Talk About It, by Martha Thomases – Brilliant Disguise | @MDWorld

September 9, 2016 Victor El-Khouri 0 Comments

Back to School!  New pencils!  Clean and shiny notebooks!  It is the seasonal equivalent of Anything-Can-Happen-Day!

Supposedly, we go to school to learn things we do not know.  This might seem redundant, because we don’t have to learn things we already know.  It would help if school could also teach us what we don’t know that we don’t know.

I thought about these things when I read this earlier in the week.  Some colleges are using freshman orientation not only to show new students where the classrooms are, and what the library hours are, but also how to interact with students unlike themselves.

Perhaps this strikes you as “coddling” young people, part of unrestrained political correctness, a society where no one’s feelings are allowed to get hurt.  I couldn’t disagree more.  I wish I had an opportunity to attend such a session when I was in college.  I wish I could go to one now.

(Note:  For the purposes of this column, we’re not going to talk about “safe spaces,” a phrase I find so imprecise that it’s like a Rorschach test.)

I want to talk about micro-aggressions, and I want to talk about it from the perspective from a person of privilege.

We have so many different forms of identity today, and it’s been great for our politics, our literature, our comics, our movies and all our other forms of art and communication.  People are rightfully proud of being different races, different ethnicities, different gender identities and having different affectional preferences, among other things.  I love to find out about perspectives other than my own, and the experiences that led to these perspectives.

In the process, I frequently act like a complete asshole.

Some of this is because of my age.  When I was a child, I was taught (perhaps incorrectly) that the polite way to refer to people of color was “colored people.”  That was the term I used, until several years later when we were told that “Negro” was the proper word of respect.  There followed “Afro-American,” “black,” and “African-American.”

There has been a similar evolution of terms for people of Latin-American heritage.  “Hispanic,” “Latino” and now “Latinx” (which I had to Google) compete for space among my brain cells.

Please don’t think I’m saying that trying to keep track of the right words is a hardship, comparable to discrimination in the workplace or murder by cop.  That’s not even vaguely what I mean.  I’m just trying to say it’s easy to screw up.

Add up a ton of people screwing up, and you can see the effects of micro-aggression.  I might mean nothing by my use of a word beyond a thoughtless choice, but it can feel like death by a thousand cuts.

If there was a seminar to which I could go, I could learn how to be more thoughtful.  I could ask the stupid questions in a judgement-free zone.

I could be insulting only when I meant to be.

There are myriad problems with this.  It’s more than a little bit possible that there are regional preferences in language and behavior, so what I learn in New York might not travel to Texas, for example.  Someone might abuse the opportunity to learn something to be a creep, and ask belligerent questions (“Why are women insulted when I tell them they have nice tits?  Isn’t that a compliment?”  “No, it’s not.  It makes us self-conscious.”  “But you have nice tits.”)

The biggest problem is that it is not anyone else’s job to teach us to be thoughtful.  People of color don’t exist to tell me what to call them.  They have enough problems (see the previously mentioned “job discrimination” and “death by cop,” just for examples).  At the same time, I can’t necessarily get a real answer from another white person.

I’ll just have to go on being an asshole, and do my best to at least be a well-meaning one.

As a child, Media Goddess Martha Thomases got on a bus with many black people already seated and, being a big fan of Tarzan movies, shouted, “Look, Mommy!  Natives!”