Quote:
Originally Posted by ThurgreedMarshall
Let me take a different tack, because I think you're hearing me, but not hearing me.
Why is it that the attention goes elsewhere with her response (i.e., complete denial of any racism at all) and when someone gets caught cheating or doing drugs or whatever, the response is admission, requests for forgiveness, and rehab? There is significance in that distinction.
The difference between why there are two different approaches is what is interesting to me. The fact that a plain denial in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary is enough to smooth this over is what is amazing to me. And since I find the same behavior when the person isn't a public figure, I'm trying to understand why that is. I think you're discounting public figures for some reason when they use the exact same mechanism to get out from under evidence of racism as non-public figures. I think a reasonable answer is the good-bad binary alternate reality that white people inhabit when it comes to race.
But the real question is, why is it that white people cannot accept the fact that (i) there are levels/degrees of racism and (ii) they actually carry it. I don't get it. I understand that people don't want to be seen as a bad person, so they use every trick in the book to explain how they are good. Is it guilt? Is it pure denial? Is it delusion? What is it about racism that makes it so that white people cannot face it in themselves even a little bit?
TM
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For starters, I think what you are describing is a universal condition. But people who aren't white appreciate it in a different way. Whites can think that other people have an ethnic identity but that they don't, that racism is something incidental to their lives.
Also, there are the people who are racist and proud of it -- not many of them, but they exist. If you ask someone to think of a racist, most will think of someone who is unabashed about it. So the word fits a little uncomfortably (I mean that two ways) for other people who carry levels of it.
There is some guilt, there is denial, but delusion doesn't sound right. Because a delusion that many other people share and perpetuate is more like another word for culture.
That's all about how people actually think. The point I started with, which I may not have put well, is that even if one is interested in understanding how people think, that doesn't mean that every episode helps you get there. What I was thinking, but did not say, is that I feel similarly fascinated with the question of why so many people still support Trump, but I also feel enormously frustrated with so much of what is written on the subject, because I don't feel like it's moving the needle of comprehension. And at some point, one has to just accept that we share the country with a large number of people with terrible beliefs, and we have to figure out how to mobilize so that they don't ruin people's lives. I do want to understand what makes the other side tick, but I also worry about a denialism that assumes that our problems are all about Trump, and not about all the people who elected him and continue to support him. Not to hijack the topic of racism to make it about Trump, but just to say that it feels necessary to understand the fucked-up ways that people think, but also exhausted and sometimes a diversion from what else needs to be done.
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