{"id":851,"date":"2010-04-07T13:31:33","date_gmt":"2010-04-07T13:31:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scientopia.org\/blogs\/goodmath\/2010\/04\/07\/i-am-a-racist\/"},"modified":"2010-04-07T13:31:33","modified_gmt":"2010-04-07T13:31:33","slug":"i-am-a-racist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/2010\/04\/07\/i-am-a-racist\/","title":{"rendered":"I am a racist"},"content":{"rendered":"

(Unfortunately, this post has been linked to by a white supremacist site. Instead of providing a forum for their foulness, I’m shutting down comments on this post.)<\/em><\/p>\n

Unfortunately, I lost the link that inspired this. But I recently saw a post by a conservative about “reclaiming” the word racist. It went on to list a collection of reasons why he was a racist. The gist of it was that all of us dirty liberals were the real<\/em> racists – because there’s no possible reason for us to support things like affirmative action, welfare, etc., unless we really, deep down, believe that minorities – particularly blacks – are stupid animals incapable of taking care of themselves.<\/p>\n

It’s typical bullshit. So I’m responding in my own way. Because, you see, I am a racist. I’m not proud of that fact – but growing up in a deeply racist and sexist culture, you can’t avoid absorbing racist and sexist messages and attitudes into your worldview. And the blogger who inspired this is, like me, a member of the privileged elite. The difference between us is that I at least try<\/em> to notice the effects of my privilege. I don’t support social justice programs like affirmative action, welfare, and job training because I think that poor black people need help because they’re less smart than me: I think that people like me have unfair advantages that we rarely appreciate, and that everyone<\/em> deserves the same advantages that I’ve been lucky enough to receive. But however idealistic I am, however commited I am to social justice, the fact remains: I am, to my shame, a racist.<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. I am a racist – because I never noticed all of the unearned privileges that are given to me until someone pointed them out.<\/li>\n
  2. I am a racist – because even after learning about the unearned privileges
    \nthat I recieve, I still<\/em> don’t notice them.<\/li>\n
  3. I am a racist, because I have grown up in a culture that, at every turn, teaches
    \nme that to be white is to be better, and smarter, and I have absorbed that lesson.<\/li>\n
  4. I am a racist, because I instinctively react to members of minorities with fear.<\/li>\n
  5. I am a racist, because I live in a sunset town.<\/li>\n
  6. I am a racist, because I believe that I deserve the success I
    \nhave, even though I know people who are more smart, capable, and
    \ntalented than I am never had the chances that I did to
    \nbe successful, because of the color of their skin.<\/li>\n
  7. I am a racist – because I am a white man who has directly benefited from
    \nthe unfair preferences that have been directed towards me all of my life.<\/li>\n
  8. I am a racist – because every day, I benefit from the denial<\/em> of
    \nbasic privileges to other people.<\/li>\n
  9. I am a racist, because I do not notice the things that are denied to people
    \nwho are different from me.<\/li>\n
  10. I am a racist, because I do not notice the advantages that I have over
    \nothers.<\/li>\n
  11. I am a racist, because even when I do manage to notice what is denied
    \nto people of different races and backgrounds, I don’t speak up.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    The point of this isn’t just to do a sort of “walk of shame”. The
    \npoint is that I am an incredibly lucky person, who has benefited from
    \nall sorts of things – from where I was born, to the color of my skin,
    \nto the background of my parents, to my gender. I have recieved, and
    \ncontinue to receive benefits because of those, and many other factors
    \nthat have nothing<\/em> to do with my own merit. And except for
    \nvery rare occasions, that goes unremarked, unnoticed.<\/p>\n

    People like me think of ourselves as the default – as “normal”
    \npeople. We consider the incredible advantages that we receive to
    \nbe normal, unremarkable. We don’t notice just how much we benefit
    \nfrom that assumption of our own normality – the benefits we
    \nreceive fade into invisibility. We don’t even notice that they exist. And
    \nthen when someone who doesn’t<\/em> get those benefits
    \nhas trouble, we naturally blame them for not being as successful as we
    \nare.<\/p>\n

