This is not a post to discuss the cultural brilliance of Planet of the Apes, but I wanted to set the stage with my bonifides, because my reaction to the recent Roseanne dust-up is unusual for specifically this reason. I will not, in any way, defend Roseanne - she's had a long history of racist and hate-filled comments that betray a point of view. This can't get passed off as mere accident or happenstance no matter how one wants to spin it.
At the same time, I want to be honest about what happened and how what happened guided my train of thought, so:
I saw the headline breaking that Roseanne had been cancelled due to racist tweets. I had no details, so I went to google to get some and be informed, like a responsible human being. Google puts the first couple image search results at the top of the page, especially when you search for a name, like I did for Valerie Jarrett. One of them stuck out to me - because of the hair style she had and the strange angle of the photograph, my mind said, "Wow, she looks a lot like the Kim Hunter character from the original 1968 version of Planet of Apes in that one." Only that photo, mind you. I went back, after actually reading the tweet, and looked at literally hundreds of Valerie Jarrett photos and none of them seemed close. Just the one, with that particular angle.
Again, I'm not here to defend Roseanne or make excuses. You can't see her history and also give the benefit of the doubt that she just happened to be a Planet of the Apes fan and also just happened to see the one photo I found with that specific angle (a photo I'm not ever going to link to for all the reasons I'm speaking about below). She's made her bed, at this point.
The "coincidence" argument, though, intrigued me a bit, mostly because I understand how virulently and fundamentally white people are afraid of being racist or being perceived as racist or having someone notice how racist we really are. People make jokes about white fear of racism, but it's not really a joke. This is why we're so quick to tell you about that one black friend we have (who's probably just humoring us - at least most of the time).
I got to thinking about some other hypothetical person - me for example - who innocently made some comment about a specific African-American person looking like another specific person, who happened to be professionally made up as an ape. How would that be received? Then I realized, of course I'd never actually say something like that, even if the comparison occurred to me, because I understand the long history of racism and how persistently, even today, the comparison between black people and monkeys (or apes) is used to demean and dehumanize a people who've suffered such travesties for way, way too long. In other words, a human adult (especially in the US) with basic social awareness, should know full well the offensive, racist associations such a comparison would invite, regardless of intention.
I briefly thought that was a little bit unfair, until I reminded myself that it is literally the definition of injustice: things in the world that shouldn't be, but are. Not only that, but it's a pretty sorry, blatant example of white privilege. White people, like me, have the distinct privilege of being the only people on Earth who don't have to constantly be thinking about skin color. Talk about injustice! The color of white people's skin never matters, at least in a negative way - whatever minuscule negative example you can come up with is totally and entirely dwarfed by the vast positive benefits of racism we've enjoyed down through the years - which gives us the tremendous luxury of not always having to think about race. Obviously, it's a luxury that everyone SHOULD have, but, of course, they don't, which makes it an injustice.
It also brought to mind a really terrific essay I read a week or so ago. It was written more than a year ago by Sebastian Whitaker and it's simply titled "Dear White People: Your Dictionary Definition of Racism is Wrong." What he brings to the conversation is the notion that racism is not, in itself, an action or attitude, but a world-view that says some people are inherently better than others because of their skin color; racism is the embodiment of white supremacy.
Prejudice is our attitude towards people different from ourselves, where we generalize people for any number of reasons and make judgments about them because of those differences. Discrimination is when we act on those prejudices to somehow hamper or hinder those folks. In this sense, anyone can be prejudiced or discriminatory against any group - white, black, gay, straight, southern, German, ginger, overweight, nerdy, whatever. Those things are about attitudes and actions of individuals regardless of context.
Racism, though, is specifically about a particular world view that's been in existence for a very long time and continues to under-gird the society in which we live - even for those of us who wish it didn't exist. People of all skin colors have been shown to have unconscious biases in favor of white people and against those of darker skin. You can be prejudiced or discriminatory against white people, if you've got the inclination or power to do so, but you can't be racist against white people, because there's no system of non-white supremacy embedded in Earth's cultural history.
