The "Stop Talking About It" Solution

        In a 60 Minutes interview, actor Morgan Freeman claimed Black History Month to be ridiculous. I understand his view to be that confining his history to a month segregates Black history from American history and that they should be integrated.

Partial Transcript of Morgan Freeman's 60 Minutes interview as shared on Facebook

     
       Surprised by Morgan Freeman's rejection of Black History Month, the interviewer asks "How are we going to get rid of racism?"
        Morgan Freeman's solution is to "Stop talking about it. I'm going to stop calling you a white man and I'm going to ask you to stop calling me a black man." He has a point. If we do not make race an issue, if we do not distinguish ourselves as black and white and instead view each other as people, then race will not be an issue. However, I do not believe we are ready for this step. Thoughts and behaviors go deeper than speech. At this point in time, if we stopped saying my black friend and started saying my tall or clever friend, if we stopped 'diversity hires' and 'black scholarships', if we stopped counting and categorizing and reopening the wound, then race and racism would become taboo in scholarly circles but continue to run rampant in our preconceptions and behavior.
      We need to keep talking about race. The color-blind attitude will only be effective once systematic racism is toppled. A day may come when the color of an interviewee's skin is given no more thought than the length of his arms or the shape of his nose. A day may come when a lost child is equally likely to ask a black adult for help as any other nearby adult. A day may come when a woman describes the man she is dating to her parents and does not even think to mention he is not the same ethnicity as she is, just as she does not think to mention the color of his eyes or the size of his ears. But that day will not come about if we brush the pain, the past, the differences, and the dialogue under the rug.
      Say we topple racism. Say no ethnicity is statistically more likely to succeed or fail in a category than any other ethnicity. Say children no longer think the white doll is nicer, smarter, prettier than the black doll. Say the color of your skin is treated no differently that the flexibility of your toes or the fullness of your lips. Say racism is a thing of the past, a history term on a chapter test that half the students will forget because it is not significant anymore. Should we allow that? Should we let the differences, the beautiful variety of culture, the heavy history struggled through, slip away into insignificance?  I believe in recognizing differences, accepting them, and celebrating them. I do not claim we should celebrate skin tone variation for its own sake. I claim we should remember the positives and the negatives of an ethnicities history. Remember triumph after triumph against persecution and ignorance. Remember vibrant cultures kept alive despite horrific circumstances. Remember too those horrific circumstances and the ridiculous preconceptions that continue to stalk the only technically free men and women.
       I take Morgan Freeman's solution as a useful way of handling interpersonal relationships. At work, do not think of that one coworker or that one client as the black one. However, as a society we must not stop talking about it, we must not forget, we must scream at the monster of racism until it is taken aback and stumbles, we must rally the members of the human race to pin down and dissect this monster that we may understand it and never again allow it to control us.




What is Racism? As I Understand It.

          The phrase 'as I understand it' will likely litter my posts. I do not claim to be an authority on the origin or structure of racism, and certainly not on first person experiences. I only claim to attempt to logically and cooperatively develop my own understanding of Racism and relevant concepts.
          Defining race respectfully and effectivly is a difficult thing to do. Many view race as a division of the human species based on physical traits, especially skin tone. It is more complicated than that, even ethnicity is more complicated than that definition. Your ethnicity is more than skin tone. It is has a lot do with the way you look, but do not forget that physical traits include things like eye color, eye shape, hair color, hair texture, hair thickness, nose shape, mouth shape, chin, hips, height, ears, cheek bones, hair line, and many minute details. An African American man tends not look like exactly like a caucasian man but with darker skin. This is because natural selection and random gene shifts affects more than just skin color. I imagine that populations in harsh climates, with specific predators or danges, and with different notions of beauty ended up steering the physical attributes represented in the gene pool in a different direction than populations in different areas.
          Ethnicity is not the same as race. But June! Why did you spend a big paragraph explaining ethnicity when race is not ethnicity? That would be because they are similar and often confused for each other. You cannot choose your ethnicity, but you can choose what race to identify with. Now, if you are "darker than the ace of spades" (Preacher's Boy by Katherine Paterson, 1999) and you choose to identify with Pacific Islander, you will get some confused looks. Determining ethnicity while census taking used to be the opinion of the census taker. A stranger would look at you and decide if you are African American, Native American, Latino/a, Asian American, or Caucasian. Not everyone fits so easily into one of those categories. Some people have parentage from multiple categories. Some people are lighter or darker than what our preconceptions tell us the skin tone of a certain ethnicity should be.
         For information about more changes the Census Bureau is considering making, see Corey Dade's article Census Bureau Rethinks The Best Way To Measure Race (2012).

        As I understand it, the race a person chooses to identify with is determined by their ethnicity, their cultural background, and even the racial make-up of the parent/guardian that raises them.

Who am I to do this?

