| | The Problem of Hate
So much about racism. Lots of words fly around, like prejudice, hate, tolerance, generalization, fear, preference, etc. I keep waiting for one word, but it hasn't surfaced yet.
In the past week, Xanga featured some hate: first one
exceedingly racist post, and second, one purportedly
racist post. The first one spawned no responses at first, and everyone jumped on the second one, giving rise to posts of varying hatefulness (3,
and 4). Their response to hatred,
I guess, supposedly makes their own hatred more excusable. I just read a new, relatively level-headed one, to which I will refer you for definitions of hatred and racism. I started this as a comment on one of the posts, like my response on the white-guy-hate post.
All
this hate is a bit disturbing to me. I was in the
midst of happily dwelling on how awesome
summer 2008 has been. Ahh, well, so much for that.
I found the first featured post hurtful. And that's saying something! My skin may be white skin, and apparently pasty and arrogant according to some, but it's thick. The
first author thinks everyone who has my ethnic+gender combination is a
jerk who treats Asian women as lesser
objects of mistreatment. The "What's Wrong with Being Racist?" post made my skin crawl, but mostly due to its amazing level of social ignorance. The responses to it were as hateful again as the racist posts. They each made me feel physically nauseous;
even if it weren't intellectually inexcusable, all this treats people like they're worthless.
So why does it feel inexcusable, when we see humans treated as though without worth?
Enjoying Diversity
I grew up in Silicon Valley, and though
"white" I have been a minority most of my life. (For the record, copy paper is white; I am a peachy light-brown hue, thank you very much.) Our neighbors were mostly Vietnamese, and my parents taught me to respect them and their customs. Well okay, not all of them were Vietnamese. One of them was Japanese, there were a couple Korean families, and
some of them were Latino, and there was another family of (as
my lovely friend Tyra respectfully calls us) Europeans.
The kids I grew
up with were fun, and we made for a wonderfully diverse bouquet of human origins, without even realizing it at the time. One girl in my class was named
Tatiana. I liked her name, though it took me a while to say it right as
a five-year-old. I had no reason to think she was different from me,
except I couldn't understand what her parents were saying sometimes. Who cares, right? My playmates
as a kid were the Thomas kids, who were African, and the Lee family,
who were Chinese. Sure, there were some interracial landmarks, like
when little Eric Thomas was curious about my brother's
bone-straight blond bowl cut, and yanked out a handful for a souvenir. Actually that was just funny. Once when I was small I asked my mom if people from Africa had darker skin because
it's sunnier there and people from Europe are pale because it's cold. My parents carefully diverted those questions into
understanding and caring answers that validated everyone's worth. My life was made more full by celebrating
Chinese New Year with the Lees. Those are great memories for me because
I was included in their lives. It didn't matter that I looked different, they loved me.
Sure, as an adult living in a diverse area, I encounter lots of cultural misunderstandings, such as how to share
the road. (I am most prejudiced against drivers from Massachusetts. Sometimes I just wish they'd go back where they came from. Hehe, just kidding.) But in general, our regional diversity has always been a
boon.
An Antidote, A Solution
That diversity, coupled with a conscientious upbringing,
spectacularly equipped me with a single, invaluable fact that no-one
has yet added to the Xanga race discussion. Wherever I have gone, one
lesson has equipped me to treat people right, regardless of their
appearance, to see people as equal regardless of their color or
culture, mistakes or idiosyncracies. The only thing it didn't teach me
was how to back down when confronted with racism, or cow-tow to interracial fears or
tensions.
The lesson is this: people have value.
Personal value doesn't vary from person to person. It is not comparative value, demand
value, nor value added by opinions, origin, talents, abilities,
personality, heroism, uniqueness nor anything else like that. It's not
dependent on anyone to recognize it or attribute it.
Nationality, ethnicity and culture are without value in themselves;
they are only as valuable as the individuals that comprise them. Even
fields of study, or particular things like art, derive their central value from the innate human value
of the people who comprise or create them. Their creativity or industry is just one
manifestation of that value.
People are equally and
incredibly valuable, and ought to treat and be treated that way,
simply because they are people.
Personal Human Value and Culture
It is the innate
value of people that would make me want to learn and follow culture,
customs and local courtesies in any place to which I am foreign. I
would not need to bend to culture were I alone in an unpopulated
foreign land. It is only out of respect for the innate value of people
that I would try to change my bearing, manner, diet or speech when
elsewhere: to accommodate my hosts. It is only because I as a person
have innate value that they ought to show me courtesy. Of course, if
someone comes into America, they are encouraged to disrespect American
culture, to fight to establish their own microcosm of their own culture
here. What is my response? Well, go back to the lesson. These people
are valuable. Okay, so I should try to treat them that way, no matter
how they act toward me or my culture.
Racism Devalues, Love Values
Author No.1
could have just had said something like this: "I had some bad
experiences with some guys who were white, and consequentially I am not
attracted to white guys." That would not have been hateful, and it would have drawn my sympathy. Heck, it
could have been a pulse, and wouldn't have been featured because it
wouldn't have been controversial. Instead she chose to vituperate, using painfully blatant insults and fallacies along the way.
A problem: so does that decrease her value? No. Her hate doesn't change my
responsibility to treat her like
she is my equal, or better, even as I was disagreeing with her. It is always best to err toward treating someone
like they're better than yourself, better than to risk treating them in a devaluing way. Why should I value her?