(Shoot, part of the purpose of that original Planet of the Apes movie was to specifically create a scenario where the humans were the oppressed species as a statement about racism in the world, with the hope that white people seeing white people as an oppressed minority might wake them up to the challenges of race in America. Whether that was wise or effective is certainly debateable, but they at least were aware enough, even in 1968, not to have any of the apes played by actual black people to avoid the overtly racist connotations that might invite.*)
There is some natural inclination towards prejudice that must be overcome in human evolution, but there was also an actual system of value ranking, based on skin color, that existed overtly for centuries. The 19th and 20th century debunked pseudoscience of phrenology was an attempt to judge the quality and character of a person based on the shape and density of their skull. It was entirely based in race and there are charts you can find where people did "research" to rank dozens of distinct "races" around the world on a hierarchy chart that always, always, always had white people at the top.
Whitaker's essay resonates with me, because it parallels the field in which I'm actually trained: Christian theology. For many Christians, the notion of faith is contained in intellectual assent - a particular passage from the Book of Romans is interpreted to mean all we need to do is believe the correct ideas genuinely and truly and we're "Christians." This is so terribly lacking in context, it will be impossible to explain without making an incredibly long post even more painfully obtuse. Suffice it to say, Christian belief is entirely about action - do the words you say and the actions you take contribute to the world as God intends it to be or not? You can intellectually assent to all the "proper" Christian ideals, but if you're a jerk to the people around you, you're an agent of death.
If you take Whitaker's (absolutely correct) understanding of racism, you can make a parallel claim: it doesn't matter so much how often you profess to believe everyone is equal and the way black people are treated in the world is terrible, if you say or do things (even without mal-intent) that perpetuate the notion that some skin colors are better than others, you're participating in racism.
So while white people like to parse all the intricacies of when and how one might be legitimately called a racist, it's very much an action-based system. What Roseanne said was racist - with or without her track record and reputation. If I were to express the same comparison, regardless of my intentions, it would be equally racist. Does that make me a racist? Well, in that moment, it certainly does - maybe not even though any fault of my own, but because an injustice exists in the world and through my action (even a potentially innocent one), I've perpetuated and participated in that injustice.
White people are obsessed with not being a racist; we tend to care a lot less about actions or systems in which we participate that perpetuate racism. Well, we do care, but only in that we're afraid those actions will define us as racist. Non-white folks tend to be a lot more concerned about calling out the words, actions, and systems of racism precisely because those are the things which actively dehumanize and disadvantage non-white folk. It would probably help if white people stopped being so worried about being called racist and spent more time thinking deeply about our own words and actions, about the systems in which we participate and how they affect the world around us. Yeah, there may one day come a time when everyone equally has the privilege to ignore race, but that day is not today and thus maybe not the most relevant conversation topic.
The other, small part of this that probably should be said, is for non-white folks to recognize how easy it is for white people not to think about race. It may seem impossible that a white person could make a statement like Roseanne's with no racist intent, but it really is (again, it's hard for me to believe Roseanne herself is in this camp, but it's certainly not outside the realm of possibility someone else might be). We do it all the time. White people say stupid racist shit without ever have bad intentions because we have this incredible, unfair privilege. It is still racist and it's wrong and it deserves to be called out. Regardless of intention, it's still abhorrent.
As a society, we're generally pretty terrible at communicating the message that just because you did an abhorrent, offensive thing, you yourself are not a worthless individual that others find impossible to love. We tend to conflate those things together and it's a real detriment to genuine conversation and growth. Healing divides are not possible with demonization, which means we have to bend over backward to be nice to people we don't like and who stay stupid things. (I am still a Christian after all - and the loving your enemies thing is pretty core to that belief system, or at least it should be.) We live in an inherently racist world - and try as we might to change that or rise above it, we're still going to say some terrible, racist things from time to time - we have to be better at recognizing, repairing, and growing, rather than shaming, condemning, and isolating.
White people need to be more aware of the world in which they live and how it continues to be shaped and formed on a foundation of blatant racism that creeps into our thoughts, words, and actions regardless of our intent or espoused beliefs. That's unfair, sure, but it's also reality. Having a conversation without a racial component is an unjust privilege we can't continue to take advantage of if we really want to see some reconciliation in the world. Guess what, it's also not the only privilege we'll have to give up if we genuinely want to see change.
