feminist blogs

*UPDATE 11:45 AM 8/14/06*

Okay, this is hilarious. This post is getting a lot of hits (but, interestingly, zero comments thus far) from this blog’s feed at RVAblogs.com, a lovely site that aggregates various Richmond, Virginia-based blogs. Recently, the site’s editor set up a neat tagging system enabling readers (rather than the bloggers themselves) to add descriptive tags to the posts. When I looked earlier today, I saw, for example, that the tag ‘race’ had been added to my post. Okay, that’s fine… but then later I looked again and a brand-new tag had been added: “only white people are racist“.

Um… Sorry, but I never said that. Or even remotely implied that! I’m writing here about racist shit white people feel perfectly happy with sharing with other white people. That was all. Of course people of all ethnicities can be racist! (See, for example, see this post on the Asian feminist blog Reappropriate about an Asian woman’s racism against a black man in making hiring decisions.) I won’t go so far as to assume that the person who tagged my post in this manner is some embarrassingly defensive (and racist) white person, but damn, it sure looks that way.

Okay, I now return you to the original blog post…

This evening we went to visit some friends, Chip and Lisa, who’d recently bought a house in a neighborhood near ours. There are quite a few homes for sale in that area so we poked around a bit, peering in the windows of those places that had For Sale signs (and which weren’t presently lived in… we’re not out to invade anybody’s privacy). Later we were talking with Lisa (who, like Chip, is white) about the neighborhood, who she’d met and what her impressions were. She said their neighbor next door, an elderly white woman, had seemed friendly at first. When Lisa asked what the woman knew about her neighbor on the opposite side of their house (whom Lisa had only briefly met before), the woman’s first response was, “Well, he’s colored.” As if, perhaps, Lisa had somehow not observed the fact that this neighbor was black, and needed to be informed - no, warned - of this fact! (How Lisa reacted to this startling observation, I neglected to ask.) Next, the woman said about the man, “Well, he’s been here for a few years.”

Later, Lisa met the man again and it turns out he’d been living there for, oh, twenty-seven years. Whereas the racist white lady had been there for only a few years longer than that. Yet, her perception was that this man was some recently invading (”colored”) interloper. Time to get over it, lady. Particularly since the neighborhood on the whole seemed about evenly white and black. Her racist nostalgia for a day when, presumably, it was much more exclusively white is just plain embarrassing.

I’m reminded of the time when, a few years back, a white waitress at a local Shoney’s, after we’d paid and were getting ready to leave, making friendly conversation, decided for some reason to share how annoyed she was about The Blacks (a phrase she uttered with significant venom) who kept using the Shoney’s parking lot, while they were apparently patronizing the business next door. What was most obnoxious about this was the way in which she said it, leaning over the counter and speaking in hushed, conspirational tones suggestive of some kind of racist shared reality between us. Of course I told her off on the spot (”In front of God and everybody” as we sometimes say in the South), explaining to her and then to her manager why the fact that she’d made this racist comment meant we would never again set foot in that business establishment (we had been, at that point, regulars, eating there at least once per week). I don’t know which of them looked more confounded, the waitress or the manager.

Later, in speaking to the same manager and subsequently his regional manager over the phone (at my initiation, not theirs), I failed to get through to them about why the woman’s comment had been racist, and moreover, why it had been so offensive to me. The regional manager actually asked me if I was white. Had I been thinking more clearly, I’d have hollered why in the hell does that matter here? But instead I just said, well, yeah, following which he seemed even more baffled as to why I’d been offended. Why would I challenge (even in this truly infinitesimal way) the very system of racism from which I derive privilege? I can’t imagine that the waitress would have said what she said to us in front of non-white customers. (While I can easily imagine her treating such customers differently, perhaps with racism of the less overt variety.)

A bit more than a decade ago, as a struggling young mom on welfare in Minnesota, I had another interesting experience with this sort of “whitey-to-whitey” conspirational racism, this time at a grocery store. Can’t remember the chain, but it was sort of like Ukrops here in Virginia… think it began with a B, which is to say it was somewhat high-end. (At the time, my girlfriend, my daughter and I were actually homeless, temporarily crashing out in the basement of someone we vaguely knew who lived in that area, hence shopping at the improbably high-end grocery store, because that’s all there really was.) The cashier smiled widely at me, saying, so pretty much everyone in the checkout line could hear, “Oh, you’re on food stamps?” As if that weren’t humiliating and irritating enough, she went further, asking, “So how do you like being on welfare?” To which I responded with something bright like, um, it’s okay, since, even if I’d been able to come up with some lucid, on-the-spot analysis of the particular intersection of class and disability politics* that had led to me being on public assistance (my girlfriend was disabled, her SSI was forever pending, and I had to take care of both her and my daughter full-time), A) it was none of her damned business and B) it would have been over her head anyway.

But wait, there’s more! Then the cashier launched into a rant about how she could totally understand someone like me needing to be on welfare and that was cool, but what she just couldn’t stand was These Black People who were forever coming in and buying steaks! Yes, steaks with their food stamps, when you could plainly tell they had plenty of money from all those gold chains They wear! In response to which I could, at that time, do nothing except stare at her in horror, grabbing my groceries as quickly as possible and heading for the door. Later, I called the store and told the manager what had happened. That time, at least, I didn’t have to explain why I was so offended; the manager profusely apologized and promised to take immediate action in addressing the problem with the cashier. (Of course, I don’t know what actually happened after that point; for all I know he may have done nothing.)

But what continued to haunt and gall me after the fact was how this woman had spoken to me in this conspirational way, from that place of presumed shared racism, and, what was more, as if she had any idea whatsoever what my life circumstances were. Plenty of people, of every possible ethnicity, scam welfare systems in one way or another (and there are lots of reasons why this is so, which I won’t get into here, but suffice it to say I would never automatically condemn someone who did that, because survival itself frequently requires such activity). Why did she automatically assume I was deserving of these benefits, based on our few moments of acquaintance in the (okay, now I remember the name) Byerly’s checkout lane? Only, of course, because I was white. Ugh.

*Actually, there’s an intersection with queer politics here, too, in that if Lee and I had been able to marry, I could have gotten a job and Lee could have subsequently qualified for the medical insurance she desperately needed while we were waiting for her SSI to be approved, a process which ultimately took four unbelievably anguishing, poverty-afflicted years. So even if she could not have been contributing economically to the household, I could have cared of all of us on one income; insurance could have paid for a personal assistant to help her with things I was staying home (or, as the case sometimes was, at other peoples’ homes) to take care of for her.