This is an interesting article. I struggle a lot in my line of work with the issue of racism. It's interesting, because it's a concept I never encountered until I moved to Georgia (it's hard to experience racism when you grow up in an almost completley homogenous world). It took me a while (I've been here over seven years now) to understand the undercurrent here, and the fact that people like Coretta Scott King, for example, are more than just names in a history book.
I have been accused of racism more times than I can count. At first it was shocking. I was shocked. I felt guilty. I wondered if I was doing something wrong. I've been told I exist to keep the black man down, that I get my kicks from arresting young black men, that I have a quota of tickets to write to black folk every day, etc. And I began to really examine my behavior.
I worked in South DeKalb. The majority of the crime I saw was committed by black men on other black men. We are constantly asked about 'profiling.' Do you profile? Well, yes and no. If you put a picture of a guy wearing pants falling off his butt, a t-shirt six sizes to big, a sideways hat, and a grill up on the screen, I may or may not have any feelings about it. If you put that person loitering around the front of an apartment complex in South DeKalb with a towel around his neck on a school day, I'm going to wonder what's up.
Whenever I get frustrated, or wonder if I am racist, or angry because I've been accused of being so, I thankfully have a good Sergeant who reminds me that 30 years of so-so behavior do not erase centuries of bad behavior. So I recognize the privilege of being white. Ironically, it was in my outrage that someone couldn't see the inherent sexism in an issue that I began to understand that while not racist, I could certainly be blind to the inherent racism in the same.
I don't know where I'm going with this, but I figured I'd just put some stuff out there and see where my typing took me. I hope that none of this has been offensive or boring. It was not intended as such!
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2007-11-30 08:22 pm (UTC)This is an interesting article. I struggle a lot in my line of work with the issue of racism. It's interesting, because it's a concept I never encountered until I moved to Georgia (it's hard to experience racism when you grow up in an almost completley homogenous world). It took me a while (I've been here over seven years now) to understand the undercurrent here, and the fact that people like Coretta Scott King, for example, are more than just names in a history book.
I have been accused of racism more times than I can count. At first it was shocking. I was shocked. I felt guilty. I wondered if I was doing something wrong. I've been told I exist to keep the black man down, that I get my kicks from arresting young black men, that I have a quota of tickets to write to black folk every day, etc. And I began to really examine my behavior.
I worked in South DeKalb. The majority of the crime I saw was committed by black men on other black men. We are constantly asked about 'profiling.' Do you profile? Well, yes and no. If you put a picture of a guy wearing pants falling off his butt, a t-shirt six sizes to big, a sideways hat, and a grill up on the screen, I may or may not have any feelings about it. If you put that person loitering around the front of an apartment complex in South DeKalb with a towel around his neck on a school day, I'm going to wonder what's up.
Whenever I get frustrated, or wonder if I am racist, or angry because I've been accused of being so, I thankfully have a good Sergeant who reminds me that 30 years of so-so behavior do not erase centuries of bad behavior. So I recognize the privilege of being white. Ironically, it was in my outrage that someone couldn't see the inherent sexism in an issue that I began to understand that while not racist, I could certainly be blind to the inherent racism in the same.
I don't know where I'm going with this, but I figured I'd just put some stuff out there and see where my typing took me. I hope that none of this has been offensive or boring. It was not intended as such!