White people, whether we're willing to admit it or not (and I'm just as guilty as the next white guy), generally want to solve the world's problems by making everyone "like us," but normalizing our own position and perspective in the world is, in fact, part of the very racist problem we're intended to solve. You can't have a world where everyone is on top - the very notion plays into a destructive, racist, divisive world view that needs to die. I have great faith that it's possible to overcome, but it does not come without a cost and it does not come without intention.
*One could argue that no black people got those jobs because Hollywood was a pretty white place and black people didn't hardly get any decent jobs, especially in 1968, but they did specifically include a black astronaut as some sign they were aware of the racial elements at play.
Yes, perhaps Charlton Heston should've switched parts with Jeff Burton if they really wanted to make a statement, but they needed to get the movie funded and Hollywood, along with the rest of society, then and now, is racist, and no one would fund this crazy sci-fi experiment if a black guy was in the lead role. MORE INJUSTICE!!
I recently read this fantastic book called The Patient Ferment of the Early Church. It's essentially an otherwise stuffy religious history focusing on the first 200-300 years of Christianity, but the thesis is unique and powerful. Alan Kreider argues that the sole, key distinctive of early Christianity was patience. The first Christians were actively discouraged from what we might call evangelism today - they were convinced that faithful Christian witness was all that was needed. If they lived in the mode of Christ, people would be drawn to that lifestyle without the urgency or outcome oriented focus that's marked Christianity in the 1500 years since.
The moral quandry most prominent for Christians in this time was the exposure of infants. Unwanted children born in the Roman Empire of the time were simply left at the dump - exposed on the trash heaps. Christians took a stand against this moral outrage. They refused to expose their infants and they often wandered the trash heaps, rescuing and adopting those babies left to die. They did not make this a cause, protest, or fight. They simply lived differently.
I recognize that things are different 2,000 years later. We live in a world with free speech and the ability to share it widely and easily.
We live in a world with long traditions of activism. We live in a world where the established morality, at least in large part, aligns more closely with Christian morality than it did in Rome. Violent racists are now the minority and rejected by polite society. Things are different.
At the same time, listening to the rhetoric of opposition in Charlottesville, it was very difficult to differentiate the sides of the debate.
"These ideas aren't representative of the America I know and these people don't belong here." In our attempts to denounce racism, violence,
and hatred, we're exhibiting the same exclusionary ideas we're protesting (or at least, it's easy to do).
From a Christian perspective, protest and counter-culture means more than just choosing a different side; it means choosing a different means of fighting altogether. In general, it means being more creative with our words and actions. This has been a struggle for US Christians in most of the last century and probably the Church as whole over its entire existence. We protest consumerism, but end up with huge chains of "Christian"
stores, full of useless trinkets covered in crosses and music that's more worried about making money than facilitating real worship. The same goes for our approaches to violence, voting, and evangelism.
In Charlottesville, we're rightly outraged that so many people feel free to openly and publicly proclaim ideas and actions so entirely contrary to that of Christ - sometimes in the name of Jesus - but the response cannot be to isolate, condemn, and dismiss the people themselves. Showing up to protests with counter protest might be the right move, but it's got to be done differently. Opposing a mob with a mob - even one committed to non-violence, is still playing games of power - our numbers trump your numbers. It's an invitation to violence. Our voices don't need to be louder or angrier if we're embodying a counter-cultural presence. There is no point to spewing hate at the haters.
Saying, "I stand against racism" is better than saying nothing, I suppose, but it might not be if those of us with privilege aren't willing to sacrifice a bit of it to make our actions match our words. That's where much of the problem comes from. When the only times in which we white people interact with more than token members of the African-American community is when we drive 20 miles to volunteer somewhere for a few hours, we're not making much of a statement.
Early Christians change their entire lives, rejected respectability, often embraced poverty, simply to live out the counter-cultural gospel of Jesus Christ. Earlier this year I read the graphic-novel trilogy, March, that tells the story of John Lewis, one of American's Civil Rights heroes, as he engaged the movement and eventually participated in the famous march across Selma's Edmund Pettis Bridge. One of the things that struck me, was how much emphasis those books put on training for non-violence. It was not a movement where anyone could show up - they endured long periods of practice in non-violence and not everyone had the discipline to make the cut. It was a lifestyle change, a personality change - it was more than just falling in line.
