Racism is cruelty, what else can it be? Sometimes it is cruelty enabled by privilege & ignorance. But in such a dramatically unequal world, isn’t it our own responsibility to find out our areas of ignorance, our areas of privilege, and keep educating them?
Tag: racism
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are you calling me a racist?
Got lured into a conversation tonight that reminded me of the old truism: that in some circles it is ok for white people to say whatever they like about black people, as long as no people say about those white people that those white people may be racist. Cos, like, that’s the *real* insult. That’s the really unforgiveable prejudice.
This is my suggestion for a new Australian flag.
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world war z
Just saw this terrorizing zombie flick which has Brad Pitt in it, he is rather good but every time he’s onscreen you go Oh look! It’s Brad Pitt! Such an awful experience and I feel traumatized. I feel like a zombie, if a zombie is the ultimate sociopath: no emotion, no response. Cycling home through the cool breezy night I was looking fearfully over my shoulder, left and right, cowering when a bus came past. Apart from fear I’m feeling nothing. Hackneyed exaggerations like ‘dead inside’ seem to me reasonable truisms. The friend I went with, a fan of zombie movies who found this gorefest ‘bloodless’, wants to know isn’t there any sensation of relief? What, that the movie is finally over? That of all the billions of diverse and pulsating people on this earth, one square-jawed blond actor and his immediate family, plus token brown-skinned boy, survived? This… is hope? All the nauseating violence and mean-skinned machine-gunning and desperate stratagems by ill-prepared people have worn me through. My emotions are spent. Then again it was melodramatic and ridiculous, but sore. I’ve never seen a film like this before and never want to again. It was so overwhelming that the nett result seems to me a sodden desensitization. Who made the word zombie, when was this thing dreamed up? Ugh. And only now, writing, do I realize the title of this terrible movie is literal as well as hyperbolic. How exhausting.
A side-note: Brad Pitt is extremely good-looking. I never really noticed it before. I guess that sounds ridiculous. I mean, he’s built well, he has a sturdy face that takes expression. My companion said: wasn’t there anything that you liked? I like that it’s over. I like that the artificial bowels-of-the-pyramid architecture of major cinemas does not prevail everywhere. I liked the girl who was brave when he cut her arm off. I found it amusing, or do I mean dispiriting, that they had four accountants just for payroll; 49 stuntpersons; five times as many digital effects artists. I liked the ice cream, from an Italian stall that was locked up when we came out. I liked taking off the 3D glasses. I like the quietude.
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the hurly-berlin
Berlin, Berlin. Familiar and overwhelming. On the train back from the airport a girl with an extraordinary voice hopped on and busked. At the end of the song, the guitarist accompanying her took a bow and people burst into applause. “Wow!” she said, opening up her hat. A cute couple jumped off and a guy with his afro razored up the sides leaned after them, silently proferring the phone and wallet the girl had left lying on the seat. Two muscular men slightly running to fat had their dog with them, a pug named Princess Sheba. We got talking. The one holding the dog on his lap obeyed signals from the other one who said, wiping his own eye, she has something near her eye, and so forth. Princess Sheba stood upright on her owner’s sturdy legs, balancing against the train’s movement like a surfer. These trains travel high above the street and at intervals feel like you’re lost in the woods. The cool breeze flooded in every time someone got on or got off. “Mind the gap,” the safety announcement said in English. Later in the evening a guy snarled at me for making eye contact and called my German companion a Nazi. He was walking along spoiling for it, followed us, taunting, through some misery of his own. “Like the black women in Brooklyn say,” he said, bitterly, chasing us, “stay away from white people.” Berliners smoke in cafes and the street is filled with old litter. If you eat out, people beg, and sell newspapers, and beseechingly play the harmonica. At the next table a middle-aged blond woman painted her lips against a little mirror while her boyfriend watched absorbedly. It took both of them to make her beautiful, it was their tradition. She made faces at herself as though she were having a very emotional, silent conversation. We saw two Romany boys whom I’d seen busking last summer, a year ago now, the little one is bigger and wirier and his chubby brother is chubbier. The younger plays the trumpet and has a loud ghetto blaster with which he drives away all the other musicians. But he’s getting better. Last year he was confident but terrible. I told him, your playing has improved! so much! you’re getting good! and for the first time in all the dozen times we have spoken he gave me his slow, curling, lopsided and personal smile.
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or anything but
“I’m not racist or anything, but… [racist remark]”
vs: “I’m not a feminist or anything, but [women are people too.]”
Why is it still embedded in our use of language that we need to apologize for opposing hatred of women the same way we need to apologize for hating people of other races?
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Eddie McGuire & Adam Goodes
Eddie McGuire, prominent Australian broadcaster, compares Adam Goodes, respected Aboriginal footballer, to King Kong. The conversation, outraged on both sides, focuses on whether or not Eddie “is” racist. Thus it gets nowhere because no one can establish what lurks in the depths of his heart.
If a child gets run over “by accident”, or because a distracted driver did not take sufficient care to prevent it, the child is still run over whether or not that driver “is” a “killer.” Let’s stop competing for most enlightened person who has the most Aboriginal friends, and focus on the damage and pain our unconscious, casual, lazy, habitual, over-entitled, selfish, spoilt racism inflicts.
Even the fact that I label Adam Goodes “Aboriginal” and Eddie McGuire “Australian” shows racism. And ill logic, given that the truest possible “Australians” are indigenous. Let’s move this conversation on and start urgently examining and addressing our actions, our inaction, and their effects, before we get round to finally being more honest about the subtle motivations and conflicts in our hearts.
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a jeans under it
An elderly couple pedalling uphill on a tandem bike: the Swiss are awesome! Casual bigotry in the marketplace: the Swiss are awful! These thoughts freewheeling through my head: generalizations are stupid! Yes: all of them.
Decades back I was here and asked somebody, a travelled, educated person, what was the population of Switzerland. His lip curled. “Four million. And *one million* foreigners!” He was speaking of Italians. Now you see black faces in the street which then was not the case.
Today I cycled to a nearby town in search of summer garments. Coming back to Berlin for winter I was only planning on three months, it was minus fifteen, I brought thick, fuzzy, woolly stuff and ugg boots. Now it is finally hot. The trees are blooming. In every shop I asked, Is there a second-hand shop in town somewhere? Maybe… the Red Cross? People not only looked blank, they sneered. I kept looking and finally on a back street found a merry collection of shoes, cheap suits, and household tat, with three African women presiding.
They invited me to try stuff on in the kitchen and over their cups of tea offered encouraging remarks: Nice colour that one! If you don’t have a jeans under it, this fits great! A white man in his seventies came in and the conversation instantly dampened. I went foraging among the racks and when I came back, he had sat himself next to the youngest, prettiest one and slung an arm casually round the back of her chair. She was just standing up as I came in. She went and stood in the far corner of the kitchen with her back to the inner door.
But you can’t keep a happy woman down and they kept talking around him, about a local woman who comes in causing trouble and pulling things off the shelves. “Police give me a card,” said the stout lady, reaching under the sink for her handbag to show it. I was pulling my sneakers back on, on the floor. The conversation between them was in a kind of pidgin, English and French with some German words, or is it a creole that people evolve when they are from different language groups and fetch up in the same place together? I think, creole. They were so kind and interesting and the atmosphere so pragmatic and humane, I too I would have liked to put my arms around them. I would have liked to stay on uninvited and bask in their presence all the afternoon long. I could understand his longing. His sleaziness, not so much.