Because she is valuable, and if I miss that, then I am the dullard and
the offender, and I also am making the world a worse
place. I allow her to draw me into her mistake. She is acting hateful because someone treated her as though she didn't have any value. That needs to be forgiven and replaced with love, not punished with more hatred.
Value in Practice
This view of people always serves well. I worked
in the poorest part of Louisville a few years back, right near where
the "Black" part of town (yes the town is still essentially segregated)
meets the most poverty-stricken "White" part of town. The homicide rate
in Louisville was high, and growing, so white people I knew actually
feared to go into the black part of town. I benefited from not knowing
any better. It just didn't occur to me, the way it did to them, to
treat people with dark skin differently than I would treat my own
light-skinned family. I got chastised by some white colleagues who
wanted to just divert their eyes and not talk to anyone who looked
different from them. And let me tell you I chastised right back at
their regressive, ingrown white asses. Lo and behold, those "Black"
people treated this cracker like an equal, and treated the others with
suspicion.Why? Because we understood each other as humans, not as
different races, we respected each other's person-ness. More simply, we
just respected each other. I attend a church now that is about 60% Asian (Indian, to be specific), and while our primary commonality is our faith, we try very hard to learn from each others' cultures as well. I love it. The Indian culture is so much more respectful than I am used to, in some ways, and more courteous, hospitable and often more sober, sincere and kind. Plus, I mean, they always want to feed me curry chicken, naan, chapatis and yogurt salads, people. Indians know how to eat! It's great!
Racism is Not Okay, Kid
After the white-male-hater post, an unfortunately-titled
post was featured, in which Author No.2, probably in order to
get attention, made up a bunch of comically-intended, tasteless
and potentially hurtful, prejudicial nicknames for different ethnic groups. She tried to argue
that disliking the appearance or culture of people different
from oneself is normal, as long as it doesn't lead to hatred of
indivual people. While I'm sure we can all see the pragmatism there, it was presented so ingraciously. Oddly, this person
considers mild "disliking" to be "racism," and is trying to justify that "racism" on the grounds that it is not "hate." So racism is really not the
word for that at all, and her title is totally inaccurate. Racism is prejudice and hate (dislike strong enough to cause action) of individual people
based on stereotypes about people-groups. Personally, I think if a lightly-held prejudice never carries over to devaluing a person, then it is not rightly labeled racism. You could even
define it this way: racism says that some races have more human value
than others. The problem with her post was that her prejudices were so presented as to devalue everyone.
Fighting Hate with More Hate. (Oh, Great.)
I agree with the driving principle
behind Author No.3's and Author No.4's posts, and I despise racism (and
sometimes I despise racists, too, though I try not to). Thing is, I
don't think either author fully grasped that the unfortunate
post was tongue-in-cheek, and probably not meant to demean
anyone. Seemingly, her point was this: despite opinions about a certain people-group's appearance or culture,
seeming foreign to her, they are people, equal with her. She
wouldn't be surprised or offended if they, in turn, disliked things about her
that were foreign to them.
I did not agree with her justification of
disliking people for the stereotypes they fit into. But I think her point was that, in the end, person to person, no hatred
stems from these "likes and dislikes." She even went on to say
that the views expressed about the groups named in the post were not
her actual opinions. It's not clear that she's a racist at all, maybe just foolish; her post is not characterized by fear,
hatred or even much prejudice toward anyone. Yes, the post was
undesirable and poorly communicated, but not
hateful.
In response, Author No.3 went on a rant
about how hating people is not okay. I was totally tracking with him
till he added that it's not okay unless they are certain kinds of people that
Author No.3 thinks are less valuable than others, mostly because he
disagrees with them. Then he went on to write base, generalized slurs
about white inhabitants of blue-collar midwestern U.S.
towns. By the time I'd read the "toothless" comment, I had little
common feeling with his post. I felt he was in fact a good deal more
hateful than the person he was attacking. More importantly,
he was defending and promoting
hate. I was surprised at how many people left comments
supportive of this. The post was clearly meant to say that people who hate don't have the same inherent value as people who don't. Whether he realized it or not, he was revealing that he doesn't recognize his own human value.
Author No.4 took a slightly softer
tact, but attacked Author No.2's intelligence, implying her ignorance
was proof she was stupid and not as valuable as a savvy, well-informed
person. Ignorance, especially when it is admitted, does not equal
unintelligence. And again, hate is hate; there is a good deal more of
it in Author No.4's post than in that of Author No.2
I totally understand this.Witnessing hate is a revulsive process, and the first response is often to hate in turn. I have total respect and sympathy for these thinking people's points of view, and the painstaking efforts they took to put them down and post them.
But I would offer a better solution, which xXbUbBlEwRaPXx hinted at in the end of her post. "We're all people," she says, "Let's start treating one another that way."
So what is "that way"?
Hate? Of course not. Returned hatred? Hardly. Are any ideals really more valuable than a human being?
So is there a better response? What if someone's personal value is more important than their shortcomings or wrongs? What if you walked out the door every morning and saw someone who looks and lives in a way intimidating to you, but you knew in your heart that that person, same as you, has innate value? What if you knew that that value is something you share, and can benefit from, by treating that person with respect, or forgiveness if necessary? Fear can't stand before unconditional love.
We're all people, meaning we all are valuable, no matter who we are.
Isn't that a generalization worth acting on?
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