Part of the reason the Early Church put so little emphasis on making converts was because the process was so long and arduous - catechumens endured years of training and observation before the Church deemed them worthy of baptism and the name of Christian. This wasn't so the movement could be exclusive, but because counter-culture is hard.
It's not enough for us to simply say, "Racism is bad. Violence is bad. Hatred is bad." We've got to understand what it means to live that out - not just in our safe little, privileged enclaves, but in the wider context of a very troubled world. We've got to work diligently to shape and form ourselves and our creativity to react differently than even those with whom we agree on some particular issue.
I've resisted giving specifics about ways in which Christians can faithfully engage in issues of immediate and ultimate importance in the world -
issues of race, violence, justice, life, and death - because I do think those ways exhaust and expand beyond my realm of vision. I do think,
though, that Christians must work to fully embody not just the emotion of the moment, but a truthful and fair representation of Christ. In this instance that includes the insanely difficult task of embodying true equality - not just in words or moments, but for the long haul.
Kreider recounts that Christianity lost its emphasis on patience when it adopted the mindset of ends justify the means. Instead of waiting for the truth to win out over time, heretics were persecuted, prosecuted, and executed. Politicans were brought in to use their power to favor one faction over another, to make decisions of right and wrong when it came to Christian thought and practice - this has been our habit ever since. We adopted the mode and means of the culture around us, but because we did so with a religious veneer, we've failed to see the compromising error of our ways.
I am continually troubled by the challenge to use my body, my lifestyle, to make statements of truth and justice, while also remembering the words of Paul, that I too, was once an enemy of God, and recognizing that my transformation was not wrought by violence, anger, or shame, but by the love of Jesus Christ. This is not a pushover faith, but it's also not a popular one; results are slow and it requires suffering - may I have the wisdom and creativity to make it my suffering before the suffering of others.
In the end, I don't have answers, but I pray that I'll have a gospel-infused patience that manifests itself in sacred, selfless action. Lord, have mercy.
There's always been a lot of debate about the causes of the Civil War, which usually boil down to "states rights" and "slavery." Ultimately they're both elements of economics, because, as we know, money is the real cause of every war. People have written better, more eloquently and with stronger grasp of the material on this issue; I won't belabor the point too much other than to say, "slavery" and "states rights," while not identical, were pretty darn close to such in the 1860s.
The real Civil War conundrum we find so many modern flag haters falling into is projecting today's race struggles onto Civil War-era America. Yes, many Northerners (and a few in the South) were upset about slavery, but it was more a humanitarian objection than an egalitarian one. It's not as though every northern abolitionist was chomping at the bit to marry his daughter off to a former slave. Shoot, many northern cities are incredibly segregated even to this day - and not just geographically, but socially as well.
There are real moral issues at play here, but we really need to stop the generalization that those who embrace the Stars and Bars are somehow far behind the rest of society when it comes to race. No one is really passing that exam with flying colors.
In fact, I have some sympathy for those southerners who really do associate the flag with individualism or states rights. There are a whole lot of people (some who don't even live in the south) who would like to keep "states rights" at the forefront of political debate, even as they acknowledge that the equality (or ownership) of persons is not one of those "rights" the states should decide.
Slavery was a big part of the Civil War, but race and racism really wasn't. By today's standards, 95% of both sides were flaming racists - they just disagreed on how far it was appropriate to go in mistreating black people.
The real problem for the Confederate flag and those who love her with race-neutral motives, is the re-emergence of the flag in the 1950's and 60's as a protest to Civil Rights. The famous South Carolina statehouse flag only went up in 1961 - probably the first time they could get away with it since, you know, it was representative of a treasonous rebellion and one of the most brutal wars in human history was fought precisely to keep the thing from flying.
Whether the Confederate flag was a racist symbol before Civil Rights or not, it certainly became one when the out and proud racists consciously chose to make it so. Strom Thurmond draped himself in the Confederate Flag during his 1948 Presidential run, where he campaigned on the basis of maintaining segregation.
So, in an ideal world, it would be great if honest, well-meaning southerners could keep a symbol of their heritage pure and unsullied (I really mean this - believe me, I am as big a fan of rebellion as anyone), but it's just not possible. Other people have messed up something you hold dear. I'm sorry, but it's still got to go. There are a lot of Asian cultures who would love to have maintained their sacred, 5000-year-old religious symbol, but unfortunately the Nazi's took it and stuck it on their flag, thus ruining it for all time.
