priapos

I recently read How to be Black, by Baratunde Thurston, and I enjoyed it a lot. It got me thinking about racism again, but in a more wholistic way. The author managed to really bring me into his experience and let me see things from a new perspective. I actually remembered some uncomfortable instances at work, and I think I have a better idea of what my black coworkers thought at the time, being asked to speak for all black people or similar stupid shit.

I also found the highly amusing website, Yo, Is This Racist?, which seems to have a technical difficulty of some sort at the moment, displaying a bunch of white text on a white background. If someone has done that deliberately, I don't get the message, and couldn't find any indication of it. I just pasted each page into notepad and read it.

I had to step away for a minute, but I wanted to add the original thought that I had that made me want to write this. We have all kinds of ways to say anything we want, and I no longer see the point in trying to defend something as not racist. If it seems even a little racist, we might as well just find a different way to make the same point, and if we can't make the point without sounding even a little racist, then maybe we should re-examine the point itself.

I think pretty highly of intellectual honesty, and I feel childish saying "the n-word" in an intellectual conversation, or reading literature, but if me saying that will keep even one person from feeling one second of shame or rage, then my version of intellectual honesty means that I'll go ahead and feel childish.

Also this article, Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is.