Contest entry: Rant #2

[DJRubberducky]

One of my friends blogged about how upset he was that there were things like "black pride" and "Hispanic History Month", but if anyone tried to do "white pride" or "Anglo History Month" it'd be decried as racist.  The following 681 words are my rant entry, and an expansion of what I told him:

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Welcome to the world of memes, dude. And by this I mean real memes, not the stupid "What-cartoon-character-are-you?" things that propagate across LiveJournals like so many spores of mold. I'm talking about those thought patterns that live deep inside your mind and fill your world with the colour of bullshit even as you try to rise above and be the better human being.  Depending on the nature of the meme, Discordians might refer to such things as the curse of Greyface, though I think it's a rare one who will actively seek to destroy *all* memes in his/her brain - I suspect even the best of us tend to pick and choose which ones to fight and which ones to leave alone because we arbitrarily declare them harmless or beneficial to us.

I work at a State University, and our former president was always *so* very proud about how ethnically diverse the campus was - not just in terms of students, but faculty and staff as well. So I'm around "minorities" all the time, and deal with many of them as the individual human beings they are. But absolutely none of that matters when I'm walking through a parking lot to my car at night, and I have to come within ten feet of a strange black male on the way. That's when the lizard brain decides to remind me that "all blacks are strong and muscular and angry with white people and would not hesitate to grab you and snap your pretty neck - or worse".  I've never been physically attacked, or even picked on, by any non-whites of any colour, and yet somehow and somewhere I've picked up a gut-level fear that means not even Verthaine could wave hello to me on the street without causing me to tense up and start figuring out the best direction to move in order to escape if I have to.  And in reflex to that mind-poison, I'm probably assuming a stance and/or demeanour that might cause him to write off me as being a stuck-up ofay bitch who thinks she's too good for him because he's black and she's white.

I usually think of public opinion in terms of a five-ton pendulum, but I think in this case it might actually be more like a Newton's Cradle with five one-ton pendula, because usually what sparks one movement is a backlash against a movement by another group.  For example:

Whites: "The damned wetbacks keep coming over and taking our jobs."

Hispanics: "The damned whites want to keep us down and doing their shit-jobs for them."

In both cases, it's gonna take a damned long time for the ball to stop swinging - and a lot of people who *do* want to stop (or at least slow) the ball are afraid to do anything because they know there's a really good chance their hands will be ripped off or crushed. There's a thin line between martyrdom and pointless suffering, and quite honestly that line is the person's certainty that his/her "side" is going to "win" in the end.

I bring all this up because I think meme-destruction was supposed to be one of the points of Operation Mindfuck.  That by doing little things to make people stop and go "WTF?!", we would be able to wedge a crowbar into peoples' brains and open them up to the idea that perhaps their ugly hate- and fear-filled world was not the only reality out there, and they could leave it behind if they chose.  But I think somewhere in there we either got distracted by hippie lettuce or an intense game of Sink, because I see and hear tales of a lot of the making people go "WTF?!", and I don't see or hear a whole lot about people wielding brain-crowbars.  (I bear as much blame for this as anyone else, mind you; this is just an observation.) It's like we're sitting around throwing the right jab and not following it up with the left hook.

But what do I know.  I'm just a fuckin' hippie.

[fluffy]

i like
honest and expressive

you aren't the only one who has those feelings
jesse jackson once said that he sometimes feels the same involuntary anxiety alone at night around strange black males
i think we all have these, as you say, lizard brain reactions
what distinguishes us from the lizards
is that we can choose not to act on them
or, at least, choose to act differently than a lizard

[LMNO]

Good insights, DJ.

Hope ECH judges you appropriately.

[BADGE OF HONOR]

Excellent rant.  I experienced the same mindless niggling fear in the back of my mind yesterday, when a dude came up to me and asked me about where he could find a phonebook. Then again, if he had been white I still would have been afraid, just slightly less so.  But, I have an actual reason to be afraid, since I live in a violent town where students get attacked every so often, but still, not everyone is out to get me.  So long as I percieve myself as vulnerable, I will be afraid of men when I go out alone.