These things happen.
We can hear your heartfelt defenses all day and all night - and I have no reason to disbelieve anything you say - but it doesn't cover up or outweigh its co-option by forces of racism and segregation, not just in the 60's, but just last month when 9 people lost their lives. It stinks, but this is reality. And for those of you who'll say, "I'm not going to let one stupid kid ruin this cultural tradition," well, you should. Let him ruin it forever and let's just move on.
Because we do (all of us) actually have real issues of race to figure out and this flag thing is just a distraction. It's giving a lot of us Yankees (and amenable southerners) an excuse to pretend we're righteous in all of this, that some of us have racism figured out. The Confederate flag has become another in a long line of convenient scapegoats and we've got to get beyond that. We just do.
Ultimately we're not too many steps removed from the racial attitudes of the Civil War. The north's perspective was, essentially, "We don't care what happens to black people, so long as we're not enslaving them anymore." Today, in large part, we think, "I don't care what happens to black people, so long as they're equal under the law."
If it takes 150 years to make that small step, well, we're probably not moving fast enough.
Think of it this way: I can't even type n----r on the internet without getting onto some terrorist watch list, let alone emblazon it on the premier sports franchise in our nation's capital. The same is simply not true for Native Americans.
Yes, yes, I know some native people aren't offended by the name and are proud to have their legacy and tradition remembered in Washington (although I thought that was what the beautiful and profoundly moving National Museum of the American Indian was all about). But seriously, when do we let democracy (or even a small minority) dictate the words we consider appropriate or polite?
Yes, that previously mentioned n-word fell out of favor largely through public pressure. It turns out when segregation ended and lots of people were regularly having conversations and relationships with angry black people, it was more difficult to use insulting, offensive names for them. Go figure.
I suppose a similar campaign would have worked for Native Americans, except while we were busy raising the percentage of Americans who were black from zero to fifteen percent, we were also making the native population 99% smaller. Most of us don't know any Native Americans because we've largely confined them to small tracts of otherwise useless land, which we proceed to ignore, allowing the reservations to languish in poverty and substance abuse in out of the way places we'll never have to go. And this is the best our relationship with Native Americans has ever been. Let me repeat:
And this is the best our relationship with Native Americans has ever been!
I'm young enough to have lived through a relatively fair portrayal of the native place in US history throughout my education (which includes a top-notch undergraduate degree - in history, no less - from a great institute of higher learning). Thing were not whitewashed.
Still, when reading the under-appreciated classic, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, I was faced with a more intimate and detailed portrayal of this sad relationship. It should probably be required reading for Americans at some point in our public education (it's at least as important as Romeo and Juliet, which I had to read three times in school). This episode in US history recounts only the third generation of engagements between white settlers and Native peoples (the first two were, in order, virtual extermination and a series of forced death marches).
I'm not sure what spurred my desire to write a lengthy post about our forgotten national embarrassment - probably guilt - I mean, I feel so woefully incapable of even beginning to figure out how to address such injustice and perhaps telling others about it helps in some strange (largely selfish) way.
We lost Richard Twiss last year - a great Christian leader and advocate for Native American reconciliation - when I was only beginning to discover his wisdom and hope. I have at least one friend working on initiatives with and among native peoples - but it really isn't like we can just walk down the street and volunteer. It's one of those problems that deserves more attention than it gets, but is also so incredibly wrong that hope seems distant if it exists at all.
We live in a world where reparations for slavery are largely dismissed as fantasy; just imagine similar compensation for Native Americans? We might as well just hand over all the shares of the Fortune 500.
At the very least, it seems like we could put the most visible symptom of this ongoing tragedy in better perspective. It's great that a few writers and broadcasters will try hard not to say the nickname of Washington's professional football team on the air. It really is. But, honestly, given the history (and I mean the full history, not the history which only goes back to the team's founding - I think we can all agree the name was far more culturally appropriate then than now), couldn't we hold ourselves to a slightly higher standard? The vigor of the owner's intransigence is really more Donald Sterling than crazy uncle. Shouldn't this be more of a thing?
