Racism

I went down to Jacksonville, Florida this past week for my brother's commencement ceremony. Anyone who knows my brother knows that everything is a deep discussion with him, especially when the two of us get together. Well, my last night there, I got into a discussion with him, and two of his roommates, Tom and Tony. The three of them together were attempting to make the point that the blacks down there were lazy. My brother talked of how he got worse tips delivering pizzas to black neighborhoods than to white. They talked about how the matrons of the family held the family down and in place. My brother also made some interesting comments earlier about how blacks don't even give their kids "real" names and just make names up that sound African. Nonesense.

This is stupid. This kind of racism is exactly the divisive kind of crap that keeps affirmative action and other such garbage alive. First, let me say that basing a statement like "blacks are lazy" on skin color is absolute nonesense. What is therre that is different about a person's skin, muscle, and bone structure that makes them lazy? Nothing. This is stupid. To try and justify the position by saying, "Well, I really mean their impoverished social status which happens to be worse for blacks" is just an excuse. This has nothing to do with skin color, so why bring it up? You'd be much better off saying, the poor people in the area are lazy. This is likely even statistically true, if you can come up with a quantifiable measure of laziness. But, this is beside the point. The real point is, what is the value in this kind of talk?

These kinds of distinctions are damaging. We should avoid this kind of racism. Racism is a highly destructive force when we think in these terms. I must admit, I do it myself. For me, it's usually when I talk about those "foreign students" or "those Indian students". I don't have a problem with this class of folks, I have a problem with a few of them that bother me and thus the whole group gets mashed together with prejudice. This is wrong. I am wrong when I say this and I hope someone nearby will correct me when I make this mistake. Yes, there is a certain cultural bias that causes some Indian students problems, but is that any reason to assume this for all of them? No. Is it valuable to make such distinctions? No.

However, there is a kind of racism that is good. Rather than identifying races by their problems, we can celebrate their cultures and can address the unique problems they face. That is, we can perform racial profiling in a way that moves out to help others in a selfless way rather than to pull back and whine about how stupid or irritating that class of people is. This too has the danger of creating stereotypical molds for people. Yet, we can celebrate the rich heritage a culture has.

African Americans do have a unique cultural background. Nearly all of them have ancestors who were oppressed to some extent for hundreds of years. Many of them were treated cruelly. This cruelty has not totally ended, but I think it likely that we will have an African American President in my lifetime. This speaks volumes of the progress that has been made and I think that we should work extra hard to avoid the kind of negative labeling that continues to pass this prejudice onward. Instead, let's embrace one another as human brothers. We must not forget the past and our heritage, but we can make today right.

As a small clarification, I mean this in a personal sort of way, not in the political realm. Political solutions have a tendency to create prejudice rather than fix it. As such, I'm opposed to affirmative action and am rather in favor of education. (That is, so long as that education isn't steeped in a "white people suck" mentality, but is rather interested in the differences between people and allows them to come together and meet.) Political tools should be used carefully and have been applied too often because they are easier than building personal rapport between groups.

Ultimately, we should strive to focus on the positives that each culture possesses, and every culture has something good in it. (I don't think a thing can be all bad.) African Americans, Latinos, Asians, Indians, Hawaiians, Europeans, Persians, Arabs, Jews, Russians, Aboriginies, and all the others are of great worth. We shouldn't apply negative labels to people. Rather we should humble ourselves and seek common ground. This is ideal racism. A high target to aim for, but this I think it's worth the effort. We should celebrate the value contributed by our differing cultures and perspectives. Let's not get caught up in destroying one another. The ruler of this world doesn't need anymore help.