I went to public schools until high school and had a mixed group of friends. How mixed, you ask? The one other jewish guy was an adopted native American. My parents said that our core group looked like a Bennetton ad.
Naturally we got up to all the things that kids are too busy to do these days with their xboxstations and faceville and chatbook and why isn’t anyone on my damn lawn. A preferred pastime was snowballing cars. We had this ideal spot picked out on a hill with a clear shot down to the road, with woods behind us where we could disappear in a hurry. The only easy way to us was up that snowy hill. That gave us plenty of time to skedaddle when the heat showed up. Traffic moved slow and sparse enough that nobody was in any danger when someone stopped to yell (around one in five, always dudes).
At some point the local PD must have dedicated a task force to us because one day a cop car pulled up at the bottom of the hill and everyone ran for the woods, where we met a line of wet, cold and pissed off cops who had hiked up behind us. They gave a lecture about what happens to delinquent thirteen-year olds and then arrested the black kid. They also took in the jewish native American, I guess because he looked hispanic. Both got their records checked, spent some time in holding and then moms picked them up. The black guy was and is one of the most polite people I have ever met, aside from the snowballs, and certainly knew the important points from The Talk better than us snotty white kids. Even in the progressive north that gets you only so far.
Another occasion comes to mind. One night few winters later a paddy wagon screeches to a halt in front of me and two friends, perhaps to do with the fireworks going off in people’s yards (under three feet of snow at night they make a very satisfying thud-poof with lights and yes, I know I will go to hell). The driver demands to know whether we saw any black kids throwing fireworks in people’s yards. I, hiding a Roman candle with a huge square base under my parka, tell him nope. In defense of my conscience (again, setting aside the fireworks thing) this was a fairly chichi part of Pittsburgh and the guy would have had to drive miles to find a group of black kids walking around at night.
So two cheers for white privilege. This sounds like pretty minor stuff, but how many times have I not been pulled over and arrested by an angry hornet’s nest of cops for no good reason? Probably a lot. It is a small miracle that I have a clean juvenile record, and I once had to take that license test again after a couple of speeding tickets. My personal experience is not exactly a James Baldwin novel but it is enough to make me laugh whenever some rightwing blowhard declares that we are done and over with racism in America.
Baud
When you are white and hot, this is the type of privilege you get.
Baud
And by the way, this post is irrelevant. John Roberts has assured us that our country has changed.
Gex
I have a weird situation going on. I’m half Chinese, half-German. When I was young in the 70’s, I did not feel different than my peers. Back then I passed. The only racial stuff I was aware of were the death threat calls that sometimes came to the house after school when I was home alone. (Yeah, that’s a doozy when I think of it now as an adult.)
But over the years, it has gotten harder for me. I’ve been warned to avoid certain towns in Indiana on the way to visit a friend. And, more worryingly, people in one of the more redneck towns in the area think I look Mexican.
I have family in that town. I know what they think and say about Mexicans. It is not flattering at best and dangerous at worst.
But hey, we’re post-racial now! So post racial that my race has become a bigger problem for me than it ever was before.
schrodinger's cat
When you are in the majority, you automatically get the benefit of doubt, minorities have to prove themselves, guilty until proven innocent. As a petite woman, I have only had good experiences with policemen so far, touch wood.
Another Holocene Human
I think of the times I got out of tickets for minor traffic violations when I was younger. Not even a warning.
Was a bit of an eye opener when I did get a written warning here. Happened as soon as I crossed the boundary into my majority-minority neighborhood. Gimpy headlight, now fixed, not that it makes any fucking difference because the housing is and was broken so my driver’s side headlight has lazy eye. Whatevs, I don’t speed at night.
Then there’s the time my brother got tackled by narcs in Eastern Mass who thought his backpack full of shitty beer was a big box of cocaine. He was under 21 but possession isn’t illegal there, so they just … let him go. He was even a bit smart-mouthed with them from the way he tells it. I mean, it is a bit surprising–no trumped up charges? No shots fired because imaginary gun? No unprovoked beating?
