I've been reading all the various posts about racism all week, but I haven't posted anything before now because I just didn't think I had anything particularly profound to say, nor that I could say it as articulately as others. And so of course now that I'm completely sleep-deprived I'm feeling suddenly verbose on the matter, and I'm sure I'm going to mangle this completely.
It's something I've been particularly thinking about over the last few days (and indeed, something I think about pretty much all the time to varying degrees), in terms of my own personal approach to the world, in terms of my writing, in terms of the environment that surrounds us all our lives.
In many ways I live in a wonderful place. It's a "little' town, but it's phenomenally multicultural. Last I'd heard, the elementary school district had something like 43 different languages represented among its children. It's nowhere near perfect, of course, and not nearly as perfect as some of the people here would like to think, but it's better than other places I have lived. If anything, it suffers from a reluctance to discuss race and racism directly because people are afraid of offending someone else. Today at work I chatted with people from Poland, Pakistan, China, India, and someone who grew up on a farm two towns away from here. The university is kind of a microcosm of the world. I'd say it's one of the more tolerant places in the country, except I *hate* the word tolerant -- to me, at least, to tolerate something means to put up with but not necessary like. My experience is that most people here treat others as part of the same great big family, with an amazing breadth of experience and perspective between us to share. I would be shocked to witness an overt demonstration of racism, because it would be so phenomenally out of place. Of course, we could get into discussions of classism -- who it is who can afford to go to college, especially to a foreign country? -- and sexism, because that's still very much present even if to a lesser extent than other places I have lived and worked, but it's not International Blog Against Classism and Sexism Week, so I'm not going there.
One of the reasons I chose to move back to this area in the first place is that I really liked the idea of my daughter growing up in a place where people came in such an amazing variety of colors, cultures, accents, interests, and so on. Some people talk very proudly about how they don't notice what race people are, as if that makes them a fine non-racist human being, but to me that's like being taken to the world's biggest buffet, with every kind of food imaginable, and proudly declaring that you don't notice that it's not all just potato salad. Or going into the Louvre and walking through the galleries and declaring that you see every single painting as a Rembrandt. I *love* the diversity of humanity, for all its good and ill. I love all the different shapes and sizes and configurations people come, and I would *hate* a world where we were all the same, where we had brainwashed ourselves into not seeing anything for what it is. It's completely missing the point, IMHO, in one of those 180 degrees wrong sorts of ways. Yes, we live in a culture that predominantly groups people according to shared physical characteristics -- gender, race, weight, orientation, etcetera -- and then assigns value to the individual members of that group based upon the perceived value of the group itself. That sucks. But it seems to me as if some people, trying to overcome racism, have decided to sort of uniformly declare that other groups are "just as good as white" and assign them the value of the white group as if that's somehow very egalitarian and enlightened. "We can all be white" still implies that white is the best thing to be, and that there's nothing of value inherent in non-whiteness that's not superceded by the value inherent in whiteness. I think that instead of training ourselves *not* to see and place separate value on groups different from our own, what we need to do is change ourselves *to* see and value what is unique about each and every person -- their skin color, their gender, their smile, their thoughts, their experiences, how they relate to the natural world, if/how they relate to the divine, their compassion and integrity, their skills, their failings, the art and the music and the good will that they contribute to the world.
I don't know that we can really picture what our world would be like without racism (or sexism, or classism, or any of the other ways in which we hold each other at arm's length) because I think that world would be unrecognizable to us. So much of what we live surrounded by has been built on that foundation of prejudice and violence, and even if it's no longer always clearly discernible what those influences were, it has shaped our culture and our history indelibly. I mean, shit, Columbus, right? Cortez? How many other conquerors, countless peoples decimated and/or wiped out entirely, or their culture stripped away from them with a ruthless cultural self-righteousness? What would this world be like if they had respected and valued other peoples as having worth in their own right? As being something unique that adds to the greater sum that is all humanity? Can we begin to imagine?
As a writer, I try. I don't tackle racism or sexism head-on (or at least I haven't yet, though those things and general "fear of the other" resonates through much of what I write), but I do try to present a universe which is, in some ways, better than our own. I have non-white, non-male, non-heterosexual, non-young, and non-educated characters. I don't make a big deal about announcing those labels because I don't know that any of those characteristics are things that should be emphasized as somehow "different from the norm", because I'm not sure I believe in a norm. They are each one an individual, and what makes them special is who they are, not what they are. Because I don't know I could believe in a future where we haven't made progress towards seeing and valuing people for themselves. Okay, not *everyone*, because you gotta have bad guys doing despicable bad-guy things, but at least more than now.
Stuck between the often regrettable, unchangeable past and the possibility of a brighter, saner future, we can do our best in the here and now, and we can raise our children to be better than we have been, and they in turn can help our grandchildren to surpass us further. I don't know what other hope we have as a species except that, with effort, we can be better than we are.
Certainly, I could be better than I am. I try every day. And some days, I like to think I succeed.
Anyhow, it's late and I'm babbling.
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