I came to Boston for a week in order to figure out if this is where I want to go to grad school. I want to get an MSW and eventually become a child therapist, and there was a program over at Boston College that caught my interest. I decided to attend their information session as well as spend some time in the area. While I love the Brookline neighborhood I'm staying in (I've subletted a room for a week), and there are parts of Boston that are beautiful, there was something I couldn't quite put my finger on that made me uneasy. Maybe uneasy isn't quite the right word. I just felt like there was something off; like there was this secret club everyone was in, but couldn't talk about or didn't even acknowledge its existence (yeah, kinda like Fight Club). At first I thought it was just an East Coast thing, but later I realized what it was. This town, and the BC campus in particular, is fuckin' white! Sure there's the occasional "minority", but there doesn't seem to be a strong representation, especially on the campus. I spoke to one of my roommates' friends about it, and he said it's all because the white kids have the super rich parents who can send them to a good school, even though the kids themselves are dumb as shit. (Ok, maybe not all of them, but for those of us with experience, we know this to be true. The rich kids get into the good schools, no matter what their SAT scores are.)
But then I noticed something else, too. It was when I was taking a bus on my way in to Cambridge. I was feeling a little anxious, as is usual whenever I'm in transit somewhere, and I noticed that my anxiety decreased when I saw two African American young men get on the bus. Usually, for a white girl like myself, even one from San Francisco, seeing those two men would have had the opposite effect. We live in a racist society, and those stereotypes and prejudices are in us all the time, as much as we might despise them. But when I saw those men, it was like my subconscious mind went, "Thank God! I've had enough of these scary white people!" These men represented something familiar.
While being in this city and seeing all the white people around here, I was constantly aware of my own desire to fit in somehow. "Do I look like I could be from here?" Do they recognize me as an outsider?" Think about it: I'm a white woman in a white crowd and I'm thinking these things to myself. Weird. But as soon as I saw someone who was not of my racial identification, I relaxed. The pressure was lifted from me. It wasn't that I thought of myself as superior to them, and therefore I could relax. It was something else, but I still couldn't figure it out.
I noticed this again as I went on the T around town. I was much more relaxed and even happier when I was in the presence of people of color. As I noticed this, I began to really think about why this was. It would be easy for me to just start applauding myself about how I've clearly "moved passed" racism. "I have learned to love people of color like they were my brothers and sisters! Amen!" Not so fast. It doesn't work that way. I'll admit that I will, in a moment of anger or frustration, internally call someone a racial epithet; or when I'm nervous because someone is acting in a way that I see as threatening or rude, I'll blame it on that person's race. Even if I stop myself right after thinking that, I still thought it. Racism lives on, no matter how much we (white people) wish to think otherwise. (Hey, just because you voted for Obama doesn't mean racism is dead.) But why did being in the presence of people of color, regardless if I wasn't interacting with them, put me at ease? The only thing I could come up with was: familiarity.
As a little bit of background, I'm from San Francisco, a city known for its diversity. I also formerly tutored inner city kids where there wasn't a white face amongst them, except for me and the other white teachers. I practice yoga at a studio where not everyone in the room is a straight white woman in her late twenties/early 30s. (We actually have a great crew of diverse queer people in attendance.) I'm used to riding on the bus and hearing at least three different languages at once (and none of them are from Europe). I'm not phased at all by any of it. I live with at least four or five people of color, and I'm close to a few of them. So I guess you could say that I'm used to being the odd one out. I've learned to accept my "minority" status in my small social circle. Except, maybe it's not that simple either. Yes, I have the appreciation for diversity, and I have the desire for the end of racial hegemony (which is an effect of systematic racism), but with this can come a kind of apathy and ignorance of race and the need to form genuine relationships with people and communities of color.
I realized that what I was encountering here in Boston was "color noise", as opposed to "white noise." I didn't feel the need to interact with these people, and I was satisfied to have them just be the background for my surroundings. What has often been noticed by those who study racism regarding white people in this country and their attitudes toward race and racism is, 1) the idea that being white is "normal", and 2) that there is no need to have significant relationships with other people of color, as long as they themselves don't harbor any personal prejudices. Both of these are outright lies. Yes, white is seen as the norm, but it doesn't mean that white isn't a race (but it is obviously a race with clear social distinction and social consequences based upon that distinction). Essentially, for most white people in this country, they have gotten used to the "white noise." For me, because of my own experiences in diverse settings, including being in a student activist group where white people were the minority, I have experienced getting used to the "color noise." I didn't notice the diversity I was experiencing until it was gone. I suppose this can be seen as a good thing. It shows that there is a possibility for, not only racial tolerance, but racial acceptance. But again, even though I have had positive experiences and relationships with people of color, I am still enclosed in my white bubble. I no longer have close relationships with my former student activists (Facebook does not count), I work as a nanny in a predominantly white neighborhood in San Francisco, I attend a predominantly white parish in a denomination known for its whiteness (Episcopalian), and while I do practice yoga at a diverse studio, I am engaging in something that has been massively appropriated by white Western culture and which continues to be marketed to the white community.
It is not enough that I am used to living with and around people and communities of color. Let it be understood that I am not trying to desparage myself in any way when I say that. Instead, I am acknowledging that more needs to be done, not only by myself, but by other people like me. Relationships need to be developed and encouraged in our communities. White people need to be aware of the problems that exist within communities of color, such as issues of environmental justice, and how our consumer practices can either help or hinder the solutions. We need to start having real conversations about race and racism, and not just in terms of black and white, either. We cannot become used to the "color noise" lest we become deaf to the real issues of justice and equality in our midst.