Think about it this way: if Uncle Ben can get a makeover, if Aunt Jemima can go from this
to this,
then surely we can do better than Chief Wahoo.
(Who is, somehow, impossibly, MORE racist than the original.)
I've been thinking a lot about what integrity means lately. So when I ran across this story which doesn't personally involve me or anyone I know, it gave me pause to really reflect on how we view integrity as a society.
Word came out this evening that the family court judge in California ruled against Donald Sterling and for his wife, upholding her right to sell the Los Angeles Clippers without her husband's consent as a result of his documented diminished mental capacity. I'm sure he'll keep suing - that's what he does - and perhaps this story from ESPN a few weeks ago will still come into play if the process drags out, but in either event, it really speaks to integrity.
Essentially, many of the Clipper players and coaches are leaving open the option to demand release from contracts or trades or simply not show up for work if Donald Sterling is still the owner when the NBA season begins. Sterling has had a troubled racist past, which has become front page news over the last few months, causing such public outcry that his team is being sold out from under him. He's become a pariah, of his own doing and deservedly so, but a pariah nonetheless, as well as a popular public punching bag.
The thing that speaks to integrity, though, is that this isn't really news. It's not as though the recent media storm of racism is anything new for Donald Sterling. Nothing that's happened has been revelatory to anyone around basketball. It was not a surprise; it's just become more noticeable among the general public.
Now that it's become a national story, the interested parties seem far more interested. They're itching to get out if this man stays, but they weren't so conflicted when they were taking his money and he still had power.
Doc Rivers went to the Clippers knowing Donald Sterling was a racist. Chris Paul went to the Clippers knowing Donald Sterling was a racist. Blake Griffin signed a contract extension with the Clippers knowing Donald Sterling was a racist. To think that they're making some righteous stand now, simply because everyone else is actionably upset just rubs me the wrong way.
I'm not defending Sterling. The dude is a slimeball and a creep and he needs to go. But threatening to boycott is a very borderline gesture at best. I guess they do alright walking the line by leaving it open as a possibility.
If the threat is enough to push Sterling over the edge and get him to accept the inevitable, then perhaps it's worth it. If they actually follow through on it - doesn't that just say, "We didn't care enough about this until everyone else knew." To me, that lacks integrity.
I'm not saying Doc Rivers and Chris Paul aren't people of integrity (although the public statements and circumstances of their respective arrivals in LA leave something to be desired), but we need to hear, just as loudly, apologies for having gone to the team in the first place.
Chris Paul needs to say, I was wrong to sign here; I was wrong to ignore this problem. The players and coaches (as well as fellow owners and league executives) are getting off pretty easy by allowing Sterling to take all the blame. Yes, he's a bad dude who's done some awful things - but the fact that so many powerful people (people who are, in large part, too rich to be bought off the way Sterling bought off so many other detractors) turned a blind eye to what they're now calling unacceptable is pure cowardice.
Anyone who's been complicit in letting this go on - season ticket holders who are just now threatening to give up their sets, advertisers, players, coaches, anyone - we need to know why there has been little public outcry until now.
This is the real integrity moment or perhaps that moment has passed. Standing up to criticize someone who's head is already on the chopping block takes no real guts. Perhaps we need to hear from those players who refused to play for Sterling because of his racial views. At the very least, we need explanations and apologies.
Integrity is being willing to stick your neck out for what's right. It's taking blame for things no one was ever going to call you out on.
I don't want to diminish the stands being taken now by players, coaches, and the league - but please, can we not hold them up as heroes for doing what's expected when its easy. Let's celebrate those who do what's right when it costs them something.
The guy's been a bad dude for a long time. He's badgered and won and paid off a lot of sexual harassment and racial discrimination suits over the years, but everyone knows he's slimy. He insists he's not a racist.
He does date women of color fifty years his junior. He was among the first NBA owners to employ a black executive. He gives millions and millions of dollars to the NAACP. And, as the old trope goes - he can't be racist because he has black friends.
I wonder if he isn't right.
Do we have far too low a bar for racism these days? I could be wrong and I very likely am, but I always associated racism with a strict hatred for a particular group of people (without exception) based solely on skin color. Under this definition, Donald Sterling may not be a racist. He's certainly a bigot and a jerk and completely prejudiced, but he may not be a racist.
