I sure am glad you cleared that up for me. All the complexity of life and dealings with local authority in a small, mostly white, southern town, resolved in one short sentence.

How’s it obvious that my being white isn’t something that helps foster said “connections?” My FAMILY is a working-class WHITE family. And they’re pretty damn openly racist. They aren’t “absolutely evil” people. But they have issues, big ones; and as I said I’ve heard their conversations and spent time with them. I would not want to be a Black person getting pulled over in the white part of my city, not by a white cop. Certainly not.
Now, if y’all are feeling up to it, here are
Some tasks for the white folks:
-Next time you’re in a room that’s only full of white people, keep your eyes and ears sharp. The oppressive nature of most white people tends to come out most distinctly when they are amongst each other; why don’t you try and be that one white person in the room that says, “Hey, wait. I don’t like it when you say that kind of shit.”

Listen for it, ID it, then fucking call it out when it happens. This kinda thing isn’t always easy, and many times it’s awkward and can hurt people’s feelings. But hurting feelings can’t really matter when somebody’s telling you some backwards, racist, oppressive bullshit. I don’t know how else to treat this disease. If more white people don’t step up and start doing this EVERY TIME THEY SEE RACISM HAPPEN, then we might as well get put into gulags when the fucking revolution comes, ’cause we sat on our fucking asses and let this bullshit go on, because it was beneficial (albeit superficially and minorly so) for us.

People, WHITE people, get so angry with me when I point out that what they’re saying is fucked up, or what they’re doing is fucked up in a nationally oppressive framework. They get angry and they act like I’ve taken away their fucking barbie dolls.

People say they want a revolution, but then they don’t want to speak up when it fucking matters. That’s really fucking encouraging.

So I’ve stopped caring whether or not white people get mad at me. I sometimes want to distance myself from this culture as far as I can. I don’t want to be a part of the ugly side of being white. But I feel like it’s my duty to stick in the thick of it, and try to fix the bullshit that my people have perpetuated. I don’t know what the hell else to do.

White people, especially in leftist movements, need to work diligently to recognize all the places in their lives where being white pays off. They need to question this out loud and they need to be honest with themselves and everybody else. Capitalist patriarchy cannot thrive without national oppression. Ignoring your privilege is an oppressive act.

Don’t be the dumb white person.

Stare your reality in the eyes and if you don’t like what you see there, punch it in the fucking face.

Ciao

People ain’t gonna deal with someone who can’t see their humanity, not for long anyway. — Yolanda Carrington

In my world, usually, white guys are so quick to throw on the “I’m soooo hurt and misunderstood” victim mantle that no reasonable conversation can ever get going. Oh, and then there’s the ones who automatically strike out, trying to wound anyone within range. (You know the type. The response to anything a woman says that they don’t agree with is to call her ugly, fat and/or a lesbian.)

Yolanda, I was going to send you a personal e-mail but I didn’t see a way to contact you. I like one of your quotes so much, I’m going to start using it.

The quote articulates how I feel interacting with some friends, co-workers or random people in the world. Seems like they can’t see ME past whatever image or stereotype they are projecting on me.

Thanks for your story. You are a good writer. I like that these stories are being collected here this way.

As someone who is seen as white, and who is white, but Jewish, so not-pure white, so to speak, I just want to add that white supremacy is real in Amerikkka, and affects everyone, but harms people of Colour disproportionately, egregiously, and too often, fatally. We all can be bigots or discriminating or unkind to others. But to miss that the U.S. is a white supremacist (and deeply patriarchal) society, would be to miss the larger picture that all our stories fit into, neatly or not.

We cannot ignore the fact that the Indigenous people of North America, as elsewhere, have been slaughtered, and continue to be, through ghettoisation now in the U.S., in part, BY people who are not of Colour. Africans were enslaved in the U.S., not just anyone, and they were enslaved by European-Americans. Women are raped systematically, by men. Men are raped sometimes too (also by men), but usually in specific contexts that are not so ubiquitous as what women face and survive, or not. We all live complex lives, and terrible things do happen to most of us, even males with light skin (you and I can attest to that), but the field is mined more for those who are female, and who have darker skin that Western European-descended folks tend to have (unless sun-tanned to brown).

Julian

That’s why the original post dealt with “white privilege,” and not some generic, dehistoricized, individually-pathological thing called “racism.”

We have to drop this abstraction, racism, from our vocabulary, until we can re-combine it with a real analysis of structured social power, and an appreciation of how history continues to assert itself into the present.

Black and white (speaking to this color line specifically in the US) are not characterized against one another by mere inequality, but by power… a form that I and others call national oppression because of its colonial aspect.

