Originally Posted by dreadgeek
Very true, but not in the direction you necessarily think.
Welcome to my world, Kobi. I have to be careful what I say and how I say it everywhere I go, every day of my life.
I have had to sit there and TAKE IT when a colleague at work asked me "were you raised by a white family". Why would they ask me that? Because of the way I speak. I sound educated and therefore I must have been raised by a white family. Now, of course, you're going to ask "why didn't I report that person to HR". I'll tell you why. Because the minute I do that, I'm a troublemaker, I'm whining, I'm trying to blame white people, I'm doing everything BUT making a report of a racist statement.
During hurricane Katrina I had to endure my co-workers making some of the most racist statements about "those people" who were "living like animals". I can't get angry, Kobi. I simply do not get to do that. Oh, at home I can but, just for instance, I have a buddy at work we call Ogre who will get frustrated and pound his fist on his desk. If I did that I would be an 'angry black woman' he does it and he's this big, overgrown frat boy with a heart of gold.
So, again, Kobi welcome to my world--except that here, if you say something impolitic nothing happens to your paycheque. If I say something impolitic I can forget the concept of raises or promotions because once 'angry black woman' is established, there's no getting out from under that label.
I'm curious, Kobi, have you read any Malcolm X OTHER than what you quoted here? Have you ever read DuBois in depth? The problem isn't you quoting a person of color, Kobi, the problem is you quoting a person of color in an attempt to try to tell other people of color how we should live in America. I said it before and I'll repeat it now--every single person of color participating in this discussion has forgotten more about what it is like to be a person of color in America then you will ever realize there is to know.
Don't you see that your inability to condemn something that was so manifestly wrong that the US Government (not known for being the first in line to say mea culpa) apologized is deeply problematic? It makes me--and perhaps others--wonder what you WOULD condemn. You have said, on a number of occasions, that it would be wrong to judge the prevailing ideas of, say, early 20th century America by early 21st century standards. You have said, in making this argument, that it is impossible to say if the pervasive racism that early 20th century blacks had to endure was wrong, or unjust or evil. You have even said that we cannot even say that the idea that blacks were inherently inferior was wrong because we don't know by whose standard to judge. I'm sorry Kobi, but I find that absolutely shocking. I have had a lot of conversations about race and I have to say that this is the only time I have had a conversation with someone who claims to not be a racist, who was not willing and able to say that the lynchings, the beatings, the daily humiliations, the fear, the terrorizing, the unequal treatment, the segregation, the exclusion were wrong, unjustified and a moral blemish on this nation. The only one. In, perhaps, three *decades* of talking to white people about race. Every other person who was unwilling to say so was a racist and wasn't going to condemn it. The truly astonishing thing to me is that you don't see that as at all problematic. You see this refusal to take a stand as somehow admirable or noble. I don't know what metric you are using but it is not one I would want to use.
No, Kobi, no one is saying a white person can't quote a person of color. You are, of course, free to interpret it that way but that's not what people are saying. It's not that you quoted a black man, it's that you deployed that quotation as some means of lecturing people of color about what it is like to be people of color as if you knew something about the subject we don't.
You invoked Malcolm X in a ham-handed fashion and you got called out on it.
You were trying to put me 'in my place' and tell me how I should think about being black in America. You did so by invoking black men because they are, as you put it, 'my leaders'. It is not quoting black men it is the way you went about deploying this as a means of putting a black woman in her place.
It backfired, of course, because this image that people have about black women is not even remotely related to my life. You've learned that now.
Aj
|