CNN Article: Are whites racially oppressed?
:: sigh ::
I don't even know where to begin on this. In management training, I was told to never try to sugarcoat suggestions or advise someone that improvement is needed by starting with their strong points and adding a "but" or "however" at the end because it makes the person feel like their strong points are being belittled. It's a lot like saying "I love you, but...." It defeats the purpose and the ensuing words following the "but" negate the positive feeling. So I am not going to start off with the one reason I agree with some the reasons leading to this article.
The article lists in bullet points indicators of this racial discontent, the first few of which I found mildly amusing if not pointless, until I got to bullet point four:
[excerpt from article]
"U.S. Census Bureau projections that whites will become a minority by 2050 are fueling fears that whiteness no longer represents the norm. This fear has been compounded by the recent recession, which hit whites hard."
At that point, a little fire ignited within me indicating a spark of anger. Unfortunately, there really is no way of telling whether this is really a fear among white people or something exacerbated in fantasy by CNN or another entity. Read it again if you didn't catch it the first time. "fueling fears that whiteness no longer represents the norm." I...don't know how to effectively put my reaction to that into words. Really? I grew up on the cusp of two ages - one where there was still racial tension, and one where everything is gearing toward the destruction of that racial tension.
In the small, rural town in Maine that I grew up in, it was pretty bad. My mother is hispanic and my father is white, and believe me, the residents did not let me forget that I was a mixed breed. But as uncomfortable as it was for me, it was worse for my best friend, Carol, whose mother was white and father was black. Her parents actually had to remove her from school because it was so bad. Thing was, when a Puerto Rican moved to town, he became popular fast. Was it that the residents were partial to Puerto Ricans? I think not. He wasn't half. Both of his parents were Puerto Rican, so there was no iinterracial breeding there. When I left that town at 12 years old and moved to Texas, it was a culture shock. A huge one. Not necessarily a bad one.
However, my eyes were young, and it took a while for the reality to set in. Sometimes communities get really good at hiding things, sweeping things under the rug, disguising. After high school, I began hanging out at Starbucks for long periods of time, making friends from all places, religions, races, cultures. There were my Arab "uncles" who once protected me from a wanderer who had had coffee with us then followed me to my car, there was Peter, the Army soldier who had a thing about people not telling him about their foot fungus, there were Sylvia and Ferrell who worked at the Barnes and Noble, Sarah, the barefoot redhead with the huge dog, etc. etc. I couldn't see their religions, their backgrounds, just friends drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes together.
That is, until 9/11. Then one of my Arab friends' stores got broken into and tagged with some not-so-nice names. A week later, another one of their stores was hit....by a truck. The last straw was when we were all sitting outside drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes - the lot of us, diverse group that we were of mixed everything - and this cop passed us, went around the parking lot, came back, parked in front of the Starbuck's (not in a parking space), and sat there...watching us for more than an hour.
After that, my Arab "uncles" slowly stopped coming around.
Ferrell, the guy who worked at Barnes and Noble, he got me into Leonard Cohen. He was Cherokee and had a thing about having his picture taken. He believed it stole part of his soul. But we had fun sitting in his apartment with his roommate, David, listening to Leonard Cohen and talking about nothing.
David, Ferrell's roommate, was a white supremecist. Go figure. I don't know. Maybe that's not what he called himself. Neo nazi. Something. In any event, David and I invariably got into heated, uh, "discussions" about his views on inter-racial relationships. I worked at a convenience store down the street from their apartment, so I ran into them on a regular basis. One day, a bus driver, who was a regular, walked into the store, and this black man looked like a tomato. I asked him what was wrong, and he starts talking about this guy on the Via bus he drives making racial remarks at him and how he kicked him off the bus and the guy was outside. Guess who walked in?
Now, since David was Ferrell's roommate, I felt close enough to be able to speak my mind and tell him off right there in the store. He just laughed and left.
As poetic justice would have it, after all his talk about how races should not mix in marriage and how the border needs to be more secure because the Mexicans are taking our jobs, David fell in love with a Mexican waitress at the Denny's he frequented and I could not shove that in his face enough for my liking.
I birdwalk. I digress. I branch out, even twig out, into memory lane and such.
Back to the article. My problem with that bullet point was...who cares if white is not the norm? Who would want white to be the norm? What is the big deal about another race being the norm?
The next two bullet points, about Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, seemed half irrelevant, half instigating upset about this white-minority debate. The bullet point after that, about the New Black Panthers intimidating poll voters...had absolutely nothing to do with anything else in this article.