[Eldora, Oracle of Alchemy]

I had to go into a building just off Martin Luther King Blvd in Flint right after I signed up for unemployment.  I had to sign up for Michigan Works.  Didn't bother me.  I went in, all the people at the front desk were black and obviously bored with their jobs, they had on security uniforms.  Something in my bag made the metal detector go off so I had to stop and let this woman look through it.  She never looked me in the eye until I asked where I needed to go, I had never been in this building before.  When she looked me in the eye and saw me smiling at her, because I know she has a crap job, because I know she has to deal with a bunch of snotty white people and snotty black people and just people who do not want to be bothered with this, anyway, her whole attitude changed when she saw me smile at her.  It gave me the feeling that a lot of white people have been mean to her.  Not afraid of her.  

Nice rant, thanks for your honesty.  I have learned to not be afraid of much of anything.  Or anyone for that matter.  I try not to go into the parts of town that are all black, not because of my fear of black people, but because of my fear of mob mentality.  The same reason I would encourage black people to not go into certain small towns.  Without realising it, by not moving, I have enrolled my son in a racially diverse school district.  That helps the reptile brain more than anything, I think.

[East Coast Hustle]

read and scored.

thank you for your submission.

as per my rules for myself, commentary will be restricted until all entries are recieved and scored.

[Lord Daddy Lombrosis]

One of my friends blogged about how upset he was that there were things like "black pride" and "Hispanic History Month", but if anyone tried to do "white pride" or "Anglo History Month" it'd be decried as racist.  The following 681 words are my rant entry, and an expansion of what I told him:

Sounds kind of like my first rant.  I actually was serious when I first posted it, the rest of that thread was me fucking with TGRR after he decided I was a...what was it?  Cryptoracist?  

I liked this rant, but I don't really see how it responds to your friend's ideas, care to elaborate?

[DJRubberducky]

I pretty well tied it back in the examples I gave.  Not only are the various racial groups forming those sweeping generalizations about themselves and the other racial groups, but they're teaching them by active or passive example.  And because they live that deep in the brain, they won't go away easily.  We haven't actually reached racial equality in many arenas, but I'm actually pretty certain that even once we *do*, there will be people of previously-oppressed minorities that will still attempt to portray themselves as oppressed minorities, and refuse to accept the evidence to the contrary, if for no other reason than to do so would mean to dismantle however many years' worth of reality was accurately described by those words.

It's not uncommon, and I will have to retain some degree of sympathy for those people if I'm alive to see them in that situation.  I have a metric fuckton of self-worth and abandonment issues, and it takes more than just going home to a devoted husband and two devoted friends and housemates and a pair of spastically loving dogs to undo all that shit.  What I'm afraid of is one group or the other seizing on the latent attitudes as justification that we should never have bothered working for the equality; we did all this for them and they're still whining.

[Enrico Salazar]

I actually was serious when I first posted it, the rest of that thread was me fucking with TGRR after he decided I was a...what was it?  Cryptoracist?  

Fuck with TGRR again and Enrico will cut a hole in your cheek, fill it with twinkies, and set Star Jones on you.

Enrico will not repeat.  

And yes, he knows where you live.


your close personal friend,

and possible executioner,

Enrico.

[Lord Daddy Lombrosis]

Fuck with TGRR again and Enrico will cut a hole in your cheek, fill it with twinkies, and set Star Jones on you.

Look.  See my avatar?  That's Space Kitty.  You don't wanna know about her.  Space Kitty will make all your nightmares come true, then make all HER nightmares come true.

I pretty well tied it back in the examples I gave. Not only are the various racial groups forming those sweeping generalizations about themselves and the other racial groups, but they're teaching them by active or passive example. And because they live that deep in the brain, they won't go away easily.

I see, thanks.

[B_M_W]

Fuck with TGRR again and Enrico will cut a hole in your cheek, fill it with twinkies, and set Star Jones on you.
Enrico will not repeat.  
And yes, he knows where you live.
your close personal friend,
and possible executioner,
Enrico.

RAH!

[Zurtok Khan]

I actually was serious when I first posted it, the rest of that thread was me fucking with TGRR after he decided I was a...what was it?  Cryptoracist?  

Fuck with TGRR again and Enrico will cut a hole in your cheek, fill it with twinkies, and set Star Jones on you.

Enrico will not repeat.  

And yes, he knows where you live.


your close personal friend,

and possible executioner,

Enrico.

Enrico has so much love.