t be out crashing the party.
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Wally Fry said:
Hi IB
Just a few thoughts here, and once I have probably alienated everybody, I will go back to the bunker.
I don’t really get white privilege to be honest. On the surface, I suppose I represent everything people say when they speak of it. I am quite white, quite Christian, and pretty much solidly middle class. On the other hand, privilege got me none of those things. Genetics made me white, The Lord Jesus made me a Christian, and a whole bunch of hard work and clawing from the quagmire of urban poverty made me middle class.
On the other hand, racial bigotry is alive and well, and in practice still in this country. It may not be truly institutionalized, but it is real. That is fact.
I don’t know if you read the post I wrote about the incident at our school the other day or not, but I am still at odds with some of my own family over that. It was an ugly thing, started by simple bigotry. Now, the reaction to the bigotry was way out of hand and simply wrong on many levels. I get it…I get it…I get it. But, what I also get is that there was an almost wholesale refusal for anybody even acknowledge that, maybe, just maybe…there were some legitimate reasons for people to be torqued. Worse than THAT, is watching people use the bad behavior to justify further exclusion and bigotry.
All I did was simply call some people on that, and as a result some are still mad at me.
“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.”
Just my two cents.
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ColorStorm said:
That was a dime’s worth W. lol
I don’t see alienation from anything you have said. It seems the Chinese are not apologizing from being born, or the Nords, or the Inuit, pick your poison. Go to work, save some cash, stay outta trouble, create your own ‘luck.’ But it’s the lazy bones who mostly get handouts who gripe, meanwhile Dr Ben Carson, Sheriff David Clark, Clarence Thomas, and such, may offer a sever rebuke to the lazy and narrow minded.
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Wally Fry said:
Create your own luck. Yep, I am a believer in that one my friend. We do need to watch, though, that we aren’t preventing people from creating their own luck.
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Andy Oldham said:
Well said IB, well said.
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thiafelkel said:
Thank you for this. I worked with “at-risk” youth for 20 years. I was constantly trying to get people to see that lowering the expectations for those kids was not doing them any favors. I felt like they should have to do the same work to get the same grades. I was frequently told that I was a racist because of this. I was told that I “didn’t understand” the challenges that these kids faced. There I was working with them one on one, visiting their homes and doing everything I could to help them and being told I didn’t understand their problems because I had “white privilege”. I knew the challenges that they faced I prayed for them every day and I devoted my career to trying to help them. I also fully believed they could rise above the challenges and prove everyone wrong. In my last year of working with these kids, I was helping a young man with his senior project, he flat told me that I was clueless. He said, “I don’t need to do all that work. Teachers feel sorry for me, they won’t fail me.” He was right. He knew how to world worked, at least the high school world but I know he wasn’t prepared for college and the adult world.
Anyway, thank you for what you wrote.
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insanitybytes22 said:
Thank you for that story. That sounds so frustrating! We don’t do our kids any favors by lowering our expectations.
I once knew a mom with a disabled child, and while she was realistic, she never let him believe he was limited in anyway. LOL, he couldn’t ride a bike, but he could ride a wagon down an embankment and wind up breaking his arm. I’ll never forget her running into the ER and the first words out of her mouth were, “I’m so proud of you. You broke your arm. Well done.”
He grew up to run a business, to build his own house.
For some reason we understand that pity robs people of their power,that even those who have serious challenges should be encouraged to try things, but when it comes to issues around race or poverty we change all the rules.
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thiafelkel said:
Love it. Well said, again!
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Julie Sheppard aka Reiko Chinen said:
Reblogged this on emotionalpeace.
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insanitybytes22 said:
Thank you. 🙂
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Linda Lee/@LadyQuixote said:
This post is riveting. Very powerful and beautifully written.
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insanitybytes22 said:
Thanks, much appreciated. 🙂
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CC said:
Hands down the best thing I’ve read on white privilege and identify politics, anywhere.
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SLIMJIM said:
Wow that is very frightening…what you described.
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MJThompson said:
Well done, good and faithful servant! How well I relate to your post!
Please allow me to comment on two quotes – “Can you not see the irony of reminding people over and over again that their skin tone itself denotes an underprivileged status and that there is nothing they can ever do to escape that?” & “It is not that I don’t understand the intersectionality of the oppression olympics, it is that I do, and I totally reject the entire notion”.
I’m a 64 year-old white man with three teenage grandchildren whose father is black. My oldest white grand-daughter (from a different mother) dates a black man. Several of my neighbors are black, (also Latino and Asian – although Mid-Easterners are noticeably absent). I’ve lived in my community for 60 years, 38 of them in my present home. NEVER until the recent BLM protest has racial inequity been an issue among my neighbors.
Recently however, my grand-kids are being confronted by their peers because of their race. They have now been forced into accountability – are they black, and victims of discrimination, or white, and ignorant haters? I told them, biologically – they are BOTH. But NEVER to allow peer-pressure or popular public opinion to dictate their moral preferences.
An alarming proof that the election results are a reflection of overwhelming sentiment to replace the broken system is the continued innuendo being reported by the national media. Instead of reports on the ‘smooth transition of power’, and positive statements about change, more reports of unrest and bewilderment are broadcast on a ratio of about 10-1.
So now, I’m labeled racist and trying to hide the fact by supporting my grand-kids. I am shameful for raising them in an upper-class neighborhood, not allowing them to experience their roots????? Hillary must be right – I’m deplorable. If only she’d won….. Help us Lord!
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Alex Stepford said:
As someone who is Asian, I am actually appalled at how much coloured people seem to be made immune from being labelled racist. I really feel annoyed that you, because of your race, can be labelled a racist in the blink of an eye.
I supported Donald Trump, I told everyone on my FB that I am against feminism, I lost many friends but no one could even use the R word against me. That is a very unfair system, the word racist is used too often nowadays and should not be just used on white people. Really.
As for coloured people who speak another language? They are the most racist, ever! You just don’t know because they aren’t saying it in English. Asians are the worst.
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jeanleesworld said:
Riveting and thoughtful, my friend. xxx
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insanitybytes22 said:
Thank you. Glad you enjoyed it.
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