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Acceptable Racism
Just read this New York Times essay and mentally reverse the races of the people involved.
Then one morning, glancing out my front window, I saw a young white couple stopped at the library. Instantly, I was flooded with emotions — astonishment, and then resentment, and then astonishment at my resentment. It all converged into a silent scream in my head of, Get off my lawn!…
What I resented was not this specific couple. It was their whiteness, and my feelings of helplessness at not knowing how to maintain the integrity of a Black space that I had created.
Long story short, she doesn’t want to see white people in her neighborhood. “Don’t let the sun go down on you around here, mayonnaise.” She goes on to justify her hatred of white people because of racist acts committed by long dead white people generations ago.
We are never going to get past this.
Published in Culture
I have been making that exact point for decades now.
In 1967 I had a teaching position in Ocean-Hill Brownsville/Bedford Stuyvesant a couple of blocks from IS 271 which was the hub of a decentralized district within New York City Public Schools. The following year it was the center of the cause of a 10 week strike that was set off when the decentralized district fired all of its white teachers w/o cause. In the two years I taught at PS28K I experience more racism than I had then or have since in my entire life, all of it directed at white people by black people. In later years, teaching in Seattle, I experienced more examples, most often by black teachers or administrators towards whites and Asians, although there was the occasional incident involving black parents.
Black racism is nothing new to me. In mandatory workshops, one after another, beginning in 1973, I was witness to it over and over again. Once my black colleagues felt that they were given license, they felt no limitations on saying anything that crossed their minds. No white person or Asian or Native American or Pacific Islander would have the nerve to express such feelings toward a black person. That would have been called RACISM, and the offending party might well be subject to disciplinary action from administration.
A kind of Stockholm Syndrome took over white administrators and some teachers who adopted the racist terminology towards their fellow whites. It was a world turned upside down.
For me, the really culminating events occurred when first I was interviewed for a position the grant for which had literally been written specifically with me in mind. The members of the interview committee asked specific questions designed to disqualify me. This according to the writer of the grant who sat on that committee and during its post interview discussions. The biggest objection was my race, since the majority of the committee were black.
The second occurred a bit later. The Seattle Aquarium was looking for a teacher to run classes there. At that time I had taught for more than 17 years. I held a Masters degree in Marine Science. I was a NAUI certified Diving Instructor. The person they hired was a black woman with one year of teaching experience, no SCUBA certification, no Marine Science courses in her School of Education degree, but her color and gender gave her more points than all of mine.
Following those two events I decided, to hell with it! I just stayed in my current position as a special education teacher and maintained as low a profile as I could, realizing that no matter how good I was at what I did, it would be of no value in my defense if I was targeted for being part of the White Collective. What has been happening in recent days is just a manifestation of what I saw for the first time in 1967 as a pretty naive young teacher.
Still reading the NYT, eh?
How is it possible the writer and her confrères don’t see the straight-up racism in their attitudes? That’s what I don’t get. But then I’m a Boomer, so…
This is getting to sound trite, but it seems everything a leftist thinks and says is projection. In this case, a Black woman (I assume she’s black, but I really had spent more time thinking that she’s white and simply protecting black neighborhoods in a white, maternalistic way) is projecting her racism onto whites, and getting offended at her self-created perception of their racism. This isn’t logical, it’s delusional.
OK, Boomer. You are the racist for seeing racism here because you remain unaware of your privilege and thus tried to use the false consciousness-inducing notion of “color-blindness” to infer a motive that is not possible in a person of color…
I would bet that her “black neighborhood” is not exactly the projects or the barrio because (a) white yuppies do not causally stroll in such places–Inglewood is 0nly 3% white and (b) the books had not all already been stolen (c) there are no bars on that front window. I will leave it native Los Angelinos to piece the location clues but I doubt rapid gentrification is underway.
To me, this is BHO’s unforgivable sin. In 2008 our culture was steps away from the sunlit uplands of MLK’s dream. Millions of Americans embraced BHO on his implicit promise to take us those last steps. Then he and his corrupt party turned a complete about-face, and took us in the opposite direction, because they recognized that completing MLK’s journey necessarily means giving up the power of their precious “race-card” forever. And why would they do that if it can still pay electoral dividends?
Bigotry is never pretty.
Is this the author? [redacted] But this explains a lot.
That’s the pic with the article. And there is the book thing in front so I assume it’s her unless the NYT faked that.
And that of the Obama’s was/is particularly toxic.
She is a racist.
Most white racists are aware that they are racist and that their thoughts are not considered correct, and that their comments and actions will be judged harshly by decent people of all complexions.
I want to feel pity for her since self-deception is a curse, but her bigotry has been carefully curated from an academic institution; she paid good money to be this ignorant.
So, a pox on her race-based space and may jays take up residence in her twee-ass library.
A badger would do it.
This makes me so very, very sad.
Bigotry is for small people; the small of size come at it through fear, the small of spirit through resentment, and the small of mind through never-challenged assumptions.
Such smallness can occur in any race, color, or creed.
Quotable.
Stupid is also race-indifferent.
That’s not quite true. If we were allowed to use intelligence as a criteria for various things, there would be less controvery, not more. I should write a post about this.