Over the last few months I have often told the story of
having a conversation with a young lady that I have a parental relationship with.
This conversation includes an extensive review from her about all her friends
at college, their likes, dislikes, personalities and strengths etc. After this
discussion had continued for nearly an hour I began to realize that while I
knew much about the people she has meaningful relationships with, I had no idea
of their racial background, sexual orientation or religious affiliations.
The above story always felt like evidence that there is a
generation emerging that has a much different worldview that represents
progress. Frankly I was proud of her.
Recent discussions at PanthiaCon around privilege prompted
me to examine this story from a more personal and very uncomfortable perspective. The story demonstrates my continued
generational need to classify individuals and put them into boxes that define
them in some way in my world view. Simply put, in celebrating her generations
accomplishment I have been driven to examine the vestiges of racism, homophobia
and religious bigotry my own worldview.
Needless to say this is a somewhat painful process. As
someone who has committed much of his life to fighting social justice issues
the insight that I also am part of the problem, that I hold vestiges of the
very views and actions I so abhor is, to say the least, a painful but necessary
self-reflection.
It is my intent to confront these behaviors, to not pass
along this ugly urge to classify others, put them in boxes that have no purpose
other than to perpetuate a social culture I oppose. I have spent much of my
life exposing and confronting racism and other forms of prejudice. The time has
come to confront it in my self, do the hard self-examination, change my
behavior, and understand that most of us in my generation still hold disgusting
remnants of the very beliefs we abhor.
So yes there was a
racist, homophobe and bigot at PantheacCon, and it was me, I am so not proud.
10 comments:
I find it unhelpful to talk about whether one is A racist or A homophobe or A bigot. That suggests that one's actions are either wholly pure or wholly corrupt, which is misleading.
Rather, we should look at how certain actions we take enact racism, homophobia, bigotry, et cetera, and learn to correct them.
This post explores that point at length.
http://www.shakesville.com/2009/01/nouning-considered-harmful.html
Peter, I understand what you are doing here and I honor your process. I thank you for being so bold and blunt about your own work.
AND I want to add that internal process should not be confused for BEING a..... (insert label). It is the unconscious programming we get the option to bring to the front that so we can replace dysfunctional thinking and conditioning.
Thank you for continuing to do the work in our community and internally. we are all better for it.
Jonathan, While i appreciate the information, it is the ability to intelectulize issues like this that cause me not to change, the pain of unpleasant insight is a strong motivator for me
Good for you to continue to do your internal work around these essential issues. To talk about what we find in ourselves feels crucial to me as we continue to move away from the need to classify.
Keep in mind there is a difference between personal behavior and thoughts, versus institutionalized sexism, racism, homophobia, and bigotry.
As an individual, I am a product of my history and my attempts at personal change. Regardless of how well or poorly I may be able to improve my behavior, thoughts, and impact on the people around me, ultimately my core effort is to understand institutional sexism, racism, homophobia, and bigotry.
I cannot stop those things.
I can however engage awareness, knowledge, understanding and voice. I can endeavor to understand the impact those things have had on me and the people around me. I can endeavor to be an open, compassionate, proactive, outspoken, connected, and kind individual in the world.
One of the things I work to be clear with myself on this is, that my behavior and participation at PSG or at home for example, are not the same as change on planet Earth for its 7 billion human inhabitants. I can however see where my own behavior and thoughts fail; not all the time but a lot of the time. I do not ask myself in any given moment whether I am more or less sexist, racist, homophobic (yes, even LGBT individuals have some bit of institutionalized or personal homophobia in them still), or bigoted.
Using only one example to make my point: Yes, when I interact with a woman, I can ask myself to grasp the impact of sexism in our times on the woman before me, as with any woman; including the impact of my own thoughts and behavior. I can acknowledge that my behavior and thoughts can at best help nudge the world a little bit more forward. I know that my behavior (or self awareness) will not diminish one whit the impact that institutionalized sexism has had on the woman before me, nor what any bad behavior by another has wrought.
As a body, in my view, we must work to end institutionalized sexism, racism, homophobia, bigotry, etc.; and personally engage what good behavior, actions, and thoughts we can muster in our own relations with one another ~ locally and globally.
That is my take on this in this moment.
All the best,
Skye
I have to wonder if self-shaming is really useful.
Your daughter is less bigoted about some things than you are, I (who is your generation or perhaps older) am certainly less bigoted than my father.
But even those of use who had BS taught to us from an early age (cf: "You Have to Be Carefully Taught" from South Pacific") can learn to behave differently from our elders.
What I have learned to do is to keep my danged mouth shut and examine my prejudices instead. If I have an unpleasant automatic reaction to someone or something, I have (and take) the option to use it as a teaching moment for myself. I can be rueful about the remnants of my upbringing, but I don't have to let it define me. Such ideas and prejudices are a fact of my history, an artifact of the times in which I was raised, but they are only pieces of me, not the whole. As long as I know that in good faith I am trying to be a better person, I am willing to forgive myself for internal processes upon which I do not act.
Good conversations here, as to shaming, I feel no shame or guilt around these issues only the desire to alter the way in which I precieve others and the world. As a human, pain is a great motovator for change.
I think you've hit an important point of insight and acknowledge the bravery it takes to admit what you have. Yes, if we are white we have to work to see our privilege and until we start to, we are racist. (Same with sexism, homophobia, and every systemic form of oppression a society can come up with.) Splitting the meaning of the word to avoid guilt is a problem as is wallowing in the guilt. (I don't necessarily see anyone in this thread doing either.)
Also, this generation coming up is the product of the work previous generations have been doing. The first attempts at anything complex enough to be worth doing are going to be a mess. So the 60s were a mess. But we keep at it. We keep getting better at seeing oppression and at allow oppression to not exist in the first place. We are seeing in this younger generation, the fruits of everyone's hard work. This upcoming gen is really amazingly different and I can't wait to see what they accomplish in the world.
I agree with what folks have posted; more to the point, good on you, Peter, for busting your own shit. And yet ...
Sometimes willful blindness to racism, sexism, homophobia, you-name-it-discrimination takes the form of "I'm going to deny its existence, and assume that your level of privilege is the same as mine". And oh my, that ain't necessarily so! There's a lot of painful discussion about whether we can actually say parts of our lives today are "post-racial". For all that we might *want* hateful isms to disappear, ignoring them doesn't automatically make the world right. (And sometimes it makes the world downright absurd. When I heard myself say "pregnant persons" instead of "pregnant women", I wasn't non-sexist - it was plain stupid PCness. I'll say it proudly when we figure out how to share that biological process, but until then...!)
Kudos to the younger person you describe, that she didn't think it necessary to describe the people in her life according to stereotypes -- and even more to those of us who can hold both awarenesses, of individual people independent of the stereotypes, and of their experiences with being "other-ed" as part of a despised group.
I'm a brand new follower to your blog, and I admit I didn't read every comment left on this entry, but I wanted to say -- I agree, that when we discover our faults, we should not try to rationalize them. Self improvement can be severely delayed when we spend time trying to justify our bad habits rather than confronting ourselves and working actively to change them.
In the spirit of being positive, though, I don't know you and I've never been to PantheaCon, but I've heard and read about lots of drama happening there over the years (as there always is at larger Pagan functions), and if you're willing to admit to yourself that you at least had faulty thoughts, then you probably weren't the worst person there. But really, I hope to go to PantheaCon some year soon and experience that whole thing for myself. Glad to have found your blog.
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