Funny Things

Man, talk about feeling grumpy. My earlier post was much more chipper, that is, before I went back to bed and slept for two more hours, waking to feel groggy as hell. Thom, though, is in an incredibly loving mood. Even when I'm at my grouchiest, I still find it possible to keep from taking it out on Thom, who, true, wants nothing but to cuddle with me.

At any rate, I'm posting because I want to add even my two cents to an internet debate that has been raging lately (actually, it's pretty much died down, and nobody came to a good conclusion.) Nubian posted this at Blac(k)ademic a few days ago. Basically, a white colleague of Nubian's came up to her, greeted her, and after some smalltalk about the weather, proceeded to ask Nubian if black people get hotter in the sun because their skin is darker (making the comparison between a black person and black clothing.) The debate about this post was actually strung over several blogs, and there were three factions, it seems: black people who thought that it was a no-brainer as to why Nubian was angry, white people who more or less blamed Nubian for being over-touchy about an innocent (if rude and ignorant) question, and white people who felt that, while the asker of the question wasn't consciously being racist, her attempt to show Nubian that she's really comfortable with the fact that Nubian is black just uncovers her own, most likely, implicit and unknown racism.

I'm sure that this is a mistake that many white people, who are well-intentioned, make, and since I have been living in that category for all of my life, I've been thinking about it a lot since I read the post. This morning I came up with something that I felt I could really grasp onto, so I decided I'd post it. I'm comparing a situation in my own life with Nubian's experience, and my situation is pretty trivial. I'm not trying to trivialize Nubian's situation, but rather, show that even the most trivial experiences like this one are aggravating and damaging.

So, I work in the Barnes and Noble cafe, which, if you've ever been in one, you know serves Starbucks coffee. Many people see the Starbucks logo and ignore the Barnes and Noble cafe logo, which is two or three times bigger, and assume that the cafe is just a normal Starbucks, but it's actually a lot different. Aside from differences in food and drink, there is also the fact that Barnes and Noble, being...you know...an entirely different corporation with a different accounting system, cannot take Starbucks giftcards. May seem like small peanuts, sure, but if you're an "entitled", upper-middle class white person, like most of our customers, when you order your food and find that you can't use that Starbucks giftcard your grandma got you for Christmas, you're pissed.

So, who has to take the flak? Me. Even though I've just been as sweet as pie to these people, more often than not going out of my way to be the best server I can, as soon as they find something that's objectionable, all of a sudden, I'm just some dumb kid behind the counter, and my individual personality flees before their eyes, as I become the flesh interface for two corporations that I have very little to do with.

After getting chewed out for the umpteenth time, every time someone presented a Starbucks gift card, it didn't take long for a grating anger and fear that spilled back in on my self to come welling up. I'm not making this up. I can only tell you my own experience, but the Starbucks giftcard thing really has been a detriment to my psyche.

The problem here is representation. Even though I'm an individual, as soon as something happens that the customer doesn't like, I'm simply a drone, and they find it quite easy to chew me out. Even though Nubian's colleague knows her as an individual, from the colleague's comments, it's very obvious that to her, Nubian's individuality can be revoked in a second, so that she represents all people of color. You know what that is when you ask someone to represent a group that they are only superficially involved with and make your judgments based on that? Stereotyping. If Nubian has to answer for every black person's skin, she'll also have to answer for every gang riot, drug ring and controversial rap song.

Obviously, I wasn't there, but I have a feeling, in fact, I'm almost certain, that Nubian's colleague considers herself non-racist, but is still uncomfortable around black people. The best way to mask her discomfort is to address its source directly. If she really weren't uncomfortable, she wouldn't have to prove it, and if she weren't racist on an unconscious level, she wouldn't be uncomfortable. Of course, the big difference between being a cafe drone and being a person of color is that, when I get off work, I get to take that dopey green apron off and become once again an individual. At the end of the day, Nubian can't take her skin off.

Although it seems like a huge stretch to compare my situation to Nubian's, I'm doing it because, through that situation, I feel some of what Nubian, and other black people, must feel. It has gotten to the point where, even if someone isn't mad at me for not being able to take the Starbucks card, I get really annoyed, no matter how politely comment about their dissatisfaction. People might call me touchy, probably the same people who called Nubian touchy.

Of course, the people who called her touchy were totally missing the huge gap in comments: as far as I can tell, all the black people automatically knew what Nubian was feeling. They had no qualms about it. They responded as if they would have felt the same exact way, and many of them commented on how angry they felt just reading the post. However, the white people were still going on and on about how it's wrong to call someone down for asking an innocent question. Did they read no one else's comments? The problem with the people who were criticizing Nubian is that they were totally oblivious to the fact that DIFFERENT PEOPLE SEE THE WORLD DIFFERENTLY. Even though the evidence that black people and white people have completely different experiences and viewpoints was glaring in their faces, they chose to ignore it, still assuming that their experience is the universal one, and anyone else who says different is simply a fussbudget. If EVERYONE saw the world like a middle-class white American, then do you think that the conflict between fundamental Muslims and westerners would exist? Or how about the few instances of genocide over the past century? NO! If everyone saw the world the way that middle-class white Americans did, then perhaps wars would be waged over sports, or whether the Beatles or the Rolling Stones were better, or atheism vs. Christianity, but there would be no conflicts like the ones now.

The problem is that a lot of conservative, as well as liberal white people, think that racial equality, aside from the "legal protection" black people are supposed to have now, means walking on eggshells around people who are different. They don't know how to act around black people, so that makes them assume that there can never be a world where white and black people can be comfortable around each other. If this is so, then they realize that it would be impossible to please EVERYONE, so apparently, the best course of action is to please no one at all. Of course, these people don't realize that racial equality = not only giving everyone equal protection under the law, but also not treating them as different from human or subhuman. If you don't think of someone as "different," then you won't be uncomfortable around them and they won't be uncomfortable around you. In that context, a question like the one Nubian's colleague asked would be a truly innocent question (but by that time, the difference between the bodies of black and white people will probably be taught to kids in school, anyway.) Another thing these people are forgetting (and pardon my own use of generalizations here) is that, although the human mind thrives on stereotypes (i. e. any person with dark skin automatically conforms to the preconceived notion of "black person," just as any piece of furniture with four legs and a flat top conforms to "table") the world actually operates on a case-by-case basis.