Quote:
Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield
I also think I may have committed the sin of extrapolating from my own background. I grew up in a diverse neighborhood and strangely still live in one, and I see the diversity expanding. But YMMV. Living in the Mid-Atlantic is not living in Missouri. Sincerely, Indians, Asians, and people from of varied Middle Eastern descent have been and remain fixtures of the local communities I've known for so long, the idea of them as an "other" is just bizarre. And I think that experience is common to almost everyone I know. (I suspect it derives from having lived in areas populated with well off professionals.) I think I'm just lucky to have enjoyed diverse neighborhoods, and that perhaps gives me an unduly skeptical view of the issue of segregation.
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Fair enough.
The book actually discusses the phenomenon you mention above and I think we touched upon it with Ty the last time I posted about the concept awhile back (
i.e., that there is an immense amount of racism in places that we associate with liberalism and diversity).
We tend to look at places where racism is out in the open as the only or major problem. DiAngelo points out that white people use the idea of living in a diverse city or working at a diverse company as a shield to avoid any real significant analysis of their own racism. It's part of the constant push back she gets when conducting a race seminar (and that every black person trying to discuss the
impact of racism must endure) while trying to educate people on why the good/bad binary approach to racism doesn't work.*
She calls the defense mechanism "Color Celebrate." People talk about their experience working with black people or where they grew up or the diverse people in their families or their distant ancestry, etc. The idea that any of these things makes one immune from engaging in or benefiting from racism is, of course, silly. But the desire to only view one's experience set up solely against extremely hostile racism lets the person in Color Celebrate mode off the hook. They never end up acknowledging their own racism because they have convinced themselves they are a good person (when compared to an "actual" racist).
Anyway, I really like the book and I am going to bring her in to run a program at this firm.
TM
*The good/bad binary assumes that racism is something that only
bad people do. It is an action that happens, not a fully-developed structure that benefits one set of people consistently. White people tend to think it only exists if someone is a bad person, which is why you get this huge disconnect when someone like that West Virginia county employee called Michelle Obama an ape in heels can claim to not be racist and why the first defense of such people by whites is, "She's not like that. She's a good person." Once you try to discuss race with any white person, they only hear, "You're a bad person," and switch off or argue about how good they are and then apply either a Color Blindness standard or the Color Celebrate standard discussed above.
