Some Basic Racist Ideas and some Rebuttals, & Why We Exist

2. Why don’t you lighten up and get over it?

Oh please.  This is like saying its not cool to eat pizza unless you’re Italian. Or only the French can drink champagne. Learn to share your heritage. Stop holding on so tightly. My ancestors weren’t even around before the 1900′s. They didn’t kill your ancestors. Get over it.

…But should racial sensitivity move all the way over to never watching a John Wayne movie ever again and seeing Italians poorly portray a “First People” (Bitch needs to check their AP style book *snotty wink*). Or a bunch of star fucking hipsters in headdresses coked out of their little American panties? It just seems like trite and really insecure whistle blowing.

…Health disparaties and poverty are worth more of everyone’s attention than hippie fashion trends or things that annoy you about white people…

As a pop culture website, we get this response so often that we even have a policy to speak to it:

8. Don’t respond to a post or comment by saying “why don’t you focus on some real issues like the war/starving children in Africa/police brutality/etc.” Newsflash: this is a blog about race and pop culture. If you’re not interested in discussing the intersection of those two things, please go elsewhere.

Incidentally Bitch is also a pop culture site, so it kinda makes sense that Jessica talk about hipsters there. Bitch readers come to Bitch to talk about feminism and pop culture, but they don’t want to talk about racism and pop culture?

The “get over it” defense is not hard to take down as soon as you realise that by “it” the commenter is referring to colonisation and genocide, the legacy of which continues to beset Native communities in the form of poverty, environmental racism, and health disparities (to recap some of the things Jessica mentioned in the original post).

The whole “but that happened 100 years ago!” defense is similarly dense: a brief look at who is poor and who is marginalised in the richest countries in the world should quiet that one down…though it often doesn’t.  There’s no accounting for pigheadedness.

And beyond this? Racism manifests itself in a million different ways, from massive structural inequalities, to the accessories of that fashionable person on the subway next to you.  And sometimes it is easier for folks to understand and tackle the small things; for me, it was a long journey to the admission that racism exists and impacts my daily life.  Talking about pop culture was a baby step that I could take; it was also something that was familiar and accessible when I didn’t really understand the academic language of postcolonial theory, or couldn’t imagine that words like “double marginalization” “diaspora” or even “immigrant” could apply to me.

It’s bossy to tell people which incidences of racism they should be discussing, and it also denies the insidious nature of racism. There’s no global limit on how many racist topics we can discuss.  If our bandwidth has room, we’re going to decontruct it.

3. Why is this my fault? My family didn’t do anything. And anyways, I’m poor/female/an immigrant (insert other identity) so that neutralises my white privilege – I don’t have any.

…Am I immediately part of the problem because I was born into it? You assume I don’t care or involved myself in Native rights and politics because I’m white? How easy it is for all you to dismiss the few uber-defensive Caucasians claiming, “What, I’m automatically racist because I’m [white]?” without reconsidering the allegation. Throwing around blame is not a solution…

…[from a commenter who identifies as a white immigrant] Though we fare better than many others…it’s been a long struggle, especially since my parents’ accents are much too thick for most American-born citizens to understand and has made jobs difficult to land. We are working class and could not even afford state university. Anyway, I wanted to say that it is interesting how homogenized white people are in this country. Our personal heritage is ignored, a Scottish redheaded regarded no differently than a deeply olive-skinned Sicillian, in the United States.

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