The continuing saga of Shirley Sherrod provides an excellent starting point for something that has bothered me for a very long time. Her point is not my point, mind you, but it leads in to what I've though for far too long. There are far too many people willing to accept racism within their own ethnicity but will then cry foul when someone of a different ethnicity expresses even the slightest racist thought.
That mentality is what is at the root of the entire Shirley Sherrod scandal. Some white dude edits a video that ostensibly shows an African American government official admitting she had a racist thought at one point in her life, distributes said video, the news orgy erupts with outrage, and she gets fired in the process. A few days later, people take a look at the context of what she was saying and realize that she was actually admitting that she knew race had nothing to do with the situation at hand and that people needed to work together to solve societies ills, and now everyone is all apologizing to her and offering her new jobs. But why did people not take the time to go through all the information when the story first hit?
Here's the bottom line of it all though: there are racist white people and there are racist black people and there are racist Hispanic people and there are racist (insert ethnicity here) people. Until we can accept that and admit that, then the dialogue on race goes no where. As long as we pretend that members of a different ethnic background should be immune to racist thought while accepting it within their own, nothing moves forward.
Admitting that at one point in your life you had a racist thought is not the end of the world. Well, it should not be the end of the world. What it should be is an admission of fault which lead to a growing understanding. Saying that I once had a racist thought, but that I then examined that thought and it lead me to the conclusion that every one suffers and that we all should work together to resolve differences is the correct attitude. Racist thoughts are bred into us through our societies and the people we surround ourselves with and the media we consume. It will happen that, on occasion, a person will have a racist thought. The condemnation should not come at admitting that thought, rather the condemnation should come if a person chooses to act on or accept that racist thought. Do you act upon that thought negatively, or do you take the initiative to analyze it and work beyond it?
There is a psychological theory on racism (which I, of course, cannot find or remember the name of at the moment) which looks at racist thought as a forgone conclusion. It is not whether someone has racist thoughts that determines if someone is racist, because everyone has racist thoughts. Instead it looks at how quickly we move away from those thoughts. The theory goes that when presented with a situation, we immediately jump to our most basest thought first, then move to a more rational thought. When it comes to race, this is where racism is measured. We may think racist thought initially, but the measure of racism is how quickly we move beyond that thought to a more rational view of the situation.
If we cannot admit to having racist thoughts, how can we examine those thoughts for what they are and learn to grow beyond them? That, in a roundabout way, is what Shirley Sherrod was getting at in her video. If we cannot accept that racism is real and alive, we cannot fight against it. We cannot fight an enemy that we do not believe exists, and that includes a belief we hold.
I'll only give a passing mention to the hypocrisy of the far right holding this story up as a beacon as if they were revealing some seedy underbelly of the Obama Administration. One woman does not an administration make More importantly, one should always clean their own house before criticizing someone else's home. Using this woman as a smokescreen is pretty obvious and just a little pathetic.
But Shirley is right. We all need to move on, and we can't do that until we admit that there is a problem that needs to be solved.
No comments:
Post a Comment