HatED? Hell, I still do. There was nothing new in it, at least to me, and I get bored easily. Because of the I HAVE A DREAM speech, I was glad that I wasn't on that March on Washington. Is that surprising coming from a person who has a long and friendly letter from Ms King? Probably. I don't like speeches that haven't made me aware of something I didn't already know...
But there WAS something I didn't already know, because of my own personal habits. When I met someone who demonstrated that s/he was adverse to equality, I just avoided him/her. My husband, Jon, and I addressed those issues politically, not interpersonally. Why wreck one's already meager social life? What I wasn't attuned to was that I wasn't in the majority, and that speech wasn't for me; it was for them. If I'd really thought about it, I would have understood why he felt he had to put it the way he did, but I was too busy shaking off the irritation that I always feel when someone spouts social redundancies.
Meager social life? Well, sure. When one is working one's way through college (and in my husband's case, medical school), one has little opportunity to develop a circle of friends. I'm not even sure either of us even WANTED a circle of friends; as Jon says, "I can get more out of a book; it's a distillation of the best the author has to offer." I'm fussier than that: I want entertainment from acquaintances...new ideas, new approaches, etc. In short, I'm always trying to find someone of whom I can approve and who is invested in issues of equality, or, as my site admits, "Seeking: I prefer sensitive, empathetic people who have a well-developed sense of humor and a no-holds-barred, brutal honesty."
I just got off a Political Soul thread where I apparently managed to offend a number of people, and one challenged me to "write my own blog" as opposed to nitpicking someone else's blog.
It was kind of embarrassing, since I have blogs up the wazoo on other sites, but, shit, O dear, here goes:
The major reason for my general disagreeableness on the White Privilege: I benefit. Do you? blog was that it appeared to be a trick question. If one agreed, one was sailing along with the current. If one said "No," as I would have said, then one left oneself open to interminable invective. So I attacked initial blog, especially in the areas where I believed it was inaccurate.
What if it were actually a sincere question? Would a sincere answer of "no," have laid there unattacked? I still doubt that.
Why "no"? If US society (or any society) were truly equal, I would have gotten what I wanted from others a whole lot quicker. Pardon this repetition (from the "White Privilege" thread): When I was roundly attacked in a large women's group for pointing out that Eldridge Cleaver wasn't exactly the great guy that the other women seemed to think, it was a shock to me. Didn't they read his book? Why did women think E.C. was a great guy? Because he had to be a great guy since he was black? Was that it? This incident taught me something about "trick topics".
Because of our age, mine and Jon's, much of political correctness can be laid on our (or our generation's) doorstep. But we weren't politically correct in our own generation, so why should we try to be PC now? I still hang to truth over PC, and to equality over hierarchy...which is a losing position. Hierarchy will almost always trump equality, because it is a part of our social-animal's genetic inheritance. Equality is an intellectual position in a society that has become urban and crowded. The urban societies are regimented. Equality, however, is much more common among hunter-gatherer societies.
I was real proud of Jon when he offered his medical help free to black citizens of Chicago's West Side in 1968. After all, he already was working his way through med school. There were only 3 (one black, one white, one Jewish) med students willing to do it in all of Chicago, so obviously at the time it wasn't politically correct. Upon that effort a health center was built.
Institutions my generation produced are taken for granted by younger people now. Good for him, not that he ever took any credit for it.
I, on the other hand, was really ashamed when I read (no TV then) about a local Berkeley girl who laid down in front of a troop train to force it to stop delivering young drafted men to partake of the US killing machine in SE Asia. My excuse for not doing the same...actually, I had lots of excuses...was piss poor. As a citizen of the US, it was my DUTY to help stop that "travesty of so-called democracy". I don't even remember if she died or got her legs cut off; it was that long ago.
I'm not going to bore you all with a litany of our personal efforts and failures. But get this: No human is entirely culpable for oppression. We're primates, and erecting hierarchies is what primates do. No one is innocent on the basis of suffering/enduring/etc. There are reprehensible blacks and reprehensible whites and reprehensible beiges. When one group attains a leadership position in whatever hierarchy there is, woe be unto others, be they women (as in the PC case of Eldridge Cleaver), or any other group. Hitler was right: People in groups love having a group to victimize, and they need their own personal group to "be superior".
I'm done with (and I certainly never enjoyed it) holding positions of power. In regard to politics, which, after all, is the handling of power, I look for candidates who have suffered some but who understand that loyalty to equality and to factual correctness is essential.
After all, in regard to factual correctness, who in 1968 had a PC...er...Personal Computer? Now there's no excuse for presenting false information, even though I admit it is accessible over the 'net. You just have to be careful, and it's not all that difficult to do.
But what can I say...Jon really likes the I HAVE A DREAM speech. I don't begrudge Jon. We disagree on many issues.
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