A story.
Biggest secret on my blog (spoiler warning): I’m mostly Cherokee. We’ll skip the argument about what it means to be “part” something or mixed blood for now (it’s an argument I’ve made other places if you’re dying to read it). But I went through a period where I was a “live and let live’ person-of-color because anyone who has seen me knows that I pass. In fact I pass so much that I’m often questioned as to why I don’t look “more” Cherokee. I’m not sure how that’d even work, but it’s constantly brought up around me (along with the “oh, you’re fat because of your genetics because your ancestors didn’t have the foods we have” — yes, that’s also why I have a drink and not “drinks” because my people are more apt to get drunk).
Anyway… I stopped being such a “keep your head down” POC when I got into grad school. I’d chosen my moments as a high school kid and as an undergraduate, and I didn’t really say all that much in my MA program, but I started to feel a sense of responsibility to my ancestors as a PhD student. This crystallized for me at a gathering of the Wordcraft Circle, when an elder pulled me aside and gave me a bone-chilling yet heartwarming speech about the duty we hold to our blood and to our land. So… I stopped keeping my head down.
I did this out of love for my mother and respect for how she raised me to keep going, to stand up any time I got knocked down, to not let people walk on me. It’s ironic, then, that I get to the first touchpoint of my post today: my mother told me to stop talking about race.
She told me that she thinks that’s why I sometimes struggle in the field, why people at work sometimes do things that make no sense to me socially, why the discipline of English studies all but violently threw me up. She reminded me that white people don’t want to hear about the wrongs they’ve committed to other people.
She’s absolutely right.
But I haven’t stopped, and I’m not going to.
And here’s why. People don’t get this about me, but I have an almost overpowering sense of justice. I want for others who struggle to be accepted and treated fairly to see an example of someone who is like them making it, someone who is like them calling people on the carpet when they do the wrong thing. This will sound super arrogant, but I don’t mean it to; I mean it to be the truth. I want to be the role model I never had in academia. All my mentors were either white people with good intentions or were POC who played weird “act white” games. It wasn’t until I could stand on my own two feet and had been kicked violently by life so many times that I didn’t need a mentor of color that I found any worthy of the job. They became major allies and I love them, but when I was an undergrad, when I was in high school… I didn’t have anyone but my mother as a role-model on how to live with grace as a person who isn’t white, and she, while incredibly intelligent, is nothing like an academic and wouldn’t be wired to do what I do for a living.
It’s funny that she told me that I shouldn’t tell people what they don’t want to hear. She might not remember now since she has mellowed (ever so slightly) with age, but when I was a teen and she was in her late 30s she’d take a fool to task with quickness and skill. She once walked out of a demeaning job with the strut of a heavyweight champion. She was a badass. All I’m doing is picking up the ball and running it across the goal line after that long drive.
So sometimes I’m– as Zack de la Rocha says– the nail in the hand of their Christmas. It’s not that I want to be a contrary prick. White people– led by their Orange master– are experts at that. The internet teems with people being contrary jerks and trollish hatemongers. No, I’m not doing it for the lols. God knows I could. Easily. I have enough anger at the world for things that aren’t about race that I could fill page after page and win argument after argument. I could take down a Smacktalk Master. I’m battle hardened and surprisingly fast for a man my size.
Here’s why I pour people the cold cup of coffee: someone has to or things are never going to change.
A classic example was a Facebook discussion I leaped into today. A friend (a Facebook friend, anyway– IDK what we are in real life. We worked together for a spell, but we were both sort of outcasts) posted about how people should think harder about things they create that are offensive to minorities. Then a bunch of his friends chimed in debating it. A bunch of straight white dudes. And so I said to all of them:
I think the real issue — not to sound combative– is when heterosexual white dudes write something that is potentially offensive and other heterosexual white dudes try to rush to condemn before the people who would be offended get there. Nothing is worse than a white-on-white nerd fight, and that seems to happen all too frequently in pop culture right now. Let those of us who are being used as the ball to be tossed in the fight that is going on stake our claim to things.
I’m just thinking of how many people have told me I should be offended by things of late. I know when I’m offended, and it’d be nice to not have people who don’t know the culture trying to be the champions of a cause. People need to know why something is offensive to fight it properly. I think lately that’s not really happening. Me telling someone that an Indian mascot is bad, for example, doesn’t mean they can then win a fight by saying “my Cherokee friend told me this is racist.” The fight needs more nuance.
That said, as a very general rule with a number of caveats, I think you’re right on it here. I tell my students all the time “if you think what you wrote is offensive, it almost certainly is. If you’re not sure, that means you actually know but want to pretend you don’t.” Most people don’t think something that is just fine “might” be offensive. People are much more likely to be oblivious the other direction and say “how did that ever offend anyone?”
And one of them said back “but we can’t ask a POC to explain it to us so we have to teach ourselves” plus some other stuff. Basically he pointed out that white dudes had it under control without checking with other people. So I had to get a little more blunt:
The only problem with that is that you’re assuming in this construction that a big group of white dudes knows what they’re talking about. That lends at least in part to the problem: such a situation presumes that you know what you’re talking about enough to educate each other, and that’s something that I’ve noticed people failing at of late.
The issue lies in the shades of gray. Some things are easy to figure. You use the n word– that was bad. You use a swastika, that was bad. But some things aren’t as clear. There’s a certain danger in presuming “oh, I’m an educated white man, so I can explain why this thing is offensive to X community.” It’s the same problem as mansplaining, and while I’m not saying this about you– I don’t know you, but I assume you wouldn’t do such a thing– that is a pretty serious problem in this world right now. It can be dressed in the rhetoric of “we can’t expect a POC to explain this to us,” but trying to speak for them about what offends them is still objectification of and commodification of a POC.
I’m just being contrary, though. Sometimes on Facebook, as a person of color who has a bunch of academic friends, I just think “do you guys realize you’re having whole conversations about communities you don’t actually know?” I realize part of that is the quest for knowledge and a good-hearted/intellectual desire to know and understand, but history is filled with people who can’t walk that line without making it all worse. The road to hell, as they say, is paved with good intentions.
So tl;dr– ask. If you think something is offensive to a community, ask someone from that community. That person has the right to roll her eyes at you, but at least make the effort to figure it out without removing the agency of the very people you are presumably trying to defend from being offended/oppressed.
That thread of the discussion died and the collective of white folks went back to revising the initial thought to be more inclusive, oblivious of the fact that a person of color actually engaged them and tried to offer a method of understanding how this all works from my side. And so I sigh heavily, and I know that I made some people upset. But their behavior reinforces the need for my intervention. Of course white dudes will keep explaining to other white dudes how to be the best dudes. But maybe someone else will see this and think “oh, wait… the not white dude made a point we should consider because he’s the one we think was offended by the content that the white dude made that we’re whitesplaining away.”
So tl;dr my mother was right, and I wonder sometimes if there’s passive aggression toward me because I raise issues like this. And I think that’s the price I have to pay. The other day in a meeting I pointed out something I thought was unnecessary and someone– someone white and male– came right at me in a way that no one else in the room could understand, making a fool of himself just to cut off my criticism.
I didn’t make any friends in that meeting.
But I was me. And you know… if there are only going to be 2% of us in the land that was our native home, and less than 1% of us in the academy, I’m willing to piss off the status quo to make sure that people realize we exist.
If that makes me an asshole, I wear the moniker with pride. The truth most certainly can hurt you, but I do believe one day it will set us all free. I won’t stop speaking it just to be better liked. I’d rather be the outcast who did his best than the toadie that jumped when his master told him how high.
#villain