Catching up on (Black History Month) People of Color Month, and why it shouldn't just be a month.

[folklorefanatic]

A couple of years ago, when I was still at Harvard, I read the Lowell House mailing list on a regular basis. It's a good way to advertise that set of Poli-Sci sourcebooks you can't return to the printing office, promote parties, forums, and group meetings, and argue about U.S. politics when so inclined.

In February that year, someone posted a message every day recognizing the contributions of African Americans to American history. Near the end of the month, someone sent out a message to complain about how the "Black History emails" were crowding her inbox and that she didn't want to see them because she wasn't interested. A couple of people rushed to agree with her. They were all Republican, white, and History concentrators.

Naturally, when the list sends out dozens upon dozens of ads, mindless email exchanges on the Mather Lather party and complaints about dining hall food, most of us didn't have a problem receiving one educational email a day, especially when we didn't ask for all of the REAL junk to flow into our inboxes.

Major, major wank ensued.

I'm going to dig around and see if I can find the exchanges, but basically, the fact that this even came up as a discussion shows how far we as citizens of a 'democratic' country have to go to eliminate white privilege. PoC can't "opt-out" of racism. White people and even some light-skinned PoC (that would be me) need to have this stuff hammered home, again and again and again, until no one can say "a man walked down the street" and then "a black/Latino/Asian man walked down the street" as if it doesn't connote a sense of otherness or deviance about the person of color. If people can say both of these statements and not see what's inherently racist about identifying one person by their race and not the other, we have a problem.

When there is no system in place to force a racist mayor to retire for saying that n***** "possibly can be [a racist term] but not really. I'm from the old school. It was a word that was commonly used when I grew up. It referred mostly to all blacks and it didn't mean good [or] bad," we have a problem.

If Americans don't understand the role of race in politics, guess what? We still have a problem.

I've been HellaBusy this past month on various projects and work, and every time an interesting conversation has come up, I've anted to participate. I'm still waiting for my membership to deadbrowalking and debunkingwhite to be approved; apparently, a huge batch of trolls tried to join every lj community that discusses race back in the beginning of February, and the mods couldn't handle the influx, and I feel badly that forums have to face this crap all the time. That doesn't mean I can't keep up with some of the conversations in those places, though. There's a ton to read and to think about. metafandom has had a ton of convos about race as it pertains to fandom in the past few months, and ladyjax just posted a PoC Carnival of articles for your reading pleasure.

I don't think racial identity and racism are subjects that should just exist in the month of February. That means I will be discussing (among things in general) them here. Fair warning, right? ;) Politics, sexism, my family and my writing again as well.