So this afternoon my girlfriend and I were lying down to take a nap. However before we drifted into our own vivid dreamworlds, we chatted about what was rolling aroung in our minds. Early this morning she'd been putting together the new dresser for our bedroom and while she assembled, I read to her from WEB Du Bois' book, "The Souls of Black Folk". (It's for a paper that's due next Friday along with a great book called, "Representations of the Intellectual" by Edward Said - I highly reccomend it to everyone.) As I read the words of the man who became disenchanted with the Civil Rights movement and gave up his citizenship after working so hard to achieve equality for he and his people, I kept having this nagging thought that I brought up to my significant other, "Honey, even today supremacy exists. We don't give it that name, of course, but I still feel that there are white people out there who feel entitled, and better than other races. Why can't we all realize that this isn't paradise? This isn't our personal haven and we have inescapabl diversity all around us. If we don't learn to compromise and understand that this isn't paradise, we're going to keep smacking our heads in the wall wondering why we're not getting anywhere. You can have your god, but I've got mine. And don't tell me that I'm going to hell because MY god doesn't believe that."
Minority groups are marginalized. Women are marginalized. Take a look at any of the standing jokes out there about blonds, priests, rabbis, blacks, asians, gays - a certain supremacy and belittlement is behind those jokes.
How do we even start to make things better? I'd vote to listen, to acknowledge and actually HEAR what others are saying, and then to work collectively towards a common goal. However, there are so many groups out there that feel so many other groups are an abomination, I don't know where to start.
Liz
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Is that many people see no problem with making the jokes, and many more tolerate them because they want to avoid a moment of social awkwardness. I've noticed the trend most -- at least among certain groups at my University -- with people denouncing anything they don't like as "gay". It is quite frustrating, and lately I've been letting them know it.
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"We cannot redeem evil, we must combat it." -- Jean Paul Sartre
Absolutely - at work the other day as I was leaving my shared cubicle area, one of the managers walked in and started talking about something personal going on in her life and denounced it as, "so gay". Now, being a lesbian m'own self, I stopped, got excited because I heard the word, "gay" which I associate with a positive connotation, and said it back to her. Unfortunately she meant the "weird, odd, freak-of-nature" kind of 'gay', but what she doesn't see is that by reinforcing that phrase time and again, she's reinforcing how others see gay people.
Whatever your orientation, thank you very much for standing up for gays. I can imagine that you must have received your own ridicule on our behalf, but I appreciate what you did, and what you said. So thank you. It's people like you who will help change the world one action at a time.
Liz
"drink from that wishing well but may it never quench your thirst" - Indigo Girls
The other half of the time, however, I get an "Oh. Damn. I never thought of it that way", and even if I only got that result one out of every hundred times it would still be worth doing.
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"We cannot redeem evil, we must combat it." -- Jean Paul Sartre