          I am a middle class, caucasian, twenty-one-year-old, auto-immune, heterosexual, female college student. Who am I to dismantle racism? Shouldn't I be focusing on my degree, having fun with friends, or finding extra shifts to put a little cushion in my bank account? Aren't there issues that pertain more closely to myself like sexism, rising tuition costs, and spreading awareness for auto-immune diseases? Racism does not directly harm me, in fact it indirectly benefits me. I am more likely to get away with shoplifting, more likely to get the job, and children are more likely to believe I am nice, smart, and pretty simply because of the color of my skin and no other factors (see The Doll Test).
        Who am I to dismantle racism? I am a member of the human race and I see an opportunity to whittle away at the stilts racism is founded upon. Besides, I think too much. I often get into the stream of "What is the purpose of it all?" "After I graduate, get a job, maybe have a family, and die, it will have left no impact on the world as a whole especially once the sun or pollution destroys the earth." And it doesn't matter, unless I do something. Something other than study and work and socialize. Something that I can do because I am me, because I overthink, because I see the generational monstrosity that is racism and start thinking. Where did it come from? Why is it still here? How do we cripple it? Perhaps it is selfish of me, or not my place, or not within my capacity to even attempt to dismantle racism or even to just comprehend its magnitude. Perhaps I am not the one to do this, but I am doing it.
       I comprehend that contensious issues and interpretations will come up in future posts. It is not my intension to be disrespectful or cruel. This blog is my thought process, my rambling, partially filtered attempt to understand why, why people can be so nice in person yet so cruel when the system supports it, why the youth are unable to reject the preconceptions of their parent's time, why racism did not disintegrate after the first tragic death and why it continues to remain after shame and disaster nip at its heels.

Origin of the Title

            Dismantling Racist Establishments At Dawn - Negating Ongoing Unfair Hate Themed Speech, may seem like a bulky, somewhat silly, title forced to be an acronym for DREADNOUGHTS. However, each word has significance.

          Dismantling
          Racism is a course I am currently taking. Part of the reason for this blog is to brainstorm and attempt to realize the full extent, cause, and potential downfall of racism. The project I chose for this course is to create and distribute a survey comparing racial exposure and racial sensitivity. I am currently waiting on feedback on the first draft of this survey from my professors, but once it is approved I will share it here.
          Establishments refers to the systematic racism that has breached our society. Stop and Search laws, the apprehension of a white girl walking down the road and seeing a black man, and the achievement gap are all pieces of the puzzle that establishments use to validate and propagate racist practices.
          At
          Dawn I hesitated to include. At Dawn is poetic, fluffy, borderline silly and nonchalant. I do not mean to take this issue lightly. Racism is not flowery language, it is fear and societal-depreciation and power beyond control or restraint. How can flowery language hold a candle to such a monster? Flowery language is hope. At the risk of being cheesy, I claim that there is a dawn coming when the infection of racism will be purged from our schools, our business, our homes, our culture.

          Negating is not merely to disagree, to speak against, to weaken. To negate is to fully undo, to make zero, to reduce to nothing, to prevent any remnant from propagating. It is not enough do a "diversity hire" or create a college scholarship for African Americans. Such solutions misinterpret the problem and may even support it indirectly.
          Ongoing is the part of the equation I am most frustrated by. Why is there still racism? Human adaptability and compassion put us ahead of animals. We are clever; we communicate; we pass on our ideals and hopes to our children; we aid our neighbors. Yet we fear the unexplainable, the otherness, the outsiders. We buy into the systematic denegration of the majority, and many do not even see the full extent and impact it has to this day.
          Unfair, of all the words here, means the most to me personally. This word shattered and rebuilt my world view as a child. One little letter word in a three word sentence, explained only by a short pamphlet. At eleven, I was diagnosed with Cancer. Do not worry; the doctor's were wrong. But before they figured that out I was given a pamphlet entitled "Life Isn't Fair". The pamphlet explained that I wasn't a bad person. That the reason I had Cancer was complicated, random even, and that I had done nothing to deserve this. This notion got me thinking. If life is not fair, if life is random, if it is chaos, uncontrolable and unthinking, then that is okay. Life does not hate me; life does not think of me as lesser or wrong; life does not intend anything. This realization consoled me even after the Cancer mistake was cleared up and other problems and dramas came and went. This realization did not account for racism. Racism hates you; racism thinks you are lesser and disgusting, racism intends to keep you in your place, seperated and humiliated. How can we as the human race sign up so quickly to an immoral irrational social construct that devastates and dehumanize vast numbers of unique and beautiful individuals? This downtrodden and raw individuals are members of our own human race, and yet we turn on them as though they were terrifying monsters stalking us in the night and darkness created by our own ignorance.
          Global frustrates me almost as much as ongoing. How is it that with such diversity in climate, religion, culture, abilities, etc. that there is no corner of the Earth free of racist preconceptions? As humans we generalize the world around us in an attempt to understand it and control it. Yet in doing so we reduce the truth, we limit potential, we stifle the beautiful chaos of individuality.
          Hate
          Themed
          Speech is a fascination of mine. The Communication of Hate by Waltman and Haas (2011) was my first introduction to 'the hate stratagem', a fallacy-ridden four step process that details how hate-speech is made effective. Hate-speech is part of the cycle that immortalizes racism and stabalizes its ongoing global throne. I will save the details for another time.


       What right do I have to do this? How does racism work? How am I going to stop racism? These questions I will attempt to reason through in following posts. I am still learning, still trying to understand exactly what kind of monster racism is and what weaknesses we might exploit. One thing I do know, is that a great way to figure something out is to talk about it, to recieve feedback, to have your ideas questioned, to question others' ideas, to dialogue. So that is what I will do, and I hope you will help me on my way.