Can I Just Point Out How Racist I'm Not Being Right Now?
Hey there, don't mind me. I didn't mean to jostle your
no-doubt-vital train of thought. I just wanted to point out that I'm
not being racist at all. Just in case it had escaped your notice,
which it easily could have.
There are any number of racist things I could be saying, or even just
implying through body language or little nose sounds. I'm not going
to mention any of them, because I'm so un-racist I can't even think
of the racist things I'm not doing. Plus it might inadvertently be
racist of me to denounce those hypothetical words or actions. Why
take the risk?
I'm just looking for a little acknowledgement here. It's a lot of
work not being racist. It probably burns like 100 calories a day,
even in a seated position. There are thousands of tiny muscles inside
me right now, clenching and unclenching with the constant work of
steering a bigotry-free course.
And before you say anything, let me just say that it may not in any
way be my fault that I might conceivably harbor some internalized
racism. I watched millions of hours of television in the 1970s. I
listened to the Rolling Stones before I found out how bad they were.
I strongly suspect my gold filling came from South Africa, back when
it was still under Apartheid. Nobody told me Sammy Hagar was Aryan.
Plus also, I fully believe in the collective unconsciousness –
the idea that we all share a sort of joint checking account of myths
and archetypes and TV-Land reruns. So maybe it's actually your unacknowledged racism that I'm not expressing. Or even the bias of
some seventy-nine-year-old guy in Alaska who happens to share some
of the same subconscious real estate with me.
I just want to point out that it's been five whole minutes and I haven't
said or done anything racist. Not even gray-area racist, like Michael
Jackson humor. Or advocating digging a mile-wide alligator moat along
the Mexican border. Actually, it's been way longer than five minutes,
but I only started counting five minutes ago.
I should get a cookie or something. Not necessarily for just five
minutes of non-racism, but maybe for a whole clean week. There should
be a gold star, or a coupon good towards a free iTunes download.
I actually tried hiring a racism coach. Not to coach me on how to
be racist, no no, but to keep me from slipping up. She was a very,
very tall woman, and sometimes I wondered if she had taken steroids
or eaten too much bean curd. She followed me into meetings, loomed
over me at lunch as I ate poached fish, and occasionally crunched
her neck over my shoulder.
Nadia was great, it was very reassuring to have her there, and the
once-a-week hands-on racism-aversion therapy was invaluable. But then
she had to resign due to conflict of interest after she and I launched
a sweaty ear-biting love affair. Apparently it happens a lot with
racism coaches.
There's a larger philosophical point that I've been circling here,
the same way I used to circle Nadia's clitoris with the tips of the
foam-rubber swastika she kept in her office to flagellate her problem
clients.
That point is this: we're always more prone to notice a presence than
an absence. We dwell on the war, and the icecaps, and stuff. But nobody
ever thinks about all the alien invasions, fourth reichs, nuclear-armed
militiamen, mega-volcanoes, mad-cow epidemics and decapitating giant
insect swarms that haven't turned up. My totally non-existent racism
is like those things.
Charlie Anders tried to build a bridge to the 29th century but fell off halfway across. She wrote Choir Boy (Soft Skull 2005) and co-edited She's Such A Geek (Seal 2007). She publishes other magazine and organizes Writers With Drinks in San Francisco.