I got a racist email this weekend.
I’m blogging about this with some trepidation—I haven’t asked the sender’s permission to reprint any of her comments here, and I’m not comfortable going into very much detail. But the incident is really bothering me, and I can’t seem to let go of it, which is why I’m handing part of it off to you. Sorry about that.
The email showed a photograph of the White House Rose Garden with a watermelon patch photoshopped in. The ‘joke,’ is, of course, that a black man will soon move into the White House, and watermelon has a derogatory connotation when connected to black people. Except that this isn’t a joke at all.
I’m not sure where you draw the line between off-color humor and outright racism. And I certainly find some politically incorrect humor worthy of a good laugh—you can’t avoid offending everybody all the time. But wherever that line is, this photo is pretty far on the other side of it. A few emails exchanged between the sender and myself only made me angrier—the implication was that I was overreacting to a ’silly joke’ and that I shouldn’t let it upset me. The sender and I are on the opposite ends of the political spectrum, so perhaps she thought that my bleeding heart was too sensitive, or that I was offended that Obama was made the butt of a joke. But I don’t think so.
I’m about the whitest white girl ever. I fit into almost every other majority: white, straight, raised in a Christian faith. I’ve lived almost entirely in big cities with relatively large minority populations. When I was kid growing up in Dallas and Indianapolis, I went to school, church, soccer practice, and ballet class with white kids and non-white kids. Which is to say that I have been, perhaps more than I realized, incredibly sheltered from racism. I know it exists, that it’s not just a toxic memory from the 1960s and earlier. Friends have even shared personal stories. But I’ve certainly never experienced it, never really witnessed it first-hand.
Perhaps it’s strange, then, that I had such a strong reaction to this photo. Although I tried not to, I almost certainly offended the sender with my reply, in which I pointed out that it did upset me, and that it should upset both of us. Our nation has an ugly history in slavery and Jim Crow laws. We don’t need to repeat that, especially for the benefit of—of what? A cheap laugh? I don’t know what pleasure people get from racism, or why people choose to propagate it. I don’t understand the close encounter I had with racism, and I can’t imagine how a black person would have felt seeing that photoshopped image. Maybe because I’ve gone 30 years without intimate knowledge of racism that seeing it exposed so close to me is so shocking, so hard to understand. Maybe because I’ve always been able to look at racism academically, removed from its emotional force.
Condoleezza Rice made some extraordinary remarks on November 5 of this year. She said, “But one of the great things about representing this country is it continues to surprise; it continues to renew itself; it continues to beat all odds and expectations… As an African American, I am especially proud because this is a country that’s been through a long journey in terms of overcoming wounds and making race not the factor in our lives. That work is not done, but yesterday was obviously an extraordinary step forward.”
I guess that whatever our color or experience, we’re all still part of that long journey, falling backward, plodding forward.
Filed under: Uncategorized, life in general by admin2
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