I think the difference between prejudice and racism is where fellow NBA owner, Mark Cuban, was going in some unfortunate comments he made at a conference some weeks ago.
Cuban essentially addressed stereotypes. He talked about avoiding a hoodie-clad black teen when alone at night on a dark street, in the same breath he talked about equally avoiding a white guy with lots of tattoos. He never got around to a point, really, other than to remind us that we've all got impressions of other people based on a lot of factors completely unrelated from their individual identity.
This is prejudice. Literally: judging before.
I don't think its outrageous to say, be a little more intimidated by a big, leather-clad dude of any ethnicity than you would be by a gray-haired lady. We really can't control the judgment calls our brain makes in any given moment. This is what Cuban was talking about. Some people just seem scarier - sometimes because of choices they've made, other times through no fault of their own. I imagine this cognitive assessment is part of our evolutionary DNA; it's important for us to spot and evaluate potential threats.
What Cuban didn't mention, though, is that we do have a choice. We do not have to operate on instinct, no matter how deeply embedded in our DNA it might be. We should be evaluating such input and choose to respond with some sense of rationality. I don't have to assume every black man I see on a dark street is a threat and I certainly don't have to act like it.
Now, I imagine a lot of people, through rational thought, will still choose to avoid some people and make themselves close to others based on stereotypes. In fact, I think we likely all will do this. Even if we're open, trusting people, there is some line at which we decide it's not worth the risk to investigate.
Donald Sterling's line is very short. In fact it's miles shorter than is even socially acceptable in our society. His prejudice is outrageous in its ignorance. He certainly deserves whatever consequences come his way. I have no doubt Donald Sterling likes some black people. He probably likes some Hispanic people and some Asian people - his real problem, though, is assuming the ones he likes are the exception to the ignorant, unfounded stereotypical conclusions he's come to about people who look different from him.
That's the rub, though, isn't it? Racist is a strong word, probably overused - but when we do use it, we can separate ourselves from "the other," the bad guy, them. We an use racism as a wall to prevent any inspection of our own prejudices. Prejudice is a much more malleable term, and one that likely cuts deep.
Yes, Donald Sterling is a sad, comically-extreme example of prejudice, but he's an example nonetheless. I don't know how often I meet someone and assume my stereotypical perception of them is correct until proven otherwise, but I know its not zero.
What's more, even when I avoid making generalizations about people, they still form over time. My perceptions of blind people are likely colored by the blind people I know and interact with - whether that experience is indicative of the whole or normative for blind people at all. Past experience is no guarantee of future reality. I am no more likely to meet an Hispanic woman who matches my expectations because I've known other Hispanic women than I am if I knew none.
People are people and people are different, unique, individual. Yes, we often resemble each other in appearance or habit or personality. There are commonalities and generalizations to make. I'm not sure it even matters if those stereotypes pop into our heads - so long as they don't determine our actions.
In the end, though, prejudice is challenged by meeting new and different people.
Donald Sterling has met some black people he likes - I'm sure he's got a list of them if you'd ask him to name some. To him, those people march against his prejudice and stereotypes. I imagine, though, if his life, friendships, and sample size were much bigger, if he actively sought to include more people on color in his life, he'd recognize the immaturity of his views.
Relationship matters.
It was real easy to be racist in 16th century Europe. Black people were mostly five thousand miles away and if you saw one, it was likely from a great distance. As those of different skin colors were integrated into the same society (albeit on far different social positions) it became more difficult to simply apply a racist line across the board. It's impossible to believe all black people have inferior brains when the guy who drives your carriage clearly possesses a cunning mind; you must reassess your notion (perhaps most, not all, are intellectually challenged). As the process continues so does the reassessment - until you reach a point where the diversity of any one group becomes too obvious and immense to draw specific generalizations at all.
I suspect this Donald Sterling thing is a wake up call to many people in a variety of ways. I hope, at the very least, we give the universality of this problem enough respect to allow it to address the prejudice in our own lives - that we take the opportunity to examine those areas where stereotypes dominate our thought and action - and give us impetus to make changes.
