Rarely when accused of doing/saying something racist have I witnessed a white guy demonstrate the strength in character or self-esteem to critically reflect and own their past mistakes and try to unlearn oppressive attitudes and move forward productively. More commonly I see the onus or responsibility of racism turned against black people in one of two ways: 1) the black people are the real racists trope, or 2) the my black friend defense. This is not an exhaustive list, only the two I most commonly see. We dont need to touch the first defense; we can see its absurdity on the face of it just by looking at incarceration statistics and the racial wealth divide in this country. I find the second one much more interesting. I recently considered making a joke on twitter: a plea to all the black friends of America to please stop telling their white friends that blackface was okay. But I chose not to because I was afraid that people would perceive that I was blaming the perpetuation of this particular racist practice on black people and not the ignorant white people who have no understanding of history or the power of symbolism. Im not into victim-blaming. But the real root of the joke is that there are no black friends condoning their white friends racism. Rather, these black friends are mythological fabrications made up by white guys getting called out so they can say, This isnt racist, but if it is, I didnt know it was racist and Ive been set up by a tricksie negro. But in the case of Jonathan Martin and Richie Incognito, were actually seeing a real live black friend defense in action, replete with racial essentialism that pairs blackness with ignorance and whiteness with affluence, and actual racist apologetics. Now, heres the thing. Im not trying to blame racism on the victims of it. When Incognito called Martin a nigger and threatened to kill him, there wasnt one black man in that room who wasnt reminded of the stench of strange fruit swaying in the warm southern night air. Ingocnito was calling every black man in that room a nigger, too. But when Martin stood up to Incognito, his career was ruined. The cost of standing up to racism and white supremacy for black people is not the same that it is for white people. And the reason these black friends are making excuses for Incognito is because theyve seen what the consequences are for standing up to him in what happened to Martin. And it disgusts me.
Posted on: Thu, 07 Nov 2013 19:26:33 +0000
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