Cops did beat my other brother who has Asperger’s Syndrome in retaliation for something that was not his fault. (And because they needed somebody to blame because they were completely unable to identify who had been engaging in property damage that night.) I know it happened because the news media caught them beating his limp, unresisting body on film. They arrested nothing but special needs kids that night. Of course the administrators at the student office for the special needs kids were livid the next morning and did what they could. So there are a lot of different kinds of privilege.
negative 1
Yes, although try getting in the system. I had a couple youthful indiscretions, really minor stuff, although you can actually pinpoint the moment when they pull up your record. Their demeanor changes from “don’t harass him he’s a white guy” to “time to get stern he’s got a record…”
schrodinger's cat
@Gex: My theory, Obama’s election has brought out all the crazies out of the woodwork, they feel like they don’t need to hide their prejudices anymore.
negative 1
@Another Holocene Human: Cops in Southeastern Mass have a WAY higher meathead/normal ratio then is healthy or should be allowed.
Chris
@Baud:
Well, no, that’s not entirely true. We have to be honest and admit that racial tensions are at an all time high in this country. But we also have to be honest and admit that it’s all Obama’s fault. Who does he think he is, getting elected?
/conservative
aimai
I thought the best part of that Kosdiary, if that’s the link, is where the diarist points out that many white people, because of their experience, think that you get out of the interaction what you put into it: if you are polite to the cops they are polite to you. This is true for many interactions you might have with the police. Its not true for interactions someone else is having with the police. But it might shape your assumptions about the world in ways you just aren’t aware of.
As a white woman my interactions with the police have always been rather sweet–police officers used to take a fatherly attitude towards me when I was a young girl, and now take a pleasantly deferential attitude towards me, except when I’m out protesting a war or something, if I need to interact with them. I get out of those interactions slightly more than I put into them and I can rely on them following a certain script which, for the most part, is not dangerous to me.
The kos diary points out that this is simply not true for a non white person–your behavior can (perhaps) mitigate harm somewhat but it can’t prevent you from being treated like an incredibly dangerous or guilty person. In fact, your behavior isn’t necessarily going to affect things at all since the police officer (or, in the zimmerman case the complete stranger) is actually imagining himself in an interaction with a class of people, not an individual at all. The diarist points out that this creates a really different attitude towards life itself and social interactions at a basic level and says that we saw that in (some) white and black attitudes towards high profile incidents like the Trayvon Martin murder.
Figs
When I was in college, some friends and I had a run-in with the cops. We had for some reason become obsessed with a sign on a local coal business, and one night we decided to pull the trigger and go get it. We were, needless to say, quite intoxicated at this point. There were three of us. I was standing lookout while my two friends tried to pry the sign off of the telephone pole on which it was mounted.
My friends had just dislodged the sign when, faster than my ability to be an effective lookout, two cop cars came zooming around the corner and into the parking lot. The first one got out of his car and screamed, “What the FUCK are you doing?” The second one, a second later, got out of the second car and screamed “What the FUCK are you doing?”
We paused, looking at each other. Finally, my friend spoke: “We were trying to take the sign.”
At that point the cops, angry as ever, started loudly and profanely supervising our clumsy attempts to hang the sign back on the telephone pole we’d crudely pried it off of. After a few minutes, they said, “Fuck it, that’s good enough. Get over here.” We walked over there. “You guys from the fuckin’ college?”
“Yes,” we murmured.
“You on fuckin’ scholarships?” I was, but my friend wasn’t, and he answered before either of the others of us could.
“No, sir,” he said.
“Fuckin’ rich assholes,” the cops said. They scowled at us for a little while, and then said, “Get the fuck out of here.”
We went back to our house and got pretty tremendously wasted. But I have ABSOLUTELY no doubt that if we weren’t three lily-white kids, we likely wouldn’t even have gotten to the point where they asked us what we were doing, let alone let us go without any sanctions whatsoever.
