October 21, 2021

A Primer on Getting Your "Respectful Questions" Answered

Back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, I was for a short time the only white student on a dorm floor otherwise occupied by black students. (Being it was 'back then' we were also all female. And there were curfews and rules and shit today's students would think totally archaic... but I digress.) I had never had much contact with black people, but I tried to be both respectful and friendly, which basically involved smiling a lot, saying 'hello' in the dorm halls and when I met a dorm mate elsewhere on campus, etc. I never made any close friends but most of my dorm mates reciprocated the respectful friendliness.

Until one day when I was startled by the appearance of a dorm mate with an AMAZING hairdo. Up until then she'd had a shaped and trimmed "natural" and occasionally slicked it or did short braids in tiers for special occasions. But that day she showed up in the common room with a swear-to-god foot-high cone of amazingly-twisted braids atop her head, with sparkly ornaments inserted and it just looked incredibly COOL and before I could stop myself I said "Melly, how did you DO that?"

And then blushed bright red.

And, as was a perfectly natural response, she gave me the side eye. I waited for a slapdown, but she decided to be nice, instead, and smiled, and told me about 'extensions' and how long it took to work up an elaborate 'do like that, and the night out she and her friends had planned at a very elegant place.

And that was my first experience with getting a "respectful" (well, amazed and impulsive) question answered.

Later, I tried again with someone at a place where I worked, who gave me much of the following wisdom:

1. You may think it's "respectful" because a) you really want to know, and b) you don't think you have any bias/bigotry against the 'different' person. That doesn't make it respectful, though. Unless you have an immediate, practical reason to know about something (like, you're in charge of arranging refreshments and do they need a dietary accommodation, or you're setting up seating for a presentation, and do they need an accessibility option, etc.) it's just your curiosity and your assumption that they should be able and willing to satisfy it is pretty disrespectful, actually.

2. You might have very good intentions about wanting your curiosity satisfied, like your workplace is becoming more diverse and you want to know how to be respectful, etc. That still doesn't make it your (black/trans/Jewish/blind/etc) co-worker's responsibility to enlighten you.

So how DO you get your "Respecftul Question" answered?

Fortunately, there are members of just about any different-from-you group you can imagine who have shared their experience of living in a world where they are considered different. They have shared that experience in writing (books, articles, blogs). They have shared it on video or film. And there are lots of them.

So do your own damn' homework. Start reading, watching, educating yourself. Be prepared to find out that (holy moly!) not all people who are different-from-you in a particular way have the same experiences or the same opinions about it. There's no one answer to some questions, especially the tricky, complicated ones.

And for the most practical stuff - like that 'how do I respect work colleagues different-from-me' thing, there are likely (there SHOULD be, anyway) a set of resources your Human Resources colleague(s) can point you to, to address issues like why vacations schedules might differ, why a 'no head covering indoors' rule has been changed, etc., and how you can/should accommodate that in the workplace setting.

You might find, if you take your "respectful curiosity" seriously and start actually seeking out those different-from-you voices in print, on video, etc., and reading them and thinking about them, that not only are all members of a different-from-you group not going to have the same experiences and opinions, they may have a very wide array. In some cases, their experience/opinion might superficially resemble your own, especially if you are yourself 'different' from the predominant culture. That doesn't make y'all besties or friends or necessarily fellow-travelers, but it might help you understand in a more personal way.

And hopefully, you'll stop seeing each member of that particular different-from-you group as a generic representative of the group, and see them instead as a person with a unique history, set of experiences, cultural background, etc., that may be shaped by being of that group, but is transcended by their essential humanity, which is the same as your humanity.

At that point, it may no longer be necessary for you to have your "respectful curiosity" gratified, because there are many more important things about interacting as a human being with other human beings who have an experience of discrimination, oppression, and bigotry to deal with on a day-to-day basis.

Who knows, you might even be moved to start thinking about the unconscious biases you have absorbed and whether they're part of your operational 'normal', and how you can be aware of them, and work against them to be less biased.

We can all hope, right?

helpfully,
Bright

October 1, 2021

America's Fundamental Dichotomy

In a nutshell, America has ground to a halt as a nation, as a culture, as a meta-community, because we no longer believe we can have nice things.

Like roads.

Like jobs.

Like education.

And so on, ad infinitum.

And we cannot get past the "we can't have nice things" because there is a fundamental dichotomy between Americans who believe we can't have nice things because racism, and Americans who believe we can't have nice things because of skeery brown folk.

I realized this today when I was talking to a young friend who has had some severe health problems lately, involving several neurosurgeries and some difficult treatments and rehab. Fortunately for her she lives in a blue state that expanded Medicaid, and she was explaining to me a difficulty she's dealing with in trying to balance the work she CAN do (which is mostly 'home help' jobs of various types) with retaining access to her necessary medical care - she can't make too much money or they will kick her off.

That's a different rant, though. What went through my mind was my own history on public assistance, for various periods in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when my daughter was a toddler and her 'other Mom' was struggling with addiction.

Look, public assistance has never been regarded well in America, for a whole raft of reasons most of which make very little rational sense. But back when I was on it, there was a qualitative difference to the processes involved.

Yes, they were bureaucratic and some of them were excessive, redundant, and silly.

Yes, there were periodic verifications needed to ensure you continued to qualify for the assistance.

Yes, there were "case workers" and other public employees whose job was to "help" you do things that would reduce or eliminate your need for public assistance, and some of them were dicks.

But... here's the deal: Back then, although there was a certain stigma to pulling out your "food stamps" at the grocery store, and it wasn't exactly something you wanted to tell everyone about, there was a lot less of the "you must be a waste of oxygen just for being on public assistance" mindset that has gotten baked into every process connected with administering public assistance programs in the intervening decades.

Yanno why?

ONE thing, and I was there when it happened:

Ronald Reagan decided to turn public assistance into a racist dogwhistle to gin up the GOP base, with his toxic burble about "Welfare Queens in Cadillacs". HE was the one who decided that "on public assistance", "brown-skinned" and "lazy slackers cheating the system" should become inextricably linked in the (white) mind.

Nevermind the documented fact that the solid majority of all people receiving all kinds of public assistance was then, and has been ever since, WHITE.

The conflation of "public assistance/brown-skinned/lazy cheater" has become not just a toxic mindworm in the white psyche, but a justification for turning all kinds of public assistance processes into humiliating, punitive, pecksniffery focused entirely on delivering the minimum possible benefit for the shortest possible time, regardless of how counter-productive that may be.

And that white majority of public assistance recipients? Do they rise up in righteous wrath and say "WTF, America, we are your neighbors and human beings with lives and potential who need help and will use it well?"

Nah.

They say "It wouldn't be such a pain in the ass if it weren't for all those lazy brown-skinned people trying to cheat the system." (And the number of them saying this while trying to cheat the system themselves is painfully ironic, too.)

These are the Americans who believe "we can't have nice things because of brown-skinned people."

And they will never, never, NEVER compromise with the rest of us who know damn' well that the reason we can't have nice things is because racism.

And we won't compromise with them, because. well... duh.

So we just have to try and keep them from perpetuating their toxic delusions into younger generations, and die off, I guess.

At some point, there will be a sufficient majority of us who understand that we can't have nice things because racism, to start actually doing something to change all the baked-in racism in every economic, political, social, and cultural process in America.

I hope my grandson's kids are around to see that.

wistfully,
Bright