When a majority Black area was hit by a hurricane on the Gulf Coast, the federal government responded with troops charged to establish population control as a higher priority than rescue, and that same government decided FOR the affected people that it would not allow 1,500 hurricane-experienced Cuban doctors to volunteer assistance.

“Racism” doesn’t even come close to exlaining what this means.

It was just a traffic stop, but as i passed they waved me over. I flashed that they thought I was the car that was about to u-turn; maybe it was just the general poverty of my truck. Now, I wasn’t unhappy with that little truck, it was a step up from the car I was driving when I got sober. The truck was fine, I thought, it was registered and insured, smogged, and it was clean. I mean it was clean, no bottles, no drugs, no seeds, no papers, nada. My license was good, restricted but good, and I payed all the warrants that were out on me.

So there I am, not-so-little-ole me, and the cop comes up to the window and asks for all the stuff, which I have, and I see that it is a woman. As she is perusing my documents, a male sheriff walks up to the passenger side and starts using the fashlight to see if he can see under all the coffee cups, cig packs, newspapers. He looks from here and there and can’t find anything, switches to the front window, and starts looking down, and then switches to the back window and starts over again, obviously convinced that he will see some incriminating SOMETHING to allow further search.

I am still in this state of boy am I glad to be out of where I was, street legal, and I say without rancor or sarcasm, “He won’t find anything.”

She laughs. We had both stopped doing anything but watch him. He is now angry and demands to know what I said. She said with a lilting sarcasm, “He said you won’t find anything”, at which he became even more jerky in his movements and kept looking, saying, “Oh yeah!!”

After about a minute he leaves. This is probably one of the sheriffs that used to come up behind me with the brights on, five feet away. I had been driving this rear-ended corolla with the rag top flapping in the wind. This car was a cop magnet. Cops would stop whatever they were doing when I drove by, poised motionless except for their head slowly rotating to follow me down the street. They always did that, no matter what else was going on, and when I got sober, they would come up behind me and tail-gate me to see what I was going to do. I started just slowly pulling over every time they did it. I was clean and sober and licensed and insured, if not a bit ragged and rugged. After a while they stopped (except, but that’s another story).

She asks me to get out of the car to show me why she stopped me, which is that my bumper partially blocked the license plate (she waved me over from in front). She then asks why there is a restriction on my license. I am oh-so-convinced that she knows, but I keep it light, the way she is treating it, and say, DUI.

She stops with all the BS and says point blank, “There is a warrant for your arrest, but you weren’t an asshole, so take care of it.” I thought I had taken care of them, but there was an out of county one that seemed to be illusive when I tried to clean it up. (it took two years).

What still sticks in my mind is that she lied to me to see if I would lie to her. She, herself was guilty of what she was most bothered by. No rest for the righteous.

As an afterthought, if my skin was darker, the result might not have been so “nice”. Do I think racism exists, of course yes. And it exists in all peoples, everywhere. That it exists is not the point. What and how are are the important aspects of racism to deal with, as we are all the “who”. This is not to pretend that horrors have not been committed, and probably will be still. But making white the only racist color will never succeed in creating a solution, or stop the proliferation of racism.

I wish you’d read more of Yolanda’s posts throughout Stan’s blog to hear where she is coming from. Her voice is powerful with political insight, and very reasonably passionate with the rage of the oppressed who refuse to be treated as anything other than fully human. As Buddha, Jesus of Bethlehem (not Christ of Galilee), and the Dalai Lama could have told you, the divine is of all of us equally. One need not walk the Earth without a home to know and experience this. Yolanda’s voice is one of the keenest on Stan’s blog, and I’m sorry you have locked yourself out of the opportunity to know and see this.

I think you REALLY misunderstood my post. I too have been to Mexico more than once, and deeply appreciated the sincerity and kindnesses of the people I met there. Part of my predominantly European-descended family is Mexican-American, and I’ve railed against anti-Mexican racist humour and other cruelties on any number of occasions.

My point, and perhaps I made it unclearly, was that those films I mentioned are racist in their portrayal of Mexican people and Mexican cultures. I have yet to see popular mainstream “white” U.S. cinema that wasn’t racist about Mexican people and cultures, to name but one ethnic group of Colour that U.S. Hollywood-producced films are usually racist about. Hell, even Crash is racist in this regard, and it’s being promoted as the best thing since sliced white bread on the matter of race.

I have yet to see consistently dignified portraits in mainstream media of anyone or any group or any culture or any nation who lives with the U.S. on top of them (aka “South of the Border”).

That is my point, sir.

If I somehow left you with the impression that I was putting down Mexican cultures or people, I extend to you my sincerest apologies. My fury is aimed squarely at white patriarchal corporate Amerikkka (i.e., the U.S.), just to be crystal clear.

Julian

My “armageddon-on-wheels” has died, now, so I’ll no longer be a menace to society on the mean streets of Maryville.