A friend recently forwarded an e-mail containing a kind of diatribe that was either a serious but clumsy attempt to “level the racial playing field” for white people or an obliquely scurrilous attempt to further excoriate the already disgraced comedian Michael Richards. The text was purported to be Richards’ “defense speech in court after making racial comments in his comedy act.”
The connection with Richards is spurious; the diatribe appeared on the Internet before the infamous Richards incident occurred. Yet here it is, still in circulation, leading us to wonder how many people subscribe to the views it represents.
Here is some of the content
“You have the United Negro College Fund, you have Martin Luther King Day, you have Black History Month, you have Cesar Chavez Day, you have Yom Hashoah, you have Ma’uled Al-Nabi, you have the NAACP, you have BET. If we had WET (White Entertainment Television), we’d be racists.
“If we had a White Pride Day, you would call us racists. If we had White History Month, we’d be racists. If we had any organization for only whites to “advance” OUR lives, we’d be racists.
“You are proud to be black, brown, yellow and orange, and you’re not afraid to announce it. But when we announce our white pride, you call us racists.”
The friend who sent the e-mail offered his own view of the message it contained: “After reading through this I thought, ‘Maybe I am grateful to be alive and a human being rather than proud to be the “colour” of my genetic wiring. I am certainly NOT PROUD of some of the behaviours of some of my white ancestors; thus a categorical statement of “proud to be white” isn’t reflective of my current consciousness.’” He asked for comments from the addressees of his e-mail.
What follows is a somewhat expanded version of my reply.
First, I agree with you: I am not proud of any of the characteristics I was born with; I am not even proud of the few meagre accomplishments that I have managed to come up with in my life. In my view, to be proud is to be misguided about what is real and important in this life; to be humble and, as you say, grateful, is to recognize and to accept our place in God’s great universe at any given moment in our brief visit.
It is true that other races besides white people can be racist. I have met many Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans who are racist, for example. But the white people to whom the author of this document is referring have never been systemically colonized, enslaved, repressed by another race or other races, so we should not resent the black colleges, the Miss Black America Pageant, or Black History Month because these are necessary for a people who have been stepped on, spat upon, lynched, whipped, unjustly interned, and otherwise excluded from enjoying the basic rights and dignities that every society should provide so that they might regain some of the dignity that has been denied them.
I am gay. I am not proud to be gay. But then I hid in the closet for so long that I was never really subjected to the humiliation, indignity, and occasional physical abuse suffered by my more courageous LGBT brothers and sisters or to those who are more “obviously gay.” So I do understand and empathize with those who feel gay pride and who participate in events that are designed to promote gay pride as a means to redress the stigmatization LGBT people endured for so long—and continue to endure—and to proclaim to an often sceptical world that we are indeed fully human.
Despite continued incidences—and there are still too many—of racist, misogynist, and homophobic slurs, assaults, and even killings, despite stubbornly persistent ignorance of the culture and sensitivities of visible and invisible minorities, we have come far in the past fifty years, thanks to brave and blessed souls like Mohandas Gandhi, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Harvey Milk, and many more.
I have several friends who are in interracial marriages or relationships and no one looks twice or makes comments, negative or positive. I recently walked through Queen Elizabeth Park in Vancouver holding hands with my partner—who is Asian; no one screamed “Faggots!” or “Chink-lover!” An African-American was elected President of the United States in 2008, and if he had not defeated Hilary Clinton in the Democratic primaries, a woman would now be President.
In a comment on this e-mail a friend pointed out that while there are indeed differences among us, we must always keep in mind that we are fundamentally the same. She recalled the famous speech of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice: “Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warm’d and cool’d by the same summer and winter as a Christian is?” Hath not an Asian eyes? Hath not a Black African woman dimensions, senses, affections? Is a Sikh not subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means as a British atheist?
Much of the progress we have seen has come through education, where the conversations begun by brave individuals with a vision of equality and brotherhood and sisterhood for all people have continued and have grown in knowledge and wisdom and sophistication. Education has taken place not only in the classroom but in the work place, on the television, in the pulpit, and in the houses of parliament, even it seems, on the playing field and in the locker rooms of professional sports. The conversations must never be silenced.
We will never be entirely free of our prejudices as long as the vestiges of tribalism remain in our DNA. Nevertheless, we can, I believe, reasonably hope for a time when we need neither be proud nor ashamed of our nature; we can simply be—and be accepted for—who we are.
Photo Credit
“Harmony” by tmvogel
Recent Ross Lonergan Articles:
- The Film-School Student Who Never Graduates: A Profile of Ang Lee, Part Four
- The Film-School Student Who Never Graduates: A Profile of Ang Lee, Part Three
- The Film-School Student Who Never Graduates: A Profile of Ang Lee, Part Two
- The Film-School Student Who Never Graduates: A Profile of Ang Lee, Part One
- Bullying, Fear, And The Full Moon (Part Four)
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