MeghanIsMe

Something I wrote on Facebook, after an incident that led to me unfriending someone over racism.

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Maybe this is a sort of AITA (Am I the Asshole) post. Maybe it's just an expression of confusion and anxiety and sadness.

Today, a thing happened that, though different in details, is the same in shape and form as other things that have happened in the past. There's a pattern.

In an otherwise-justified angry rant, someone invoked the stereotype that people in Nigeria live in huts and share their space with livestock.

This is a racist stereotype.

Isn't it? Am I wrong about that? Because this evening, I keep questioning myself about this, repeatedly and at length. I question whether I am wrong because when that stereotype was invoked, no one else said anything about it. Even though I'm sure many of the people reading the conversation truly care about issues of social justice like racism, no others in the over 1000 potential readers seemed to notice or feel the need to say anything. (ETA: I'm told that one other person did follow up on what I said and agreed with me, and that makes me feel a little more confident in what I did.)

I tried to gently point out the problem. Maybe I'm not good at being gentle. Or maybe I was too vague at first and too direct later. I don't know. But I said I was specifically objecting to the stereotype of Nigerians living in huts that they share with livestock, and the person who wrote the original rant said that they were being intentionally insulting with that phrase and did not rewrite their comment or acknowledge the problem.

It was terrifying to say anything in the first place. I'm terrified of conflict, and of taking up social space, and of criticizing other people. And when the person did not acknowledge the point, I felt like there was nothing else I could do. Nothing else I was brave enough to do, or that would be effective. And to let it go feels akin to saying that, if someone is angry enough, racism just gets a pass.

So I unfriended them.

We all have racist ideas in ourselves. I certainly do, having been enculturated as a white individual in the sea of racism that is the United States. That's part of what makes it so important for me, as a person of privilege, to be aware of and call attention to racism when other people of privilege are engaging in it. This is our responsibility.

This is my understanding of what anti-racism is meant to be.

But things like this leave me questioning myself and my understanding of social interactions, and even of racism. Am I wrong? I have such a hard time believing someone else is wrong and I am right that it's easy for me to start thinking I must be in the wrong. I must be making something out of nothing.

It's really hard for me to call out instances of discrimination. I feel torn between my fear of causing distress and anger vs. my belief that it is my responsibility to point these things out when I see them. I've been alternately anxious and angry and sad this evening. I cried a little. I talked to Miriam. I took Ella to the dog park to relax, but I kept thinking about this even as we walked around the field and Ella chased and played with new doggy friends. I want to know what the right thing to do is.

I'm looking for people to tell me that pointing out what appears to me to be racism is the right thing. Or that it's the wrong thing and I shouldn't trust myself to tell when I'm seeing something racist. I'd like to know that if I am doing the right thing, people support me, even though it feels so isolating and confusing sometimes.

I'd like to understand why, if I am doing the right thing, I am the only person doing that thing among so many other people who also care about social justice.

I know I have readers who may have seen this interaction. I don't mean to call anyone out. I mean, I don't even know if calling people out is the right thing to do. I just wish there was someone or someones to talk to about this who understand the whole situation and could tell me what they think is the right thing to do. If you fit that description and are up to talking about it, maybe we could talk in messenger to avoid discussing it in public if you want?

It's another of my popular, audience-grabbing walls of text! This time with a content warning for violence against women, transphobia, racism and racist lyrics, and cultural analysis. You won't be able to put it down! ('Cause it's not a physical object! HA!)

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One of the CDs I grabbed for my trip to Posi's place yesterday was The Beatles'* Rubber Soul. One song on that album ("In My Life") reminisces about all the "places and things" and "friends and lovers" the singer has known through his life; how he will always hold them in great affection even as he loves his current partner more than any of them. I love the recognition that there is room in the heart for tender feelings that stretch beyond a single person and a single time. It's really sweet.

Another song ("Run For Your Life") threatens violence against the narrator's partner, telling her she'd "better run for your life if you can little girl," and he'd rather see her dead than with another man. Musical whiplash in one album!

I thought about the context of those two songs as part of the same greater creative work, and what I know about the time that created them, and similar contemporary music (see Jimi Hendrix singing "Hey Joe",), and in the end I could only think to myself, "culture is really complicated."

(And that's not the only such instance in the Beatles' oeuvre. Whenever I hear a snippet of the Beatles' "Getting Better", I think of Lennon singing:

"I used to be cruel to my woman
I beat her and kept her apart
From the things that she loved
Man I was mean
But I'm changing my scene
And I'm doing the best that I can."

But it still worked wonderfully for a GE advertising campaign a while ago because it's such a happy, upbeat, classic song, right!?)

Anyway, this morning, listening to a David Byrne album on the way to work, I heard "Now I'm Your Mom," a potentially offensive song from the perspective of a trans woman, and thought about Lou Reed.

