Race and Color

[fabrisse]

I'm white. To a certain extent, I don't get a say in all the drama because I have white privilege at my back. Hell, I have long hair and blue eyes to boot.

But most of the kids I mentor aren't white. They always seem a little surprised when I mention race in passing -- like referring to one of my fellow mentors who was having a hard time keeping a beat when some of the kids were trying to teach her a clapping rhyme as "whiter than I am."

I know I've told the story about one of the boys saying he didn't like to go outside because then he'd be black. Without thinking, I turned to him, looked at his hand, then mine, then his and said, "Kid, I hate to break it to you ... " Thank heavens he laughed.

And then all of them tried to explain to me why it was better to be light.

There was an article in The Washington Post yesterday on the subject.

I wish they hadn't put it into Michael Jackson terms, but I would like to hear from my friends about this.

Comments

[tpau]

hmmm... this is not news, the article. i read about the doll experiment in psych class. wasn't surprised then either.

i find it very hard to sort out the concept of white privilidge, or of colorism or anything. it is jsut not ingrained into my consciousness as concepts i understand. the prejudices i grew up with were somewhat different, and i detest the game of "my people are more persecuted then your people"...

[siderea]

i read about the doll experiment in psych class.

Presumably, you read about the original doll experient. A young film maker recently redid it on IIRC the 40th anniversary to see if there's been any changes since then.

i detest the game of "my people are more persecuted then your people"...

Privilege is a way of talking about oppression without getting involved in the "persecution olympics"; that's one of the things that makes it useful. "Worse" and "better" are scalars: they reduce all the details of oppression to an INT, which loses all the useful information with which we might learn to understand how oppression works and do something about it. The concept of privilege isn't quantitative, it's qualitative. It's about what specific forms persecution has taken, and it allows some very subtle and interesting observations to rise to the fore.

[riverfox.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. Not sure on what angle you'd like a comment, but I'll take a stab. ;)

First, MJ as a base? Good god, no. Perfect example of a self-hating person, both as black and as a man, straight or bi or gay. He is the perfect example of what *not* to do, never mind emulate.

Second, the sooner a bunch of white bigots are either educated, shoved out of the way, or dead, the better. What color your skin is doesn't matter, even though the bigots running things would like others to think otherwise. We need to be who we are and not worry about who should be what according to others. I think President Obama is a damn good example, as well as Justice Sonya Sotomayor. :)