I had a great advantage growing up. I was brought up believing that race was unimportant, that it didn’t matter what somebodies skin color was or was not. It was a small northern country town.
I knew people of many races and many mixes, and none of us ever saw each other as being particularly different, beyond the occasional “Your hair can do cooler things than mine!” comments that turned in to long standing jokes we all laughed over.
I moved down to Texas, and ended up living in an area that was predominantly African American. For the first week, I tried to treat people like I always treated people.
About that time, it was forcefully presented to me that I was the wrong skin color, and I could either leave or die. There were a lot of arguements over that, since neither options were particularly viable in my opinion at that time. However, it drove a point home very, very deeply:
I don’t hate people with a different skin color, but /they hated me./
You want to tell me racism is my fault because I’m white? You can go elsewhere, I *learned* racism at the hands of the oh-so-innocent reviled and hated. They themselves have also learned to breed hate.
I don’t care what color your skin is or isn’t, and I’m not going to waste time speaking on it. I’ve only got one really simple point to make here:
The instant you become focused on the issue of race, you have become racist because the inherent meaning of the term is ONE FOCUSED ON RACE.
One who says “Why are all you white people so racist?” is no different from one who says “Why do all you black people keep going OVER this, we’ve already spent a generation trying to help you, you’ve taken English, perverted the grammatical rules to make Ebonics, insisted we recognize it as a language, done everything possible to be distanced from us in the name of pride in a culture you have very little concept of because of being sold in to slavery – er, sorry, your ANCESTORS were sold into slavery by your OTHER ANCESTORS.”
And I bet some people are going to explode because I used the derogatory word black.
Would somebody please explode because I used the derogatory word WHITE? It’s *precisely* as respectful (or disrespectful) as saying black, it’s black and white terms (pardon the pun), but even the immediant notice that using the word black /will/ cause, the fact that nobody is going to blink over the word white, I think, really sums up the current status of racism.
Now, can you tell me what skin color I am, what ethnic group I belong to?
No. None of you can. Education, a desire to learn, can create grammatical and intellectual capabilities REGARDLESS OF SKIN COLOR.