    The underlying theme of people like the jerk who inspired this
    \npost is: “I made it by myself, without any help<\/em>. So
    \nthey<\/em> should be able to make it by themselves, without any
    \nhelp either.”<\/p>\n

    But that’s bullshit, because none of us “made it by ourselves”. We’re
    \nthe beneficiaries of the system we live in.<\/p>\n

    I grew up in a wealthy town in NJ. We didn’t consider ourselves
    \nwealthy – but by comparison to lots of other people, we really were.
    \nI went to a very good school system. We complained about it a lot<\/em>:
    \nthe textbooks were too old; the equipment in the science labs were too
    \nbeaten up; the classes were too easy, and so on.<\/p>\n

    When I was in college, I got to teach a summer program for top
    \nstudents from schools in Newark, Camden, and Jersey City. And I
    \ndiscovered that my students went to schools where they didn’t have to
    \nworry about their books being too old – because they didn’t
    \nhave<\/em> any books. I mean that literally: in their english
    \nclasses, they didn’t have books, because their schools had
    \nnever<\/em> been able to buy new books since it opened – and the
    \nbooks had long since fallen apart. They didn’t complain about the
    \nlousy lab equipment – because their schools had never<\/em> had
    \nscience labs at all. How could people coming from schools like that
    \npossibly<\/em> hope to compete with students from a school like
    \nmine? I didn’t admitted to college over people from their schools because
    \nI was smarter<\/em>. I got admitted into college over people from their
    \nschools because I was richer<\/em> and whiter<\/em>.<\/p>\n

    And when my students went to the campus bookstore to buy
    \nbasic supplies like paper and pencils, the people who worked there
    \nfollowed them around the store – because what would a
    \nbunch of poor black kids be doing in a bookstore if they weren’t
    \nthere to rob it?<\/p>\n

    I write this math blog for fun. How did I get the background to do
    \nit? I come from a highly educated family. They taught me to read
    \nbefore I even started preschool. I’d learned about statistics from my
    \nfather when I was in third grade. I learned about algebra in sixth
    \ngrade, even though my school didn’t teach it until 8th or 9th. I
    \nlearned calculus in my freshman year in high school – even though my
    \nschool didn’t teach it until a senior year AP class. I was learning this stuff
    \nlong before the school taught it to me; and my parents made sure that
    \nthey bought a house in a very expensive school district where there would
    \nbe things like AP classes. My parents paid for me to go to college – which gave
    \nme the time to take courses not just because I needed them to graduate,
    \nbut because they covered things that I wanted to learn, just for fun.<\/p>\n

    How could a person from a family that just managed to scrape by,
    \nwho lived in a school system that couldn’t afford textbooks for the
    \nbasic classes, much less the AP classes, how could they compete with
    \nme? It’s damned close to impossible. Not because they’re any less
    \nsmart, or any less talented. But because I’ve had an absolutely
    \nuncountable number of advantages. Every day of my life, I’ve been
    \ngiven benefits which helped make it possible for me to become who and
    \nwhat I am. I’m here partially<\/em> because I’ve worked damned hard
    \nto get here. But that work, by itself, wouldn’t have gotten me to where I am,
    \nwithout luck and privilege.<\/p>\n

    People like me need to remember that. We didn’t earn what we have
    \nall by ourselves. We may<\/em> have earned part of it – but only
    \npart. An awful lot of what we have is built on privilege: on the advantages
    \nthat we’ve been given because of race, gender, wealth, and family.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    (Unfortunately, this post has been linked to by a white supremacist site. Instead of providing a forum for their foulness, I’m shutting down comments on this post.) Unfortunately, I lost the link that inspired this. But I recently saw a post by a conservative about “reclaiming” the word racist. It went on to list a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[12,51],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-851","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chatter","category-politics"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4lzZS-dJ","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/851","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=851"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/851\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=851"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=851"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=851"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}