Author: connie

Racism permeated our childhood
A muddy stream constant through our lives
Crying out to our innocence with its painfulness
Interfering with our friendships
Seen clearly in our child-eyes as the wrong it was
Murdering the purity of our souls

I’m going to tell three stories, two about myself, and the other told me by a friend who heard it from a friend. All of these story tellers are opposed to racism and trying very hard to eliminate it from our lives, and yet…

I was walking down the street. Some neighbors were planting drought resistant plants in front of their house. They were Latino. My first thought? Wow, they know how important it is to plant drought resistant plants even though they’re Latino.

It took me a moment, but then I recognized the subtle racism of my thought. They’re Latinos so they won’t know about these things – won’t be educated …

Wrong!

One day I was standing opposite the side door to a church where I would be attending an event in the evening. A black man came along and moved back and forth in front of the door, reading the sign on it and looking around. If he’d been white I’d probably assumed he was trying to figure out if this was the place he was looking for, but the first thought that flickered through my head was, Is he looking around to see if anyone is watching him — planning to go in and steal something?

Fortunately, I erased that thought almost immediately in a wave of shame, my face turning hot with embarrassment. My face got hot again that night as I recognized him. He was the pianist for that night’s event.

It is impossible to avoid the rampant racism around us. What we can do is be alert for it, recognize it, and name it when we find it floating through our heads.

The other day someone told me a story her friend had told her. The story was really about the reaction of the friend to being suddenly and without cause punched in the face. The friend was proud of himself – and rightly so – for not responding violently, instead saying, “I think you’ve got the wrong guy.”

But the story I want to tell is about the descriptive language used in telling this story. The person who told it to me said, “My friend was walking down the street and all of a sudden this big black man jumped up and punched him in the nose.” She told of her friend’s non-violent response, and then said, “The black man’s friends came running up and pulled him away apologizing to the victim. Another man – a client of my friend’s – ran up and helped my friend.”

After hearing this story, what do you know of the race of the various characters? Only that the perpetrator was “black”. Why did the story teller tell me this and not the race of the others? Because it made the big man sound scarier. There was no other reason race was important in this story at all. Of course, my friend, who works hard at not being racist, was not really aware of having done this. This kind of language is so prevalent in our society that it slips out without even the most conscientious of us realizing it.

We in the United States are still seeing “black” as synonymous with “scary”. We must consciously weed this concept out of our minds and our language. Were the guy’s friends scary? No, they were helpful, reasonable. How about the “client”? Was he scary? No. But all of these people were also African American…

Oh, do you notice the difference? Not black, but African American. Not so scary.

We need to get beyond this. Describe someone as black or white if it’s relevant, but not as a stereotype – in this case the stereotype of the black male as violent. Being black or white doesn’t make a person scary. It’s their actions that are frightening whether they are “big black men” or “big white cops.”

Did you notice that? If you’re African American the big scary guy is white. As history shows, not an unreasonable fear.

 

The Lion and the Cougar

Recently a lion was lured out of a wildlife refuge in Zimbabwe in order to be killed by a trophy hunter. The lion was well known by the keepers and others who frequented the refuge. People all over the world were horrified at this senseless killing.

But a Zimbabwean man, Goodwell Zou, told a different story in his opinion piece in the New York Times.  (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/05/opinion/in-zimbabwe-we-dont-cry-for-lions.html?emc=edit_ty_20150805&nl=opinion&nlid=50342746&_r=1) In his village lions were a frightening threat. His uncle was attacked by one, others were killed by them. He was glad this lion was killed.

When I was a child one of my favorite books was Man-Eating Tigers of Kumaon, by Jim Corbett. This was an adult book, but the stories Corbett told of his years in India hunting animals that were threatening people in small villages were captivating. Why? Not because of the thrill of the chase, but because Corbett was able to see both sides of the conflict.

Corbett’s compassion for both the animals he killed and the people who were endangered by them was what drew my attention. I remember the story of the Thak tiger, a very young mother, who had been shot by buckshot causing her inner and outer skin to grow together. Think of your cat and its loose outer fur. When Thak’s inner and outer skin grew together she could no longer hunt her regular prey. She couldn’t move fast enough. Instead she killed a six year old child and a grandmother.

Corbett did believe in human exceptionalism. Making the decision on whether or not the tiger or the humans should survive, he didn’t see any choice. Humans came first. Today we are beginning to see things differently. Steven Shaviro  says in The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism (Posthumanities), “Indeed, human exceptionalism is even less tenable today, now that we know that not only chimpanzees and parrots but also fruit flies, trees, slime molds and bacteria communicate, calculate, and make unforced decisions…”

Corbett was a British colonist. I wonder what his choice would have been between a “white” man and one of the villagers? We are still struggling with “White man exceptionalism”, much less human exceptionalism.

Goodwell Zou says, in his article: “Don’t tell us what to do with our animals when you allowed your own mountain lions to be hunted to near extinction in the eastern United States. Don’t bemoan the clear-cutting of our forests when you turned yours into concrete jungles.” White man exceptionalism sometimes sounds like ‘do as I say, not as I do.’

Actually, I’m willing to guess that Europeans and Westerners had a great deal to do with the clear-cutting of his country’s forests – as they (we) did here.  For the villagers, the defense against the lions has to do with survival, but the exploitation of African, and of our own, forests has more to do with greed. The destruction of habitat is the biggest killer of nonhuman species all over the world. It probably has killed more lions than trophy hunters have. (I am not excusing the trophy hunter. Anyone who kills a living being so he can hang its head or skin on a wall is reprehensible … and disgusting.)

But does Goodwell Zou really want Zimbabweans to make the same mistakes we made? Does he really want Zimbabwe to be a “concrete jungle?” I can’t imagine that he does.

Recently, outside of Los Angeles, a cougar (mountain lion) was killed on a freeway. The freeway runs in a mountainous area right through the middle of the cougars’ habitat. Advocates are trying to get a “wildlife bridge” built across this freeway to allow passage for cougars and other wildlife. This will protect both the animals and the humans in cars who might hit animals dashing across the freeway.

Cougars have been known to attack humans, although rarely, and they are not as powerful an animal as the African lion. In my community of Berkeley, CA, twenty minutes from San Francisco, we have had cougar sightings, mostly in the less populated hills, but at least once on the main downtown street.  Some people, of course, called for killing the cougar, but most of the town just wanted her relocated to a more rural environment.

As for the one sighted in the hills around the large complex of the Lawrence National Laboratory – the three thousand plus workers were just warned to be alert, and all of us were told to keep our distance since she might have cubs.

Mostly, I think we were delighted that these magnificent wild creatures were going to be living near us.  And that’s the way I feel about the skunk, the opossum – even the raccoons in my back yard. I’m working on the ants.