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FLIP_RACISM
November 14, 2020
Okay, here's an odd dream for you:
DREAM_CRITIC
Sitting next to my partner, we were
watching together a stack of recent A common enough experience,
videos I'd download and set up in even pre-Covid.
sequence on my laptop, using the
living room television as an BUFFER_YOURSELF
external monitor.
In one video a music critic was
doing a compare-and-contrast of
two jazz performances, one of them
by some white people the other by
a black guy.
The critic asserts that the black
player's "playing" (musicianship)
was better. "Let me show you what
I mean."
He then cuts to a bit of stage schtick:
a white duo-- evidently something like
a husband-and-wife team-- cease playing
for a moment, and the white guy runs up This motion was a particularly white
to the front of the stage, puts his bit of avant-art schtick: deliberate
arms around the white woman, and drags and mannered like "performance art",
her back up stage. it wasn't intended to look like a
spontaneous display of affection.
My immediate reaction was The woman freezes in place and lets
a quip something like: herself be dragged backwards.
"Oh, if that was a black guy,
all of the women who loved him Perhaps inadvertantly, it seemed
would've raved about that like the man was treating the
schtick." woman as an object: for a moment,
she became the instrument he was
Dangerbaby responded, sounding playing.
shocked: "Are you *serious*?"
(And just to be clear, this
Actually, I wasn't sure how serious performance is entirely
I was, and I stopped the video to made up creation of the
think about it for a moment. dream world, I can't think of
anything like this I've
What I settled on was something like: actually seen that fits this
description.)
The critic's reaction was the flip-side
of the attitude that black people are
emotional, "natural": white people are
supposed to be intelligent and controlled.
The critic-- I think (in this dream)--
wanted the white performers to display
precise virtuouso muscianship, and objected
to coloring outside the lines even a little
bit. Had the race of the performers been
reversed, if it was a black couple doing
this-- or something like it-- in the middle
of a performance, it would not have excited
any comment.
No nice white liberal commentator would've
complained about them not sticking to the
narrowly-defined task, and they certainly
wouldn't have complained about them being
pretentious or what not.
So-- still in dream-- I concluded that
this *probably* wasn't a case of me
being racist, but rather me trying to
track the way people's reactions are
influenced by racial attitudes (among
other things-- you could probably also
attack that in-dream quip on grounds of
sexism, "all the women who loved him").
We really aren't "color blind", and
pretending that we are doesn't seem
reasonable or effective.
But then, it's entirely possible my in-dream
self (and me, right now?) was being clueless
in some respects, and was inadvertantly
buying into and promulgating some racist
and/or sexist attitudes without realizing
it-- these things can get pretty subtle.
For example: for a white fellow like myself
it's sometimes a small problem to avoid
seeming like I'm "trying to be black".
If I'm perceived like that, I could get
responses ranging from "who do you think you
are?" to "cultural imperialism!".
But I can only imagine how bad questions
like that are for black people. "Should
I relax here and show them how black I Every one of us would at
am, or would it be better to show-off how some time or other like
clever and intelligent I am, and risk to just put this stuff
being accused of trying to be white?" aside and just "be
human"/"be ourselves",
but we can't really.
I can get closer to pretending
that race isn't an issue for
me personally, but that in itself
is a racial phenomena: white is
"normal", white is the default.
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