Sunday, October 24, 2010
Thursday, October 7, 2010
This Still Gets Me
About four months ago, I bought the Van Morrison album "Astral Weeks" on vinyl. For those of you who know Van Morrison, this is considered to be one of his best albums (though it turns out, he himself never thought much of it. He just created it as a way to pay the bills). The title track is one of the most beautiful on the album, and one of my favorite songs ever. Around the same time that I bought the album, I went looking on YouTube for a possible video of the title track. The first one that came up was a live cover done by Glen Hansard. The minute this guy opened his mouth, I knew I had come upon something really special. (You may remember Hansard as one of the main characters in the movie "Once".) There was a quality in his voice that captivated me, and when he uttered the words in the chorus my heart just ached. It still does, and I'm still trying to figure out why.
Hansard doesn't use all of the lyrics that Morrison did, but it doesn't in anyway take away the power of his performance. This song is about desperation, but not in a pathetic sense. It's about a longing for things to be different, to start over. ("Could you find me?/Would you kiss-a my eyes/Lay me down in the silence easy/To be born again.") If you look at the full lyrics here, you can see that this is all about a relationship that is ending, or struggling, or has already ended. He wants to be found by his love, almost like a lost child being found by his mother. He wants the struggle to be over, for the complexity to disappear and be left with one who will always love him, will always find him, and never let him go. He's battling between still loving this person, and realizing that things aren't the way they should be and that it's probably time to go. It's a realistic message, and yet the music behind it makes it poetic and ethereal. It's both relatable and somehow seperate from our existence. I guess this is what really good music can do.
But back to Hansard's performance. He embodies the message of this song by the way he sings it, by the way he passionately strums his beat up guitar. The gentle desperation in his voice as he sings, "Would you find me?" gives way to outrage as he screams, "Don't you point that finger at me, no!" and crazily strums away between two chords as if he's trying to tear his own heart apart to show his anguish. It's perfect, and it gets me every time. I must have posted that video to my Facebook profile at least three times. I want people to get it, to understand the power and emotion behind this little-over-three-minute performance; to feel every word sung not only sink into the soul, but rake across the skin as it makes its way in. . .and to breathe easy and deep while it all happens.
I know it seems silly to be so emotionally attached to one little song, but I'm a firm believer that music is the sound the soul makes. And I'm not the only one who feels this way. According to an article from Wikipedia (yeah, I know), Lester Bangs wrote of the album: "What Astral Weeks deals in are not facts but truths. Astral Weeks, insofar as it can be pinned down, is a record about people stunned by life, completely overwhelmed, stalled in their skins, their ages and selves, paralyzed by the enormity of what in one moment of vision they can comprehend." All of this in an album. A man struggles between love and anger and desperation in one little song. And another man picks up his beat up guitar, gently tells the crowd in his lilting Irish accent, "I'm gonna play you a Van Morrison song," and succeeds in making every phrase sung come alive with the passion and complex emotion it was meant to have. Beautiful.
Hansard doesn't use all of the lyrics that Morrison did, but it doesn't in anyway take away the power of his performance. This song is about desperation, but not in a pathetic sense. It's about a longing for things to be different, to start over. ("Could you find me?/Would you kiss-a my eyes/Lay me down in the silence easy/To be born again.") If you look at the full lyrics here, you can see that this is all about a relationship that is ending, or struggling, or has already ended. He wants to be found by his love, almost like a lost child being found by his mother. He wants the struggle to be over, for the complexity to disappear and be left with one who will always love him, will always find him, and never let him go. He's battling between still loving this person, and realizing that things aren't the way they should be and that it's probably time to go. It's a realistic message, and yet the music behind it makes it poetic and ethereal. It's both relatable and somehow seperate from our existence. I guess this is what really good music can do.
But back to Hansard's performance. He embodies the message of this song by the way he sings it, by the way he passionately strums his beat up guitar. The gentle desperation in his voice as he sings, "Would you find me?" gives way to outrage as he screams, "Don't you point that finger at me, no!" and crazily strums away between two chords as if he's trying to tear his own heart apart to show his anguish. It's perfect, and it gets me every time. I must have posted that video to my Facebook profile at least three times. I want people to get it, to understand the power and emotion behind this little-over-three-minute performance; to feel every word sung not only sink into the soul, but rake across the skin as it makes its way in. . .and to breathe easy and deep while it all happens.
I know it seems silly to be so emotionally attached to one little song, but I'm a firm believer that music is the sound the soul makes. And I'm not the only one who feels this way. According to an article from Wikipedia (yeah, I know), Lester Bangs wrote of the album: "What Astral Weeks deals in are not facts but truths. Astral Weeks, insofar as it can be pinned down, is a record about people stunned by life, completely overwhelmed, stalled in their skins, their ages and selves, paralyzed by the enormity of what in one moment of vision they can comprehend." All of this in an album. A man struggles between love and anger and desperation in one little song. And another man picks up his beat up guitar, gently tells the crowd in his lilting Irish accent, "I'm gonna play you a Van Morrison song," and succeeds in making every phrase sung come alive with the passion and complex emotion it was meant to have. Beautiful.
Wednesday, October 6, 2010
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