David in NY
I’ve lived for the last 30 years in a neighborhood that’s about 90% members of minority groups (I’m white), and I see this a fair amount. The cops about to arrest a black neighbor’s crazy kid on my block (which is about 50-50 white-black) for having driven off with his mom’s car, when all of a sudden a bunch of white women come out and ask what they’re doing, and they suddenly find they can just give the kid a ticket and get a promise he’ll seek treatment.
Or the cop car ticketing a car for illegal parking during certain hours 15 minutes before the parking would have been illegal. That time, I got even, got the patrol car number, called the precinct and spoke to a lieutenant or captain, reported the illegal ticket (before the car would have become illegally parked), and went out to meet the owner, who promptly came to move his car (while it was still legal). Then, much to our satisfaction, the patrol car returned, pulled up, and did what NYPD officers say is never done — the officer took back and tore up the ticket.
Poopyman
Tim, it took me a few years of living in the DC area before I realized what a segregated, racist place Pittsburgh was when growing up in the 60s and 70s. Certainly our little corner of the southern suburbs, where the blacks knew their place and it wasn’t with the white kids. But my sense then and now is that it was widespread.
I know my cousin’s kid’s sensibilities and who’re in their circles, so I can happily say that things are way different now. In any event, I was oblivious to the privilege assumed as a white male until a rather slow dawning in my 20s. Slow because I’m not always the most perceptive, and my non-white, non-male acquaintances were too gracious by half to knock some sense into me.
The Moar You Know
I was having a chat with my wife about this last night, albeit in a vastly different context, and there are many problems with the nonwhite experience in America, but one that struck me in particular is that whites always get the benefit of the doubt – even if you’re one of them hippy-looking longhaired males, which I was for many, many years. Got pulled over more than thirty times in my life, starting the first night I got my license, never got cuffed, never got a ticket.
That doesn’t happen to nonwhites. They never get the benefit of the doubt in any situation, not ever.
That is merely one of many, many white privileges. And of course, nonwhites are getting it far worse now than ever before. The election of a black president has not been a blessing for any ethnic group in this country of ours. It had to happen; but there was going to be a price to be paid, and nonwhites are paying dearly.
@schrodinger’s cat: Also, this. Problem is, a not inconsequential number of those “crazies” are cops.
Gex
@schrodinger’s cat: Agreed.
I do see less of a problem with racism with younger folks (I’m early-40’s). I’m not naive enough to think there isn’t any racism. I see it as improving, I guess.
And as such, I see this much like I see the extreme anti-gay backlash in the country in recent years. It is the screeching of a desperate group that is losing power.
Villago Delenda Est
@Figs:
The tell there is “fuckin’ rich assholes”. This meant that the cops would damage their own positions if they had the balls to actually arrest some fuckin’ rich college kids.
You don’t arrest the spawn of the rich. There are consequences for doing that, not for the spawn, but for you.
The cops are around to protect and serve the 1%. Period.
Figs
@Villago Delenda Est:
Absolutely. I’ve gone over that night a lot of times in my mind, and that’s one point I get hung up on. Would we have been somewhat more likely to get arrested if they hadn’t thought we were all rich kids possibly with connections? Could be. Tensions between the town and the college were very, very high, as is very often the case, so it could be that our being at the college would have been enough.
Betty Cracker
When I was a kid, we threw rotten citrus fruit at cars instead of snow. Because there was no snow. Snow White privilege.
Chris
@Figs:
LMAO, “fucking rich assholes.” You just KNOW if you’d said yes he’d have just said “fucking moochers living off my tax dollars” or something like that.
schrodinger's cat
@Betty Cracker: I have thrown chalks at cars and people, never got caught though!
ETA: Mother was a teacher, so we always had a supply of chalk.
kindness
Ha Tim you are funny. All you Gen X, Y & whateverers. Us Boomers did not have x-boxes. We didn’t even have VCRs or cable tv growing up. We did however used to purposefully get neighbors to call the cops and play ditch ’em. Punk kids. Yea, I know.