This whole article seemed geared at fueling a war between white people who feel status-quo challenged and....well, everybody else.
Now, the thing that I can say, is that I understand, to a point, why some caucasian folks might be feeling a bit, let's say, left out. Partially, though, because I live in Texas. Let's take a look at the job market. You get paid more if you're bilingual in English and Spanish. This may, at first, seem like a reason to irk people who don't know Spanish because it makes them feel less qualified...or whatever, however let's really re-think that feeling.
These people who are bilingual in English and Spanish....had to learn both languages. Even though my mother is Hispanic and my boyfriend constantly jokes he does not understand what she is saying, and her father didn't speak a lick of English...I don't know Spanish. I tried. I took 3 years of high school Spanish and the entirety of the language I retain to this day I learned working for Valero and communicating with the construction workers who went in so I could offer them peanuts for 10 cents with their soda. But if someone goes into a government position knowing English and any other language and gets a job as an interpreter...no one blinks an eye. Why should we be biased against people who speak Spanish?
In addition to that, the amount of help that is offered for "minorities" definitely outweights that which is offered to "white people." I knew someone who used this excuse exasperatingly as to why he could not land a job, go to school, etc. etc.
He was a quarter Cherokee and just did not feel like filling out the paperwork to prove it. Most "white people" in this country can (easily) trace their heritage back to some ethnicity or another instead of just saying "I'm white." Why white? Why not the emerald green of Ireland? Why not a red Russian?
I have a friend who constantly remarks he can't understand people with accents and states he fought for this country so people could learn English. This rankles me to no end, and I keep reminding him that "this country" was stolen from people who didn't speak English, founded by people who did not all speak English, as a refuge to people who were being religiously persecuted. The point seems moot on him, but I refuse to give up.
I did get one thing out of this article. Now I want to read Peter Brimelow's book "Alien Nation: Common Sense About America's Immigration Disaster" so I can write a book in response.
In conclusion, I'd like to make a shout out to someone who will probably never read this blog, whose face is anonymous, but whose comment mirrored an opinion closest to my own:
laminjatta
"If we’re ever to rise above racial problems, we need to stop being racist. We need to stop assuming that all blacks are underprivileged, that all whites are oppressors (or are privileged directly because of the former racism of their ancestors), and now, apparently, we need to stop asserting that all whites are an oppressed minority.
"The grandstanding and rabble rousing of Limbaugh and Beck aside, they are onto something. We do need to fight racism no matter which way it goes, and there’s no reason to say only whites can be racist. At the same time, we need to be careful not to assume all whites are discriminated against.
"Grouping all people of a color into these broad groups is exactly the kind of thing that caused our racial problems in the first place. Let’s face the reality without stereotypes. Some blacks ARE underprivileged (and sometimes that IS a lingering effect of slavery and the jim crow era)..... but so are some whites – albeit for other reasons, but similarly reasons out of their control. Should we treat those whites differently from the underprivileged blacks just because they are white and therefore their ancestors must have been racist? (Affirmative action and many minority scholarships would say yes. That is one example of reverse discrimination.) I say no.
"Whites should not be punished on the assumption that they are benefiting from the wrongdoing of their ancestors, nor should we assume that they are privileged above all black people because of past racism. They may not be privileged at all. Help should be based on need, not color. Is a white child born to a crack addict homeless parent any less underprivileged than a black child born to a poor black family that has never climbed out of poverty since their great great (....?) grandparents were slaves? Is the white child any more responsible for his situation than the black child? Why exactly do we treat the black child as more needy?
"Conversely, due to the growing racial equality that we have managed to achieve, some blacks are quite privileged. That needs to be acknowledged both to encourage further progress and to prevent further discrimination. Further discrimination how? If a multimillionaire black child applies to a college, our system assumes he is still suffering the lingering effects of racism (clearly, because he is black, he must be underprivileged) and needs a special hand up because of his skin color. According to our current system, it doesn’t matter that he got a ferarri for his 16th birthday, the important fact to us is that he is black and clearly needs affirmative action if he is to compete “fairly” with blue collar white children in the admissions process.
"We should help underprivileged people, not people of a certain color; assuming the two are synonymous is the same racism that got us into this mess in the first place and it’s what whites are now complaining about. In fairness, to assume all whites are now discriminated against is to make exactly the same mistake. It needs to stop."
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