Otherism

I am racist.

Sure, I have friends who are minorities and people of color. But I am white, middle-class, Protestant, male.

I spent years in another country among people of a different culture, but I am still bound by and to my own culture. Learning about another culture is a way to expand my perspectives and to better appreciate and critique my own culture. But it would be a mistake to say that, because I am aware of other cultures, I am no longer biased by my own.

I dare say I might have made the same mistake that Megyn Kelly did, in thinking and saying that wearing blackface was no big deal. I have been woefully unaware of the history of the minstrel shows and Jim Crow, which is evidence in itself of my cultural and racial ignorance—one form of racism.

While many were roundly condemning Kelly for her comments, Joyce Carol Oates tweeted a more nuanced view:

Megyn Kelly apologized. In what might be called her naiveté, which might be called privileged-white naiveté, she represents countless other Americans who feel as she feels because their experience is limited. They might wish to be corrected if not denounced & ridiculed.

— Joyce Carol Oates (October 24, 2018)

You could read "they might wish" to mean that it is possible that they do wish or that they ought to wish, or both. I admit to naiveté and commit to wishing to be corrected. I think many people of color are willing to forgive our ignorance, provided we see it as that. I expect we are more gracious in accepting their forgiveness than we are their correction. Let's try to accept both.

Our church council is reading the book Waking up White, by Debby Irving, in which she admits to not knowing she needed to be woke. She makes the point that race is more a social construct than a genetic category. Our DNA is as likely to be similar to that of those from other "races" and continents as to that of our neighbors. There is essentially no such thing as race. Except in our minds.

Race may be no more than a social and mental construct, but that doesn't mean racism and its effects are not real. And, if racial differences did not exist, we would still separate us from them. The tendency to distinguish ourselves from (and over) others is not limited to physical characteristics. In Liberia and Rwanda some people were willing to kill others based solely on which tribal group they belonged to. In the US, when immigration from Italy and Ireland was peaking, many Americans proclaimed such people inferior—and to be feared and excluded.

The seeds of racism extend beyond race. Ethnocentrism involves judging another culture for having different standards and values than our own. Even within a culture, we separate and then compare. We discriminate against those who are different from the norm. We discriminate against people of different religions or sex or preferences. We tend to believe that us have it more right than them. If I had been indirectly told my whole life that people of my culture were intellectually inferior, I might be inclined to believe it. As it is, I grew up thinking that my people were the standard against which all others should be judged.

We need to recognize this tendency to compare ourselves to, and judge, others. It might be harmless to say Italians are friendly or the Vietnamese are polite. But if I say this, I'm offering you a clue that I don't know very many Italians or Vietnamese very well. If I did, I'd have met a few Italians who didn't treat me as a friend and at least one Vietnamese who was rude. And such generalizations, when negative, become an excuse for treating whole groups with less respect than we treat people like us.

When such judgments become part of our cultural fabric, we have institutionalized our bigotry. Injustice follows. And blame. When we make scapegoats of those who are different, when we think our problems are the fault of those people, we tilt toward evil. It may start as only a grudge but it can be fanned into something much worse.

A demagogue knows our tendency to consider others lower than ourselves and harnesses the power of fear and hatred to his own advantage. He permits us to hate others while assuring us of our superiority over them. This has a powerful attraction.