Now I can’t say we were so mistreated that we had to find sticks to play with. We weren’t. But that was the era that a parent had no issue telling an 8 or 10 year old kid to walk a mile to school (alone, horrors) if they missed the bus and didn’t think twice about it. Actually that aspect was really nice. Way better than today’s overprotective parents.
Shakezula
@Gex: Martinsville?
Omnes Omnibus
@Villago Delenda Est: Dealing with the authorities is always easier if you look like you might be, or be related to, someone important, i.e., white and rich/powerful. I am a white guy who neither looks nor sounds like a manual laborer ( yeah, stereotype alert); deference is the default.
schrodinger's cat
I have taken self defense classes taught by the campus police more than once, and they have always been nice. I was once locked out my house because of my Tunchesque cat Inji, who was a kitten then, when I lived in married student housing and had to call the campus police. We were not even supposed to have animals in those apartments, but the young police officer was nice and said nothing as he unlocked the door, perhaps because he knew me because of those classes.
Shakezula
The most distressing thing is, all cops adopt this attitude. An African-American expecting sweet reason from an AA police officer will be sorely disappointed.
Phil Perspective
@aimai: Also .. if you look/appear rich .. you have it easier over anyone non-rich. I was once stopped in the middle of winter at like 3am in rural CT because the cops were looking for drunk drivers. Problem was they had no reason to stop me. I wasn’t weaving all over the road or any of that. I hadn’t even had a drink for 4 hours before that, and only had 3 all night long. All between 5pm and midnight. Anyway, I had to walk the line, touch my nose with the pointy finger on both hands and the kicker .. do the alphabet backwards from Z to A. I passed them all with flying colors, including the alphabet thingy, which pissed the cop off to no end. When I finished the alphabet, he told me to get the f–k out of there. Do I, as a white guy, have it easier? Certainly. But as with most things, I really do think it comes down more to class.
schrodinger's cat
@Phil Perspective: Class and race both matter I think, also wrt cops, you do have it easier when you are a woman. One of the few times that gender is an advantage, if you are a woman.
Poopyman
@Shakezula: In my white-male POV, there are a couple of things going on:
– The AA cop got The Talk years before, which included the part about having to be better at his job than his white counterpart just for the chance to be judged equal, and
– White and AA cops who drop their guard often wind up dead.
I’m glad to be corrected, though.
Chris
@Shakezula:
Probably because everyone at the station is just looking for an opportunity to pounce and say that the black cop is being soft on black people and it’s totes racism and awful. You have to show yourself “fair” and “even minded” in order to be accepted. White cops who give white people freebies, of course, feel no such pressure.
schrodinger's cat
@Chris: It happens to women too. My adviser was a woman who was a perfect bitch to other women, but much nicer to male students in general.
ETA: She was the only woman in a department full of men and thought that being a hard ass proved that she was as tough as any of the men.
Matt McIrvin
My personal experience as a white nerd is that cops consider me a harmless but amusing freak. White privilege? Oh, my, yes, plenty of it. But they’re not exactly polite per se.
Comrade Dread
Yeah, this was my experience as well. I never gave the police a second thought growing up at all, because it was inconceivable that they would ever stop me or give me a hard time because I hadn’t done anything wrong.
It never occurred to me until I started moving in diverse circles and heard stories from friends that weren’t as white, clean-cut, WASP-y looking about their very different experiences with the police.
But it can’t be about race, because nothing is about race anymore. SCOTUS said so.
Shakezula
@Chris: I have to disagree. One, the minority may be the majority in some precincts around here. Not to mention the chief of police may well be African-American.
Two, I’ve never seen an instance of a minority police officer being thrown to the wolves when he fucks up. The big Wall of Blue will protect him just as much as his white brother. You wouldn’t expect that if the AA officers were seen as “Not one of us.” But again, I can only talk about the D.C. area. Maybe it is different elsewhere.
