When I see posters for an event that invites me to talk about race, here’s what I know I’m being invited to: observing the internal discourse among white people on this campus as they try to grapple with issues of guilt and political correctness and try to find out what they can and cannot say around non-white minorities. At best, the event helps them realize the best way to alter their behaviors and speech so that these minorities feel less like minorities. The event, in its conception, tries to have racial minorities help in this education of white students, because think about this – why would women want to learn how to “talk about gender” in a personal context? “Talking about gender” is a misleading way to phrase what really should be labeled “talking about non-cismale genders.” “Talking about race” is the same sort of misnomer.
Then we get to what the talks don’t talk about (hint: the real issue). In trying to make race a personal trait instead of a social one, in sensationalizing personal narratives about individuals’ experience of racial profiling, in speaking of overcoming personal racial prejudices, this sort of an approach becomes an enemy of addressing race in productive ways. It becomes complicit with the systems of exploitation that it (at least in claim) seeks to undermine. Why? Because race is historical. It isn’t your skin color – it is your experience with centuries of oppression and where that places you in today’s world.
I like to think about privilege in time-machine terms – if you time-traveled to different times in different parts of the world, how drastically would your life change? As an Indian woman, I know there is a very narrow slice of the historical timespace that will accept me as a human being. Also, my relative privilege today is not after overcoming forces of oppression – it is despite them. There is proof – there are millions of other Indian women with less privilege. The ways we are oppressed have not simply faded away.
To dehistoricize race is to attempt to shove historical oppression under the carpet. It is pretending that race is just a personal idiosyncrasy that would be solved if all white people were nice to nonwhite people (I’ve heard this multiple times at Conn – the “be nice” solution). It is pretending that if everyone at this college accepted minorities as fellow human beings, all the systemic forces that oppress will disappear – the rates of education, employment and incarceration would all fix themselves.
Over the summer there was a campaign that went viral in response to the attack on Gaza – “Arabs and Jews refuse to be enemies.” Really? Is that what its all about – the desire to be enemies? Not about like, a struggle for territory and power? Decades of ethnic cleansing, wars and imperialism? Just refuse – why didn’t we think of this before?! Now we can all go relax in our pools, feeling good about having helped change the world.
It is this infuriating, this simple-minded crowd-pleasing that these race talks cater to. Profiling and taking offense are not the worst things that happen to minorities, and the personalization of oppression needs to stop.
Mimi Bangali (page 6) tells us of a conspiracy theory from rural Sierra Leon, asks “Why was a cure suddenly available as soon as the first white person got it?” This, I think, is actually a good question to ask – Ebola and the way it is handled cannot be separated from the region’s histories of oppression and how they translate into the present. This is how racial histories play out in the real world. Ebola, Gaza, Iraq, the minority and immigrant experiences – all have a lot to say if you know how to ask the right questions.
You cannot meet one fine October evening and understand race. You need to have a sustained dialogue – an Oppression gen-ed built into the curriculum (for true “ReVision”). That’s how much there is to learn about race. If Conn is really the progressive school it likes to say it is, it needs to stop catering to deinstitutionalizing race so it can have diversity blog posts on conncoll.edu and take on the challenge of getting real about race.•