A few months ago at work, Lou Reed came up as a topic of conversation between myself and two co-workers. I think we were talking about Walk on the Wild Side because it had come up in a public to-do about potential transphobia in its mention of Holly Woodlawn:

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"Holly came from Miami F.L.A.
Hitch-hiked her way across the U.S.A.
Plucked her eyebrows on the way
Shaved her legs and then he was a she..."
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The song was played at a college-related event and some students felt this was inappropriate because it minimized and/or ridiculed the process of gender transitioning. But Reed, and probably the bulk of listeners who understood the context, saw the whole song as a love letter to the weirdos and freaks of New York in general, and the acquaintances of Andy Warhol in particular. “Paul Morrissey made me a star," said Woodlawn, "but Lou Reed made me immortal.”

Because it's relevant, one coworker, 1, is a Black woman. As we talked about "Walk on the Wild Side," the other coworker, 2, clearly felt awkward about explaining why Walk on the Wild Side was racially insensitive. I personally didn't feel like a line referring to "colored girls" singing was out of line as a historical reference, so I quoted the line for 1 so she wasn't sitting in information limbo while we tiptoed around it. Later, when just 1 and I were talking, she pointed me at lyrics she'd found when reading up on Lou Reed. From I Wanna Be Black:

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"I want to be black
Have natural rhythm
Shoot twenty feet of jism..."

"Have a girlfriend named Samantha
And have a stable of foxy whores..."
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And that's leaving out a lot of other lines that would be, to put it mildly, inappropriate in a present-day context.

I think I said something like "Wow. That's really not ok." Because there wasn't really anything else to be said about that at that point. How do you understand and respond to something like that? Later, I looked around the internet to get an understanding of the context and to help me relate the song to the artist and his thoughts and intentions. I'm not going to try to contextualize it here because it's still rather outside my experience and understanding.

Sometimes people's reactions to problematic behavior on the part of content creators means is to believe that all of the content produced by that creator is indelibly stained by their thoughts and words and must be forever shunned. (Of course forever is a short time these days, but that's a tangent.) Whose work could we actually appreciate then, other than perhaps Fred Rogers?

I think there are things that shouldn't be part of the popular culture of TV, radio, and other such media. Things like Walk on the Wild Side and - another piece of media I haven't touched on here - Baby It's Cold Outside for instance. For a significant portion of people who hear them, they exist outside of their context and, in that way, are perfectly legitimate targets of serious criticism**. I still think they can be consciously enjoyed without inherently accepting racism or domestic violence.

Is such media categorically different from Reed's "I Wanna Be Black" or the Beatles "Run For Your Life"? If so, what differentiates them? If not, where is the line between 'acceptable in context' and 'simply unacceptable?'

And lastly, should I just shut the hell up and enjoy music? I guess that question is basically moot though. It's funny how strongly a question I was asked elsewhere on Facebook recently has stuck with me lately.

"Why do you care so much about this?"

How could I not? How could I *possibly* not?

--Footnotes

*I almost feel like Beatles albums don't even need to be introduced as such because everyone knows the names, but that's never really been true, and becomes less so as time passes.

**Meaning is created from, and exists entirely in, context. See the use of the word queer, for instance. If a song is felt to be misogynist or racist, then in a very real and important way, it *is*. To say otherwise; to say "if you knew the context you'd understand and your opinion is not valid" is a form of cultural elitism. But it's not *always* misogynist or racist. Or always *and* not always? Some kind of quantum state of...what? Problematicness? Culture is hard.

Seeing that presentation on mapping the Holocaust affected me more than I realized. There was a point during the presentation when I was feeling uncomfortable enough to think about leaving. I didn't because it felt like I was overreacting. The discomfort I was feeling was difficult to pin down, and I didn't want to look like I wasn't appreciating the talk, and the work she was doing is amazing and powerful, and it's important that these things be shared.

I was feeling a delayed reaction I think. It's a bit like a delayed response I had to someone (unintentionally for what that's worth) saying something deeply personally hurtful to me at a social event. I didn't realize how emotional I was at the time because it made me kind of numb.

I've been pretty stressed in general lately, so that doesn't help. But when I started talking to Danae about it last evening on Skype, I realized how upset I was and how difficult it is to deal with thinking about these things. I vividly remembered a picture from the talk and it seemed more powerful than before. I was less numb, or more vulnerable while talking to someone I care about. Especially when that person is ethnically Jewish. And maybe that's another part of why it affected me more; it felt more personal. Maybe part was the viciously explanatory visualizations, presenting this topic in new and more integrated ways. Maybe it's just a different me at a different time in my life with different experiences than the last time I thought seriously about Nazi genocide.

Talking about it, I realized that I was sad and angry. And the anger spilled over a bit, in retrospect, into stronger feelings about other things I was looking at yesterday. The 1940s Miami city directories that listed "white residents" separately from "colored residents," for instance. I happened to see "white residents" at the head a page and got upset. The 1940s. That wasn't that long ago. I asked myself what the hell was wrong with people that they didn't see this?

That picture from the presentation wasn't of something graphic and violent. It was just two columns of people, one of men, one of women and children, lined up in front of the train they'd just disembarked from. The guards at the front, Professor Knowles noted, were sending them one way or another. To barracks and the labor camps, or to death in the gas chambers. But without that context, it's such an innocent image. People in line to stamp their passports or buy tickets. I'm more and more glad that she and her group are doing this work. People need to see the fruits of racism and rampant nationalism, as hard is it is to confront head-on.