I think it comes down to the fact that a police officer sees himself as a different breed than us puny mortals. They all believe the same things. So if the mind set is: Black guy is always guilty, everyone will think he’s guilty. If the woman in a domestic abuse complaint always exaggerates, even a female cop will assume she is exaggerating. Because that black guy or that woman isn’t a cop.
Davis X. Machina
I was thrilled just to see ‘privilege’ spelled without a d. This by-analogy-with-knowledge artifact is one of my pet peeves.
Not as bad as ‘perogative’ for prerogative, which really does my nut, as the Brits say. By rights that should have something to do with Polish ravioli…
schrodinger's cat
@Davis X. Machina: English teacher or Spelling Nazi or both?
Origuy
John Scalzi wrote about this last year. Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is.
@Shakezula: Martinsville has become a bedroom community for Indianapolis. I don’t think it’s nearly as bad as as it was in the 60s and 70s. I grew up in Bloomington. In the early 70s, our black cheerleader didn’t dress for away games there. Not that Bloomington was that much better. My elementary school was all white; there was one black kid in my middle school. He got beat up a lot. Nearly all the black people, outside the University, lived in one area in the northside.
Matt McIrvin
@Shakezula: I recently saw a distressing article about a study of racially biased snap judgments in a simulated police shooting situation. It turned out that active and conscious anti-racism was worse than useless for keeping people from being biased toward shooting black people; in fact, African-American subjects and white liberals who stated vehement opposition to racism were some of the worst. People with naive “colorblind” attitudes weren’t as bad.
The theory was that greater consciousness of stereotypes can cause them to operate in split-second decisions even when that consciousness revolves entirely around rejecting them.
It’s distressing because you could so easily spin this in an “anti-racists are the real racists” direction. When it comes to choosing whether to shoot somebody in a fraction of a second, they may well be. To my mind, though, it’s not really an argument against actively confronting racism, so much as an argument against a society in which a lot of people have to make split-second trigger decisions. It might suggest that people who have to carry guns need to be trained differently about race from everyone else.
Another Holocene Human
@negative 1: What’s sad is that the non-meatheads feel like they have to put on their togs and ACT like meatheads, like the Cambridge cop, whatever his name was, who was on camera drunk slurring about how he’s not a bad guy (had some Brookline pigs say that to me once after pulling me over past midnight for NOTHING AT ALL FUCK YOU BROOKLINE–obviously I was a communist for watching a late nite showing of a furrin movie with subtitles instead of the dubbed version at the multiplex) . But listen to how he talks to his own police dispatcher on that radio tape that was released. Total amped up jackhole. No surprise at all that he arrested Gates “just because”–at time of arrest he had already determined that Gates lived there and no crime had been committed, except that of being impertinent to a cop. Then I guess he wanted us to feel sorry for him for fucking up and arresting a nationally famous Harvard perfessor as opposed to, I dunno, some punk visiting scholar? Who knows.
Linda Featheringill
rich assholes:
A few months ago, I moved into what is definitely an upper middle class area, not that far from people that are actually rich. I’m playing the mother-in-law role. Daughter’s honey provided the address.
BUT, the first thing I noticed is that tradespeople, police, city officials, etc. treated me with greater respect than I was used to. It felt odd, actually. Still does.
drkrick
@schrodinger’s cat: Remember how many of us thought we would never see an AA president, at least not as soon as 2008, and how pleasantly surprised we were? There are an awful lot of bigots who never expected to see that either, but their emotional response has been just a little different.
drkrick
@Shakezula:
Your definition of f***ing up and the Thin Blue Line’s definition aren’t the same. There are plenty of things that the minority officer can do to get him thrown out of the protection of the tribe. Abusing civilians, especially minority civilians, is most assuredly not on the list. Objecting to someone else abusing a civilian usually will be.
Origuy
Not sure why my comment is in moderation, maybe it’s reverse discrimination! Actually, I used the wrong email address.
Grover Gardner
I hear you. I grew up in Sewickley (very elite northeast suburb of Pittsburgh). By the early 70’s when I left we had a few token minorities at the private school but that was it. My grandmother belonged to the local country club, which naturally didn’t accept Jews. My two older sisters married Jewish men and of course the weddings *had* to be held at the country club despite the fact that everyone involved was made to feel miserable and self-concious.
