:eyes:
and that cannot be tolerated. you must profess to love us at all times
:eyes:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.ph...this reminds me of an incident in a class i took in grad school...many incidents, actually.
i posted a poem i wrote, "never trust the white man" in my online salon. it was a creativity class, so each student had her own online salon. my poem is about my great-grandmother's oft-repeated admonishment. my great-grandmother looked like a white woman, but she held onto whatever drops of black blood she had. we found an old tintype of her and her brother with a dark-skinned little girl and we asked her: who is the little girl? she replied, "that's me...i don't know who those white children are."
the poem started out as an exploration of the irony of my great-grandmother, for all intent and purposes, a white woman, telling her black great-grandchildren never to trust "the white man." in the poem, i describe an incident that actually happened, i.e., my great-grandparents were forced from the land they owned by and angry white mob. they fled to save their children and they lost the property. not only were they perceived to be an interracial couple, and they had the audacity to be more wealthy than many of their white neighbors.
as the poem evolved, i wrote about my grandmother. my parent, and me. i wrote about my cousins who grew up in ft. worth in the 50's and 60's. when the family came to visit on holidays, the neighborhood kids would tease and taunt them: you have white people in your house! so my cousins would run in side and check under the beds and in the closets, then return outside and tell the other kids: we couldn't find any white people. but the children would persist: there are white people in your house!
in frustration and fear, my cousins went to their mother and told her what the kids were saying. she and the other adults laughed, and she told them: baby, tell them it's just family. just family. little black children in texas were terrified of "white people," who bombed churches and murdered little black girls. they lived in segregated neighborhoods, and went to segregated schools. the only white people they knew were the ones they saw on tv, the ones with firehoses and dogs, they one who faces were perpetually contorted in hatred. the ones who spat at them called them niggers. the monsters.
anyway...let me get to the point. there was quite a strong reaction to my poem from some of the other students, in fact all of them except the other person of color in the program, a black man. the reaction was basically: how dare you write about things that make me feel uncomfortable!!!!! i was accused of racism and everything else under the sun, and my only ally was the brother, who defended and supported me.
it got so bad that the professor had to intervene and tell them: you have NO RIGHT to "object" to her life experiences! you have NO RIGHT to personalize her words or to feel hurt by her perspective. you have NO RIGHT to demand, from her, a perspective that makes you feel good about her family's experience...or hers.
he suggested a term, the dominant white, male, christian, heterosexual paradigm, as a more palatable substitute for what my great-grandmother called "the white man."
when i told my friend robyn about this incident, she said: "karen, they aren't used to hearing about the complexities of our lives, especially from our perspectives." this in a nutshell, is what the rage about ethnic studies is all about. when i was in college, i remember how the dorm's common area would be trashed after certain parties, and how bad i felt for the latino janitors who had to clean up the mess.
it wasn't the black or latino or asian students who trashed the place (if we did, it would have called a riot). the trashers were people who had latinos and blacks cleaning up after them at home. it would never even occur to me to leave vomit and beer all over the carpet because i did household chores all my life.
but i digress. do people really think people of color need ethnic studies classes to resent white privilege or to detest the continued teaching of white male hegemony as a natural state as the only valid history? is learning about slavery and jim crow nothing more than hating on white people? as i told a friend the other day, the great thing about the teabaggers is that no one can deny the existence of of racism in america. it is so deeply entrenched in the collective american psyche that, as my friend says, it's almost genetic now. the teabaggers are the extreme version of it, but as we all know very well the insidious nature of the beast.
at 51 years of age, i am a part of the FIRST generation of african-americans who had the full rights of citizenship in this country, since is inception. i never forget that, and i won't let anyone else forget that either. if you don't like the reality of my life and that of my ancestors: tough.
you will continue to hear about it whether you like it or not. and perhaps, just perhaps, if you stop personalizing everything, you just might learn something.
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
