Quote:
Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski
So Sunday I had the pleasure of driving my son to the neighborhood in which his flop house exists. It was my first time in the neighborhood. It was vibrant 15 years ago. Chaldean town.
But driving to it Sunday, the streets were more and more abandoned buildings. Much of Detroit is having the gentrification that Brooklyn "enjoys," but not this neighborhood.
I dropped him off at 3 in the afternoon, half way down the block from a liquor store. Liquor stores are the only open businesses in much of the beat parts of Detroit. My son looks/is the part of someone who lives there. I'm not. My car isn't.
A man in front of the liquor store was staring at me as I was helping my son get his stuff out of my car. I noticed and was nervous. He was black. But he was also my age. He wasn't dangerous. He might ask me for a dollar, but he wasn't going to rob me. But I was nervous. A white rummy I'm pretty sure would not have put me on edge.
I walk by black people on normal sidewalks without thinking. Of the 10 people in life I'm closest to right now, 3 are black.
But there is a fear that saddens me when I'm in a position that could lead to danger. And that is harmful to black men generally. I try to be mindful of this fear and factor it into my initial thoughts re stuff. But that requires I acknowledge such bias might pop up.
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I could not possibly call you a racist for this incident, or anything like it. The proper description that fits is "Person who had a racist thought."
This gets to the meat of semantic and logical problems with loose and lazy use of the term, "racist." It cheaply trades in absolutes where an argument of degree is appropriate. Having a single racist thought, or a racist thought every four or five days, or when you're in a certain part of town, does not make you a racist. It makes you a person who's had some racist thoughts.
Odd example, but fitting... I was watching a Bond flick the other night. Gert Frobe, who most know as
Goldfinger, was a Nazi for a few years in the 30s. He left the movement before the war and became a staunch liberal, living an admirable life. However, for a period of time far longer than any moment of racist fear you've had, Gert Frobe was a National Socialist. Does this mean that forever he is a Nazi?
Of course it does not. That's an absurd position to take. As absurd as the position that because one is born into a system, he is automatically guilty of the sins of that system. This is akin to original sin, and original sin is a silly religious fiction.
It's logically and semantically lazy and counterproductive to assert "everyone is racist." The accurate statement is, "everybody in the US lives in a racist system." This is fair. Because unlike you, Hank, who may have a passing racist thought every once in a blue moon, many of the systems in this country are discriminatory all the time.
Torturing language is never an effective way to make a point. This board, which leans left, may accept expansions of definitions, but the general public does not. When you define a word so broadly that a person such as Adder can argue that everyone fits into that category, you trifle with rendering the term utterly meaningless. That result would be a huge shame. Because few words are as important as this one.