I always tell people that where I grew up, if you saw a black person in your neighborhood who wasn’t wearing a maid’s uniform or pushing a lawn mower, you called the police.
Moving away from there was the best thing that ever happened to me. I’ve gone back a few times looking for some “nostalgia” but all I got was the hives.
Davis X. Machina
@schrodinger’s cat: Latin teacher and etymologist.
The -leg- in privilege is the same root as that found in ‘legal’. “Knowledge” is from the German side of the family tree, and the -ledge business isn’t connected to the -lege in the other word in any way.
Same thing with ‘prerogative’. One century — the centuria praerogativa — in a Roman election in the centuriate assembly was asked (-rog-) its opinion in advance (prae-), and its choice was thought to have special, prophetic, oracular significance. (This, I believe is the origin of the New Hampshire primary.) When the prefix is flipped to ‘per’ (for sound phonetic reasons, I’d guess…) the etymology is obscured.
JCJ
@Shakezula:
Martinsville and Bedford immediately spring to mind, don’t they? That said, anyplace south of Indy besides Bloomington is suspect to me. I remember stopping in a small store near Bean Blossom many years ago to get a Diet Coke. My Asian girlfriend (now wife) stayed in the car. I was terrified in that store even though I am as white as white can be. If I felt uncomfortable I cannot imagine how it would feel for others.
Another Holocene Human
@Shakezula: I love the story where the graveyard shift cops in Springfield, MA (hometown son: Bill Cosby) drag a crack-addled blackman out of a car suspiciously parked at a gas station in the wee hours of the morning and beat his black behind only to have the news blaring the next day that the 50-something diabetic Superintendant of Schools didn’t show up to work that day and after a few hours of worry and panic turned up alive a few hours later beaten and bruised in the hoosegow.
They broke into a car and beat a man in a diabetic coma.
Aaaaaaaand they were wrong about just who they were beating and got busted.
The chief of police resigned a few days later.
Another Holocene Human
@schrodinger’s cat: Unless you get pulled over by one of those rapey cops.
If you’re a female alone in a car at night, call 911 and slow roll if you see blue lights.
Another Holocene Human
@Chris: But I think there’s a bit of authoritarian mentality going on, like that PG county cop who followed this dude in an SUV all the way to his driveway and shot and killed him.
Cops think they’re at war with “civilians”. Very troubling.
maurinsky
I’m a white woman, law-abiding, and my experiences with cops have been mostly negative. I called the police once because there was a very drunk/high young woman in our backyard who refused to leave, and I got yelled at by the cop because apparently this girl gets put on 72 hour hold in the hospital on a fairly regular basis, although that had nothing to do with me, he decided to take out his frustration one me.
The worst was once when I got pulled over for no reason, and this pissant searched my car and said he was going to arrest me for carrying a deadly weapon because my softball bat was in the backseat. I was on my way to a softball practice, btw. I admit I freaked out and burst into tears when he said that, and he let me go, but I recognize that it would have gone down differently if I were not a white girl.
Another Holocene Human
@Matt McIrvin: Sounds like there are a lot of confounding factors there that are going unquestioned.
Another Holocene Human
@Davis X. Machina: Sounds like gallup.
Also, too, if the meaning and pronunciation has shifted that much, what’s the beef?
I must admit the spelling confounded me and I folk etymologized the word as a mneumonic.
Kent
I teach at a suburban Central Texas HS that is relatively upscale and pretty diverse. This is the Waco area and I teach in the affluent suburban part. The other end of the city is mostly black and Hispanic and much poorer
An administrator told me a story last spring. A black kid came into the office to get a school parking sticker 2 weeks before the end of school because he had just gotten a new car. They are pretty expensive…about $50 for the year for the privilege of parking your car in the student lot. The administrator told the kid not to bother as they weren’t going to be doing any more sticker patrols that late in the year. A few hours later she got a call from an irate mom demanding that her son get his parking sticker.
