1. It would have saved me a lot of time and emotional energy if I had realized this earlier about racism: I was already way more advanced than those endless lines of politically correct people who continued to try reeducate me about racism (and do so even to this day), because I was a white skin coloured person from Zimbabwe. Actually, we had already a very assimilated society, racially speaking in my high school by the year 1983 (I emigrated with my family, aged 15, in 1984). It was not perfect, but I was already mixing with the Shona without so much as flinching, which is not like something that happens in Australia, almost ever -- hence the endless politically correct sighs and sense of tension about "racism". Yes, at the age of 15, I was already more ethically and socially advanced. Yet, I didn't know how to speak up for myself, or even that the need to project a racial attitude onto me was the core of the problem.
Then there were my father's ongoing psychological problems, due to having fought in a war and been on the losing end and being forced to leave his country and start again with almost no nest egg in his prime (and his four young children to bring up -- I was the eldest). He dealt with his anxieties and traumas by means of resorting to Christian fundamentalism and misogyny. Somehow, however, due to his actual conservatism and perhaps good intentions overall and due to my lack of maturity (which is not entirely odd for a 15 year old), I did not understand all the implications of this political and psychological morass that I had become embroiled in.
2. There is still so much invested in political correctness and the need to project the evil of racism out of oneself into another. It's absolutely huge in the West and so much so that if I make a direct protest (i.e. standing up for myself) as I began doing ever since I finally figured it out in 1996, people take that as a sign of guilt, rather than as pointing out a general tendency of error. Oh, she is protesting so much that she isn't a racist -- it must mean she is one! So, this particular battleground is as much political as it is psychological. It persists independently of me (or of anything I might say in my defense) because people feel guilty about historical facts.
3. There is a deeply rooted human need to perfect one's own image as morally perfect. I think I had it in me, too, until I overcame that feeling through a shamanistic immersion into the dirt of life. You realise that the dirt of life IS life itself in a fundamental way and then you kind of go into a state of shock and then you recover from that and you are much healthier -- less in need of defending oneself against others on a psychological level and more capable of doing it on a practical level. And, I think I have just described one outcome of shamanistic initiation, as it was for me.
Then there were my father's ongoing psychological problems, due to having fought in a war and been on the losing end and being forced to leave his country and start again with almost no nest egg in his prime (and his four young children to bring up -- I was the eldest). He dealt with his anxieties and traumas by means of resorting to Christian fundamentalism and misogyny. Somehow, however, due to his actual conservatism and perhaps good intentions overall and due to my lack of maturity (which is not entirely odd for a 15 year old), I did not understand all the implications of this political and psychological morass that I had become embroiled in.
2. There is still so much invested in political correctness and the need to project the evil of racism out of oneself into another. It's absolutely huge in the West and so much so that if I make a direct protest (i.e. standing up for myself) as I began doing ever since I finally figured it out in 1996, people take that as a sign of guilt, rather than as pointing out a general tendency of error. Oh, she is protesting so much that she isn't a racist -- it must mean she is one! So, this particular battleground is as much political as it is psychological. It persists independently of me (or of anything I might say in my defense) because people feel guilty about historical facts.
3. There is a deeply rooted human need to perfect one's own image as morally perfect. I think I had it in me, too, until I overcame that feeling through a shamanistic immersion into the dirt of life. You realise that the dirt of life IS life itself in a fundamental way and then you kind of go into a state of shock and then you recover from that and you are much healthier -- less in need of defending oneself against others on a psychological level and more capable of doing it on a practical level. And, I think I have just described one outcome of shamanistic initiation, as it was for me.
5 comments:
Is there a difference between racism, segrigation and aparthied? And second, can racism ever be erradicated, if so how?
When people stop projecting parts of their characters onto others, racism and sexism will cease.
Also, all the ideas about difference that lead to discriminatory treatment are based on psychological projection of unwanted character parts onto the other.
True.
I have a very similar outlook, and experience. I grew up in a small town on the Texas/Mexico border with white skin. That made me a little less than a 2% minority, even though my family is largely from Mexico, everyone spoke Spanish, I grew up eating Mexican food, etc...
Having a background like that give a person a sense of perspective than most people don't get to experience. The strongest bit of culture shock I've ever experienced was when I lived in Kansas City for about 6 months. Until then I assumed that the kind of "White" culture stereotyped in movies, and satirized by comedians was mostly a myth. There I realized that such a culture existed, and now than I'm in North Texas, this is the culture that people automatically ascribe to me. People started to try to get me to recognize my "whiteness," as though there has ever been a time in my life that I wasn't aware that I had white skin.
As you've said in a more recent post, identity politics has nothing to do with universal social justice, it's just a way for some folks to fight over who is more innocent, and therefore who is more worthy of gaining advantage. Shelby Steele hit the nail on the head, by stating that this is all about fighting over who gets to be more innocent, or less guilty. It's all about power. The bullshit, anti-racist rhetoric you've been pressured with is just a way for these folks to gain back their own feeling of innocence in a battle for control and advantage. It's a bargaining strategy, no different than the kind that black Americans had to resort to in order to gain access to White society.
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