This week has been a stellar week in Various Examples of Racism. First, there was the swim club that decided that the "complexion" of their club would be negatively changed if they honored their contract with Black and Brown kids but did you catch the second type? You weren't supposed to see it.
The swim club example is just beyond blatant. It's the sort of thing we don't see as much of these days. The second example is the more common type. Do you know what it was?
It was the pictures of Obama "ogling" the women at the G8. You don't think so? Let me explain how it works and perhaps you'll see it.
America has a long and (as one friend termed it) bloodthirsty tradition of black men being characterized as lecherous sexual threats to white women.* Black men were lynched for so much as looking at a white woman in a way that the white men felt was inappropriate. The idea of black men having sexual access to white women was a scare tactic used to oppose emancipation, repeal of Jim Crow, opposition to Civil Rights and school integration. And it hasn't been so long ago that the fear doesn't live on in our lizard brains, in the subconscious and immediate reaction to a BM/WF interracial couple before we engage our more evolved minds to the situation. Some of us check ourselves and some of us rationalize our reaction but I've yet to meet anyone white who grew up in the US who does not have that split second reaction. It's not under our control--it's something that was absorbed by osmosis simply by being a member of this society at this point in time. It simply is.
Political campaigns playing on this fear has a long history as well. Willie Horton was used against Dukasis in 1988. Harold Ford in Tennessee felt the sting of this tactic. Strom Thurmond was a master at this American tradition. Each of those ads plays on fear while deliberately leaving it unsaid. It's in the subtext, the same way that Reagan's "State's Rights" speech in Philadelphia, MS doesn't contain any overt racism but instead relies on the listener knowing what was meant. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge.
Are you beginning to see it? Our African-American President is seen supposedly leering at not one but two young women. The first is light-skinned woman, not immediately identifiable as "not-white" from the photo and the second is a woman as white as me bending over to pick something up she dropped at Obama's feet. Greta Van Susteren viewed the entire video of the first photo and found that it was a ridiculous contention. It simply never happened. The second photo, if one looks closely, is just as misleading. He's looking at a point somewhere between her and his feet but not at her. And besides, he's a human being in good health. So what, right? Shit, if I had someone following me around with a camera, snapping photos of all the men I so much as look at, I'd be in big trouble.**
But it doesn't matter. That's right. It doesn't matter. The damage is already done. That fisson of fear, of wrongness, has already been felt while viewing a photo of Barack Obama. The connection has been made in our lizard brains between that feeling and Barack Obama. And there's just one cure for it.
Like all things evil, this type of racism depends on the shadows. It lives in the space beween words and in the spaces before words. It depends on never being seen, skulking around in the places never noticed, let alone examined.
The cure? To shine the light in the shadows, to expose those places to examination. To call attention to it makes it melt like ice on a Texas sidewalk in August. I just did that to you.
You are welcome. After all, the alternative is to end up the kind of person who denies a five year old a swimming pool in the hottest days of summer. It means ending up the person who sits in a dark room, looking at videos of the President frame-by-frame in an attempt to find something that "looks bad". And, I don't think any of us wants to be that person.
*To disentangle the racism and misogyny in this meme could be a doctoral dissertation and I'm writing a blog post, not a dissertation.
** I work at a university. I may be a fat, married-for-decades, old woman but I'm not blind nor am I dead. Hell, I look at Keith like that, too. He's a fine, fine looking man. Appreciation of beauty, like one appreciates the beauty of the sculptor's work on the David or the Venus di Milo, is not inappropriate. It's in how you do it and in your actions, in my opinion.
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