on curiosetta

Okay.

So there is a guy – and rest assured, I know it’s a guy, because only a guy would get this bent out of shape about this – who has commented on a previous post I made. And it wasn’t just a “hey, no” comment. It was a line by line dissection on how I was wrong and ought to feel bad.

Bad news, curiosetta. I am calling you out.

What follows under the cut is me dishing back to curiosetta what he can’t or won’t stand on his own blog. See, he either doesn’t have one, or he deleted it, which tells me he doesn’t have the stones to put his own opinions somewhere public where they can be critiqued and picked apart, the way he’s done to me.

As he has done, twice now, I’m going to take his comment point by point and break it down. You have been warned.

EDITED because while I don’t think an opinion blog should be held to the same standards as a peer reviewed academic journal re: sources and citing, I’d hate for you (or anyone) to feel like the lack of sources in this rebuttal is an opening for more “discussion”. I have refuted each and every fallacious point you attempted to make, and with this edit, I have done it AND cited the sources you demanded (despite offering none of your own). You are done.

on racism, white privilege, head burying and horror

You know, the kind of person who feels the need to append every statement with “I’m not racist, though”, or to preface every comment with “Not being racist, but…”? Those are the kind of people who tend to be the most racist, in my experience. Because the people who genuinely aren’t racist? Tend to get on with the business of not being racist.

Ever noticed how “I’m not racist, but…” tends to be followed by something racist?

It’s a bit like what Shakespeare said in Hamlet. “The lady doth protest too much, methinks”. Or, in this case, the racist doth protest too much, methinks. Like, if you didn’t know damn well that the next crap to fly out of your face was going to be as racist as hell, then why would you need to assure the world it isn’t?

And putting all that aside… I don’t believe that any white person has the right to say “I’m not racist, but…” because if you are white, you have benefited from being white. You might not have meant to, you might not have set out to, and you might not even be aware of it, but simply by virtue of having white skin, you’re winning in ways you’ll never even know about.

I wonder how many times someone has looked at me, noted (whether consciously or unconsciously) that I’m white, and has written me off as “not a threat”.

I wonder how many times someone just like me, who just wants to browse books but has committed the grievous sin of having dark skin, has been followed and made to feel like a criminal – not because they’ve done anything wrong, but because the color of their skin makes people assume they will.

And I’ve been watching the news. And black people are being killed. They’re not doing anything wrong. They’re just black, and they exist, and for some reason that’s really offensive to some people. The news recently is not good. It’s not happy, and it’s not pleasant. It’s scary and intense and full on.

I’m lucky. Any time it “stresses me out” too much, I can turn off the TV, or walk away from the computer, or switch to another tab. I can go outside and walk my dog down to the park and throw sticks for him for an hour. I can get on a bus and go to the mall and shop. I can forget about the horror in the world, if I want to. It would be so damn easy to just bury my head in the sand.

But black people can’t. Because when they turn off the TV, the horror doesn’t end. It gets more real. The horror is their lives. The horror comes into their homes and kills them. The horror pulls them from their cars and points guns at their heads for having a tail light out. The horror shoots their children. The horror is inescapable.

So I won’t turn off the news and I won’t switch to another tab when stuff gets too real for me. I’m white, and I don’t have to deal with this. So that’s exactly why I will – because there are people out there who don’t have the luxury of turning away. And who the hell am I to just ignore them simply to make my world a little less bleak?