One of the unique features of humanity is that we're not trapped by our own evolution. We do not have to run on instinct. We can intellectually analyze our responses and act against them. By all means, let's condemn Donald Sterling and his terrible examples of prejudice, but, please, let's not stop there. Allow the light to be turned on ourselves and let's be the better for it.
I make stereotypes of people that are partly, if not wholly, based on race. I don't like it and I repent of it and I'll try to figure out some ways to amend my lifestyle to combat it. I'm still a racist.
Let me explain a bit. I've spent a fair amount of time with the urban poor to varying degrees. It's been a difficult journey, but I've come to recognize that the values embraced by the culture of urban life are different (albeit no less valid) than the values imprinted on me by my white, middle-class, mostly suburban upbringing, an upbringing that tends to be upheld as "American" or "normal."
I have come to appreciate the different emphases among my friends in the city. They have helped me embrace things that have made my life better and more complete. There are certainly positives and negatives to any cultural condition; I have benefited greatly from learning to think critically about my own and embrace another.
I understand that this urban culture is not exclusively black, but my experience in it has been almost uniformally so. My best teachers and friends in the city have been African-Americans. As part of that experience I've come to expect certain things from them in terms of behavior and values. Things indicative of the culture they come from and not at all indicative of the color of their skin.
The problem I find myself facing now is that I've unconsciously combined the two. Perhaps the past two years spent in an exclusively white context has dulled my cultural sensitivity or perhaps I am just a racist. Either way, I find myself having difficulty separating what someone looks like from the expected cultural context.
It sort of feels like I've come full circle and ended up right back where I started. I do possess more of an ability to accept cultural differences without judgment - to move beyond my own cultural conditioning in evaluating other cultures. At the same time, I seem to have pigeon-holed people in my mind based on the color of their skin.
I know it's a white guilt problem when it comes to stereotypes of ethnic minorities. Everyone makes such stereotypes based on their experience of lack thereof - its only us white people who feel guilty about it.
So I'll lie to myself and to you and say I hope it's more of a human problem - not that my stereotyping is from anything other than lack of experience - but from too narrow an experience.
Somehow I, and a whole bunch of other clueless, well-meaning white people, think that because we've spent time with one group of different-skinned people that we'll all of a sudden be enlightened to understand everyone who's different from us. I'm not sure where we get this crazy idea. Clearly the white people I knew in Kansas are totally different than the white people I know in southern New Jersey; I wouldn't even give a second thought about that. But somewhere in my brain there's this idea that every hispanic person or every asian person or every black person is exactly like other people I know who look like them. It's insane.
It's even more insane that it's taken 30 years to come to this realization. I wanted to get this out there in public for a few reasons: 1) Nobody really likes to talk about it - at least it makes white people uncomfortable and we could do with being more uncomfortable, 2) I know this sort of ignorance makes people frustrated and upset and I wanted to acknowledge that at least I recognize it exists in me, 3) we have to move beyond the solution of just experiencing more cultures.
Let me go over that one a little bit. As I've been processing all these thoughts, my first solution was simply to try and intentionally spend time with more and more people groups - the assumption being that I'll be able to appreciate and understand a more diverse population if I'm exposed to it. While that might be technically true, it's both impossible and short sighted.
There's a lot of different people out there, different culture, subgroups and individuals. I'm not going to accomplish some sort of magical cultural competency by accurately stereotyping everyone. It will just make me a well-rounded racist.
The real solution is to engage individuals as individuals. I know, no real revelation here. It's something I talk about and advocate all the time. Apparently I'm totally failing at it. I think its pretty natural, when one meets a new person, to try and compare them to someone else you know; we'll probably never escape that inclination. We, as humans however, do possess the ability to override our natural inclinations.
People are valuable and unique and deserve treatment as such. They're not to be categorized or grouped together or used for some other purpose. I do all of those things far too often. A few years ago, when my grandfather died, I wrote that what I most admired about him was that every person felt like they were his favorite person in the world. He was constantly in the moment with people.
Our country and our world have some real and pressing societal issues with race. Issues that encompass and address large groups of people. We constantly speculate what grand gestures we can make to fix or begin to heal those rifts. I wonder if we're not working in the wrong direction. I would never advocate we ignore or diminish those issues, but what if the solution to our large-scale problems comes in focusing on individual relationships and not trying to simply fit the individuals we meet into some bigger picture?
