Our fair city

[adrian_turtle]

It's nice to think this part of the country, this part of the world, is not full of bigots. We have this comforting belief that the bigots are elsewhere; some place they have Waffle Houses. This comforting belief is wrong. It's just that the bigots don't put out lawn signs. They mostly just quietly vote for people like Scott Lively. Or they say "I'm not racist but..." in what seems like a polite tone of voice.

Sometimes there are things like this:
I was coming home from Redbird's house, around 10pm last Saturday. Walking down the hill to Porter Square isn't usually a big deal, but there was a power failure that knocked out all the streetlights and house lights for most of the way. I had a migraine when I got to the bus stop, so I stayed outside the little glass shelter. It looked like one of the people inside was drunk, talking loudly on his phone and gesturing wildly. Only he wasn't talking on the phone. He was yelling at passers-by. After a while, he came around the edge of the shelter and said to me, "You and me, we're the best. We're white. Gotta get rid of all them [bad word]."

I did not do anything useful. I might have cringed away from him. He said something along the lines of "Gotta get those people out of here. It's for your own good." Ick. Layers of ick all the way down.

I managed to say, "Sir, you are wrong. I hope you learn better." With as much dignity as I could manage (though it probably wasn't much), I swept past him into the bus shelter, and turned my back on him. Not surprisingly, he did not immediately change his ways. He went on howling racist insults at people across the street.* I kept facing away from him for more than ten minutes, trying to make small talk with one of the other people waiting for the bus. Every 2 minutes or so, I'd turn around and say "Please stop screaming." To no effect.

He was drunk, and alcohol lowers inhibitions. Lots of drunks say things they shouldn't, but most drunks don't do THAT. I think it's noteworthy that he stopped yelling when the bus turned up and the driver opened the door. I got on the bus, and he did not. As we drove away, I saw him resume gesturing. He was sober enough to behave himself when an authority figure was in earshot. Even such a vague authority figure as a bus driver.

And then there's what happened yesterday at BU, with the Nazis. (See previous post.) Neither incident was at all violent. Neither was even really aimed at me. And it's not like I had previously thought this was safe space. Not really. It's just...it feels less safe now. I don't like it.

Comments

[corylea]

Racism isn't just evil and ugly and wrong, it's also STUPID. I'm always surprised that people can spout some of the stuff they say, given how ridiculous it is on the face of it.

I'm wondering if something more might be going on for men, though. For my whole life, my mother and father have said that my father "hates snakes." My parents lived in a rural area when I was a teenager, and there were frequently snakes in our yard. My father would be FURIOUS that a snake had DARED to enter his yard ... which was kind of stupid, considering that their yard was two acres of rural land, part of it wooded.

It was always clear to me that my father was AFRAID of snakes, but the image of masculinity that he'd grown up with did not allow a man to be afraid, and certainly not of something as harmless as a garter snake. So my father did, in fact, hate snakes -- he hated them for making them feel a fear that he believed was inappropriate.

I think a lot of White men are afraid of Black people, but fear is unacceptable for men in our society, so they hate Black people for "making" them feel fear. This isn't a good or kind or intelligent way to feel, but I personally find it a bit more understandable and a bit more human than race hatred.

I mention all of this because if you thought of that man at the bus stop screaming, "I'm SO SCARED of Black people," it might make it slightly easier for you to tolerate waiting for a bus in his vicinity.

To be clear, I'm not saying that fear excuses or justifies racism -- racism is evil and stupid and wrong -- but there's something of shared humanity in someone who's scared, whereas hatred is a lot harder to understand.

[adrian_turtle]

If your father wanted to stop hating snakes, I think his motives might have made a difference in how he approached that change. (Or how somebody else approached trying to change him.) But in the moment he was attacking a snake? I don't think it mattered at all. I was going to say "especially not to the snakes," but it also really didn't matter to any observer who might have heard him, and felt encouraged in their own dislike of snakes.

Over the last 20-30 years, there's been a general trend away from thinking of "homophobia" as a fear thing, and towards thinking of it as "anti-gay bigotry." Something that isn't a matter for gently teaching people why they ought not to be afraid, but simply forbidding their damaging behavior.

In principle, I believe in compassion and forgiveness. Everybody makes mistakes. Some people make terrible mistakes. (I know you're an atheist, but "Cease to do evil, learn to do good" is a line that works pretty well outside the bible.) But I'm not going to start forgiving until some time after they stop attacking.

[corylea]

I never said -- and certainly never meant -- that you should forgive racists. I said exactly what I meant, but it looks as if you were so afraid that I was actually saying something else that you didn't hear what I said.

Being in the presence of someone who's loudly espousing racism is horrible, and I thought it might be slightly less horrible FOR YOU if you thought of the drunken man as being afraid. That really is all I was trying to say!

[adrian_turtle]

Sorry for the misunderstanding. I guess I didn't see how his motives could have anything to do with how scary a person is, in the moment he is doing something threatening. Hate makes people do dangerous things. Fear makes people do remarkably similar dangerous things.

[silveradept]

It's a lot more obvious now than it was before, and people feel much more emboldened to say what they really think about all of it, rather than having to keep it in check because of the social consequences they would otherwise suffer.

[adrian_turtle]

It's a lot more obvious now than it was before

Some of that depends on the time scale you use for "before."
Most people still say "I'm not racist but--" There are a lot of microaggressions and dog whistles, where 50 years ago there was more straightforward "doesn't everybody hate these people?"

In my previous post, I mentioned that I've been hanging out at Boston University. (I never used to, even though it's less than ten miles from my apartment.) They have a big display of Martin Luther King's papers, because he left them in his will after going to theology school there. The Montgomery bus boycott had amazingly modest demands. They knew how much power the racists had...they were so careful not to ask for too much. They did not dare ask to sit next to white people, only to sit near the front of the bus when there was space available. This happened in living memory, when my mother was a teenager. Living memory.

[silveradept]

I suppose it's not really progress to go from [REDACTED] to "articulate black folk", but it does seem like we're back toward people saying [REDACTED] and admitting flatly to racist motivations for the things they're doing. Similarly with other -isms around, as if greater awareness of the thing itself had given people new language to describe themselves, rather than things to avoid.