Turns out it had nothing to do with actually parking at the HS. She just didn’t want her black son driving around the suburbs in a car that didn’t have a local HS sticker on it. Apparently the local cops are known to harass black and Hispanic kids driving around in the “wrong” neighborhoods but if you have the local school sticker on your car they know you belong and leave you alone. As a parent of a blonde teenage girl it would never occur to me to make sure she had the right parking sticker on her car to avoid police harassment. As a teacher who works with a lot of black and Hispanic kids I see this sort of thing all the time. It is normally just little stuff like a parking sticker but it all adds up to the fact that we really live in two different worlds even if we live side by side.
KXB
A guy who works for us part-time told a story of how he was riding his motorbike in Indiana, and was approaching a tollbooth. But the wooden barrier was the same color (white), as a set of stripes on the road, so he did not see it until too late. He broke through the barrier, and just kept right on going. For two days, his conscience was bugging him, and his father in-law told him he should just call the tollway authority and see how much it costs. So he did, and they said it was no big deal, and waived him off.
My co-worker happens to be a white guy.
As a 40 something male whose ethnicity is not readily apparent to the naked eye, and whose Indian name is a bit uncommon that unless you are familiar with the array of Indian names you would not know – most of my interactions with cops have been businesslike. The last time I got pulled over (for leaving a left turn only lane, which had a solid white stripe), the kid had to have been just out of the academy. The flashlight was bigger than his head, and he sounded like the high-pitched kid on The Simpsons (It’s Crantastic!). He checked my license, my records, and let me go.
I also happen to live in an area where even if you are born in America, like me, you cannot assume that your last name will be all-American Smith. There are a helluva lot of Polish and other Eastern European people in Chicago and its suburbs, and their names are harder to spell than mine.
Gex
This was for the child’s own good you see.
schrodinger's cat
@Davis X. Machina: Cool, it is always great to find out about the origin of words. So I have to ask you, since when did the English as we know now become common
place?
Ivan Ivanovich Renko
I’m lucky, I have a facility with accents; so if I lay a fake-Brit accent (or just enough Brit that it sounds like I was edumacated there), they are generally polite and respectful.
True story– I’ve been driving since I was 18; and the very first (and ONLY) time I ever got pulled over by a black cop was when I was well over 40. He must have been in his late twenties or so, but I was so amazed that I took the ticket, shook his hand, and told him it had been a pleasure. (oh yeah, I was stone busted doin’ 70 in a 55.)
blahblahnobody
I’m really tired of talking about this topic with white people, so I’m probably not going to respond to any of the responses. But I’m growing weary of liberals congratulating themselves for writing about racism and filtering that writing through exclusively white perspectives. People of color – and American blacks in particular – talk about this topic all the time, and in much less annoyingly tortured anti-racism 101 terms. Does it physically pain people to actually link them a little more frequently? Or seek them out and read them? White people have absolutely nothing interesting to say about racism and I have a hard time taking it seriously when these pseudo-empathetic articles are trotted out and linked in service to anti-racism but with no evident diversity in the perspectives rendered. Two white people realize that white privilege exist. Wonderful. But this doesn’t say anything about racism so much as it shows the inherent insularity of whiteness and the increasingly low bar required for white people to consider themselves “not-racist.”
And while I’m at it and here, where in the world is this site’s POC writers? Several recent events have happened that effect POC politics, POC lives and involve POC experiences and this site – which is supposed to be in service to a political party that wouldn’t have any power without POC’s – generally had nothing of note to say about them. That’s a problem, and it should be treated and discussed as such. ABL hasn’t posted in ages, Zandar’s posts are infrequent and the similarly infrequent This Week In Blackness posts are largely ignored. Would it hurt to actually seek some out? Would it hurt to yield the floor to black perspectives and let their voices include and incorporate what your voices independently can’t?
