I’m spring boarding this from this excellent piece, about racism and white privilege, regarding an ongoing conflict between him and his partner regarding which deli to go to:

But finally I just confronted him. “What’s up? Why don’t you ever want to shop at Deli A? It’s nicer. It’s cleaner. I like it better.”

He told me, “The owner of Deli A watches me like a hawk. He follows me around. He thinks because I’m black I’m going to shoplift.”

In my teens, I was dark.  I was in the sun all the time, and I lived in mostly white parts of the Midwest.   Though I’m not a wasp by any stretch (I’m Italian and Jewish) when I was younger, I was taken for a wide variety of ethnic groups, most often from the Mideast.

But since I had a basically whiteish ethnic identity, it took me some time to realize that not everyone got eyed nervously by store security.  I was also kind of a stereotype breaker even for people who thought I was non-white: I would add up the prices of everything I was purchasing in my head and have exact change ready before the cashier told me the price, so any store where they knew me realized I was probably a risk to myself, but not anyone else.  But new stores?  New places?  I was tailed routinely.

I learned Clark’s lesson in reverse– my experience being white(ish) led me to think that white and black people alike were mistrusted by authority and looked on suspiciously.  But it also led me to think that once someone got to know me, they’d realize I wasn’t a threat, and that that would ring true for everyone.

Of course, that’s not the case– something I learned as an adult.  

In high school, I was moved from an urban, primarily black, town to one that was almost entirely white.  I went from fitting in with the people around me to being one of the darkest skinned people for more than a hundred miles.  There were only two people at my high school who were darker than me.  They were sisters, and their father was black.  Knowing the younger of these sisters was what started to show me the difference.

For them, they understood a lot of things I did not about race, because they’d learned it fairly early on that the treatment of them based on their race was a permanent thing.  Even if they wanted to, neither could ever have passed for white.  I had the choice to change my appearance fairly easily.  I could never pass for thin, and that came with its own problems, but if I wanted to pass for white, I could do so fairly easily.  In my case, as I noted before, whatever prejudice I felt about my race to that point wasn’t something I recognized as being about race as much as it was just about things that happened to everyone, but seeing what all three of us experienced in an almost entirely white environment?  

I was told, on multiple occasions by classmates, to “go back to Mexico.”  The younger of the two sisters had doors slammed in her face by people.  She didn’t like to talk about this much– I know that worse happened, but she never told me what it was.  She did, after all, perceive me as one of the white kids.  She wasn’t wrong about that.  I was one of the white kids, even if I didn’t quite get what that meant.  

I had friends at the school– we all did.  But no one really stuck up for those that were perceived as ethnic minorities.  It was uncharted territory for them.  A bunch of white kids (myself included) don’t generally learn about what it means to be black and what sort of lasting damage their prejudice can do.  They weren’t bad people.  They were just out of their depths.

This is something I let kids off the hook for.  I’m not as inclined to do so with the adults that perpetuate the problem and turn a blind eye to it.

At this point I should probably explain something: I am an extremely perceptive person.  I can look at interactions, look at situations and circumstances, and see things that no one else seems to get.  I am wicked smart, often too smart for my own good, because I get stuck in following ideas and thoughts to the point where I get excited bout learning something new without always thinking that I might be blurting something out that someone else doesn’t want to hear.  This is, on occasion, socially awkward and has led to serious problems between me and friends.  I don’t have a religion, but I do believe in authenticity and honesty.  I think we’re kind of lost without them.  

I mention this because I can be extremely obtuse as well, and when I am emotionally involved, my ability to be objective and perceptive can go out the window.  This means that when I am, for example, attracted to someone, I find it more difficult to assess whether or not they are lying to me.  I can do it, but I have to kind of push myself to do in a way that feels very uncomfortable.

So at that point, in the thick of this sea of prejudice, while also trying to find my way through a new school and deal with all the crazy stuff that happens in high school, I found it very complicated to understand everything that was going on at the time.  A lot of what I’m perceiving about it now is from introspection and afterthought, not stuff I could see fully when it was going on.

But even some things I get pretty quickly, even being in the thick of it.  

The older of the two sisters had an injury of some sort to her foot which caused her to be late to school a couple times.  She got called into the guidance office about it along with their mother.  Her guidance officer told her mother “I know she has problems with her feet because white and black feet are different and when you mix them there can be trouble, but…”

I knew that racism existed before I heard that story.  I’d read history.  I’d even seen some fairly nasty examples of it, but that was the first time it clicked with me that it was, in contemporary times, still part of our ongoing story, and direct and personal.  I think it was the first time that it clicked with me that it was so incredibly stupid, but that’s a whole other story.  

I’ve written a bit already, but this is all intended as prelude to give you a little background into my perspective here.  As I’ve written before, I developed (unconsciously) some of my own racist attitudes during this time as well.  It was easy to do– if people perceived me as non-white but treated me like a white person once they got to know me, why couldn’t other ethnic groups do the same.  In some ways, it’s easy seeing the world in such simple ways because it prevents you from being forced to acknowledge that you’re full of crap.  There’s also an emotional investment for many people in seeing the world as better, more just and more fair than it is.  If I think of the world as generally “fair,” I find it harder to admit that racism exists.  Even it if does exist, I find it harder to admit that it can’t be overcome, which falls into a very easily racist trap that translates to “other ethnic groups overcome racism and find success so why can’t blacks?”  Not once in that logic is the possibility that white people hate blacks more than they do other ethnic groups recognized, nor is the possibility that there’s a big difference between ethnic groups who come here by choice and those who are brought here involuntarily.

I’m not suggesting that we need to bring slavery into every discussion involving African Americans.  I’m just suggesting that we sometimes seem to have a pathology about even acknowledging the possibility that not only did we royally screw a whole lot of people, that in our effort to avoid responsibility for that, we’re still screwing them.

In the broader sense, I think the whole tea party, big picture, Obama hating crapfest we’ve been subjected to over the past two years was something we probably should have seen coming.  I think the blindness we had to it was similar to the blindness I had about race when I was younger.  It’s not just that– it’s that, as white people, I think a lot of us hoped that the election of Obama would somehow help us move past racism.  We weren’t stupid– we knew racism would continue to exist, but at least I had hoped that it would be moved to the back burner, something that was treated as more of an a fading foolishness that would be gone in 30 years.  

Of course, that was unrealistic, but I don’t think I got how unrealistic it was.  But I think non-white people did.  Every friend of mine who was part of an ethnic minority saw trouble coming with the tea party long before I did.  They saw the race baiting not as an extinction burst (i.e., the sort of frantic ramping up of a virus before it finally dies) but the continuation of something they’d seen their whole lives.  

And, once again, when I can step back and be objective, it’s kind of obvious and I can’t believe I didn’t see this coming.  

I don’t think many politicians are necessarily racist.  They might be, but I don’t know.  I don’t even care that much.  What I do know is that some of them are smart enough to know that their constituents are racist (though most would never admit it).  So when, for example, the word “Macaca” is used, it’s one of those things that dehumanizes non-whites in ways that are usually subtle enough to access white racism while slipping beneath the radar.  Similarly, the anti-Harold Ford “I met Harold at the playboy party” ad, plays off of white fears of blacks.  

And even with all that, I didn’t see that there was so much outright hatred and hostility towards blacks that would become so visceral and vivid on a national scale.

I feel pretty damned stupid for that.