Susan,
I will suppress the innate response I have to you referring to my grandmother
and others in order to answer your basic post.
There is a cultural tradition which gives respect to your elders, particularly
as deserved when the speak of experiences of their own, experiences they
brought themselves and their families through, experiences you then find
yourself, your children, your community going through in the present.
It is always strange for most of us, when a white person speaks as if they
know the feeling of racism against a black person, or any other. Once in
school, a dean (white) spoke about travelling to a part of China where he said
they had never seen white people. He said when he got out of the boat, the
people stared at him, and he knew what it racism felt like. Even we young
students were amused, confused and insulted that he could trivialize the
experience with what he thought he understood. It was arrogance we saw, not an
attempt at sympathy.
However, in that same program an elderly black spoke about growing up in the
South during the early 1930s, and we respected his opinions because they were
based upon his experiences.
Would people ever say that they knew how it felt to have no ability to walk,
if they were not so disabled? I remember hearing one person, unable to walk
and confined to a wheel chair, say that people who imitated this, even as a
means to help, did not fully understand because always in their heads they
knew they could get up and walk away from the "experiment".
If you bothered to read what I wrote, I said that I believed my "witnesses"
about such things, and they - not joe dees - were the people I looked to, as
guides. Joe Dees main reply was that he should have pretended to be something
other than a white, male to make his point valid. I also said that as a black
female, I held to the right I had to speak about my experiences over what Joe
Dees felt I had said, was trying to say (i.e. Eldridge Cleaver) idealogy. I
told him that he did not know what it felt to be a black woman, or even a
black person, though he dated a black woman and helped a school senate vote to
fund a black student union. I remain firm on that point.
I decide what witnesses count for me. I think you lack an understanding that I
am coherent enough a person to decide my witnesses and evaluate them. You seem
to negate any idea that I could not only do that, but also bring in my own
knowledge and experiences. Let me just say clearly that I am able to make
decisions, choose whom I believe and whom I do not, decide what "wisdom" I
will take and what I judge to be fake. I can say what I don't like about what
someone has said, and what I like about what someone has said.
I met a Jewish man once who talked to me about how he felt to be liberate from
a nazi death camp. Regardless of what I read, or what degrees I had, or even
what I studied, I would never think that my understanding of how that
experience would be supercedes his own.
If you cannot understand why I would think that way, then fine. However, there
are many who would understand - perhaps it is just cultural.
Susan, I do not (and never did) expect you or joe dees to have the same
respect for my "witnesses" as I do, nor do I have any concern that you do. I
also do not expect you to understand a host of other perspectives that I have
- and again, I do not need you at all to validate them in anyway.
I am not naive enough to think that I will change the mental paradigms that
anyone has been raised with, certainly not people on this list. For many
people those paradigms never change. I believe that some on this list,
including you Susan, have the mental paradigm that negate the experiences of
others, perhaps most often black people, or people of color, and reject the
idea that you cannot feel everything and know everything of experiences of
those people. It is perhaps inconceivable that some little illiterate black
man can know more about how it felt to be black and trying to vote in
mississippi in 1945, than some white well-degreed person who has studied the
experience.
It is the same mentality that ecologists use to disregard the experience of
indigenous people on their land - they are unable to believe that these
indigenous people could have any understand of their land that a degreed
environmentalist could have.
Living among "them" doesn't automatically make you even well aware of "them"
depending on what paradigm you bring to the experience - and it certainly
doesn't elevate you to know "them" as well as they know themselves and their
experience.
For me, you clearly revealed your "view" and what you don't understand when
you wrote "Or: my grandson is black (in Britain at least, you are treated as
'black' if you are not 'pure' white): does that make *me* an expert on racial
discrimination in this or any other country? It does not; but at the same
time, because he is only nine, there is a very real sense in which I know more
about it than he does. And if my grandson were not black, how would that
affect what I had to say about racial discrimination? "
Can you envision that your grandson would know how it felt to be the only non-
white person in a group of white people? Even at his age? Can you envision
that he would have a different feeling than you would, to see people
discriminated against because of their race, when he too is of that same race?