I’m sorry, but pointing out instances of conservative and distantly (for you) institutional racism doesn’t qualify as valid anti-racist action for white people. It’s incredibly narcissistic backpatting and I’m not very impressed by white liberal efforts to use it as a way of discussing racism without grappling with their own personal personifications of it. Racism’s scope and destructiveness is considerably broader than the debate here has rhetorically allowed and it’s conveniently disingenuous to pretend that it’s primarily a conservative/old person thing. It’s just as morally bankrupt to pretend that all we have to do is wait 20 years for the Real Racists to drop off before it’s all solved. Chauncey DeVega (a black person!) had something genuinely correct to say about the topic recently:
“We can also not forget that White conservatives and White liberals are both the children of Whiteness and White Privilege.
Both deny the existence of White Privilege. The former rejects it outright. The latter just tries to dance around it. Some white liberals acknowledge that White Privilege is real while writing themselves out of it; other White Liberals want to introduce class as an over-determining variable so that race is made secondary; some White Liberals want to use the concept of White Privilege as a cudgel to beat White conservatives about the head, while denying that they too benefit from a society that gives them unearned advantages due to being “white”.
In total, White liberals and others want to be talked to by people of color in a manner that is deferential to their racial privilege. Moreover, White liberals and White conservatives both want to have their feelings “respected” and not hurt by people of color who dare to engage in truth-telling about White Supremacy.
Consequently, White conservatives are for the most part the enemy of the Black Freedom Struggle. White liberals, with the exception of brothers like John Brown and the ride or die Freedom Riders, Abolitionists, and others having been duly noted, are allies of black and brown folks until it becomes inconvenient and challenges Left-leaning white folks’ position of domination, privilege, power, paternalism, and ego towards non-whites.
In this way, White conservatives are much more honest racists than White liberals. White conservatives will let you know that black and brown folks are “uppity” and need to know their place. White liberals will often just derail and hijack the conversation by using thinly understood language gleamed from the introduction to books on white privilege or materials they found online.”
That’s a much better starting point. You’re not moral, empathetic heroes for belatedly observing an actual, social reality for people you only have superficial familiarity with. Stop the preening, please.
Shakezula
@JCJ: Martinsville was notorious when I was out there, but I’ve been around the southern and northern parts of the state even to places that fit stereotypes and never had any problems aside from maybe a Look.
On the scale of places I’ve felt uncomfortable, Indiana is a 2 compared to places in Alabama and Georgia (8.5-9).
However, I was always with a white person, usually a man. I would still not feel comfortable traveling some of these places solo. How much that is being a woman vs. being a minority? No idea.
Shakezula
@Another Holocene Human: PG is notorious. I think they get all of the cops that don’t even make the grade for Water and Sanitation police. I live there now and even though I’m mid-40’s and female, really don’t feel comfortable around them.
I actually knew that officer when we were teens and the idea of that unstable fuck being give a badge is baffling until you realize he was with PGPD.
Omnes Omnibus
@Shakezula: I once had a boss who was an AA Lieutenant Colonel, combat vet and both airborne and ranger qualified who said that he would drive 1000 miles out of his way to avoid Alabama. And he was from Texas.
KXB
@Omnes Omnibus:
I’ve known Italians who avoid parts of the South – Alabama ranks high.
Shakezula
@Omnes Omnibus: Most of my family is from Alabama but I just won’t go down there any more. I know a lot of it is because I grew up hearing scary stories about encounters people had with racist dickheads down there. And I know that was 40+ years ago. But still. No thank you.
karen
@schrodinger’s cat:
BULLSEYE!
Racism was like this huge boil on the ass of humanity. All was beneath the surface because they were confident in the fact that everyone believed like they did. When Obama won the Democratic primary that was the first sign that the country was changing. Hell, even Hilary said that she should win the primary because Obama was “unelectable” and look what happened! Racists in both parties (remember, the first Birther was a PUMA) had the confidence of knowing how “unelectable” Obama was….until he won the Presidency. Then the boil burst and the pus of racism has been spewing every since.