(not that your family would necessarily be able to raise him with this sense
of consciousness and connection) Can you imagine that he would have a more
tangible sense of racial discrimination against a black person, than you would
have? One day, your grandson may (if he is so blessed) be able to turn to you
and be irritated that grandma thinks she knows how it feels to be a black
person and discriminated against.
That you cannot understand this, for me, indicates the validity exactly of
what I was saying. However, your paradigm just won't allow you to see it. If I
had to be around you, interact with you, I would find it infuriatingly
untolerable. Fortunately, you don't exist for me any more than I exist for
you.
Another curious thing is the "I dated one so I know" feeling as evidenced by
Joe Dees, dating a black women makes him know as much as a black woman, even
higher on the scale is the "I married one so I know". I find that this
"evidence" is brought in by white women, even more so than by white men, who
have married black people or other people of color. An Eritrean friend told me
how disgusted she was that a white woman married to an eritrean man, used this
mentalilty to antagonize a whole group of Eritrean women and men - because of
course she clung to the idea that her being white american AND living among
some eritrean family members gave her not only "deep" insight, but gave her
elevated insight because of her education and her "whiteness" which she felt
made her so much more aware than those "less empowered, backwards, crushed by
their culture" Eritrean women (so she felt).
Whenever I have mentioned to someone about this list, blacks, an Indian
(India) friend, even a Japanese friend, they all agreed that it was a waste to
discuss such topics with people who would not only never have a clue, but who
would also never believe that they didn't have a full understanding, much less
a clue. I agree, but because it is an email list, it is less onerous to
comment, if I keep it sporadic and invest no extended feeling to the
interaction.
I must say that had you not fixed your keyboard to comment on my grandmother,
my aunt, I would never have bothered to respond to what you wrote. But the
idea of your words wrapping around them, required me to send in my words to
take yours off of them. I will never leave them to the words of such people as
you, I must clearly speak up and say that whatever you say about them from
this point on, you are speaking about not them, but your own, even if you
refer to them. Fortunately you do not know their given names, and I understand
a culture that gives two names, one for the "public" to know, and one held in
private.
Susan, what people do you claim to live among? How would you not know that
your reference to my grandmother as you did, would draw a hush and then a
sense of outrage among many such peoples? Perhaps you are used to the fake
politeness that many many people offer while speaking on such thing to you
openly, they later talk with their friends and family about how you are just
arrogrant, ignorant and unaware of both?
Perhaps those people around you are just so very disempowered and rootless in
self understanding and consciousness that they are inundated and overwhelmed,
and can only spew out what they have been "bred" to accept about the
perspective you and yours present to them as fact? It must be hard to be so
constantly disempowered and disregarded.
A close friend of mine, a Sudanese woman living in Sweden, is hear to attend a
UN conference and as always we spend lots of time together. This time, she has
brought her boyfriend with her, his mother is swedish, father african-
american, and meeting him for the first time, I finally see what my friend
meant. He, in many ways, acts like a suffocating man who has finally reached
air, when we take him to various African events, lectures, even just groups of
such able to talk openly without that invasive presence. When he met my
friend, he was taken by her strength of speaking and thought as leader of an
African student group in Sweden, and even as we had dinner, he commented on
this respect for her, her strong activism as a black woman, and talked of how
he had to learn to be like her as a black man. I won't go any further with
this, because this is the wrong (overlall) group of people to be discussing
this with, therefore I apologize for this digression- which must have been
like speaking a language you could not understand (for some and esp. to Susan)
Susan, I have no postive words for you and you have no positive words for me.
We need to cease communication.
My tolerance quota for such things, especially on this list, has been met by
what you have written. I cannot imagine, except most briefly in a nightmare or
passing sickening thought, what it would be like to be swarmed by such ideas,
to have them swirling around you, throughout you, and having no defense,
neither taught nor learned to protect oneself. It is indeed a fate worse than
death.
Nicole
