I've gone back and forth about publishing this post over the last day or so, and i still reserve the right to change my mind again and yank it 20 minutes after i hit the publish button.
So yesterday morning, i got an email from a reader, forwarding a post from the Trinity Park listserv. The author of the post had his house burgled, and responded with an email of the kind that almost always starts out with some flavor of "I'm not a racist, but . . ." A neighbor had seen the perp, and described him as a Black man with a parka. The author asked his neighbors to call the police if they saw any "minorities" near his house in the future.
If you don't see how that's a racist statement, try this thought experiment. Last week,
three School of Science and Math students were held up at gunpoint near their campus in the Watts Hospital-Hillandale neighborhood. The suspect was described as a white male in a dark sedan. Imagine an email to concerned residents asking them to call 911 whenever they saw a white man in a dark sedan in the vicinity of NCSSM.
Absurd, right?
Or imagine if the perp had red hair and freckles. (Mrs. D reports that she was mugged once in San Francisco by a guy with red hair and freckles.) Could you conceivably put a post out asking for the police to be called whenever someone with red hair and freckles was near your house without being mocked?
I don't think you can possibly claim that it's not racist. I don't know the guy who wrote it, and that's one of the reasons why i didn't publish that email yesterday. For all i know he's a really nice guy who was angry and upset about having his home broken into (and believe me, i know exactly how he feels) who just misspoke. He did, after all, apologize for his remarks several times on the Trinity Park listserv.
So why was this comment acceptable to any of the several residents of Trinity Park who devoted so much energy to defending it the past day and a half?
I can probably make a quick list in my head of the people XXXXXX is likely to have visit him, and all of them are white. So, rather than being racist, my neighbor has made a good logical deduction (XXXXXX, this one is for you):
1. We don't expect anyone other than [People X, Y, and Z], who all happen to be white, to visit the house.
2. Thus, anyone who doesn't match that description (in this case "white") and is hanging around was NOT invited, and is likely up to no good.
I can understand that many people would take this the wrong way and have their feelings hurt. However, I'm pretty sure he meant that anyone other than those he would expect to visit him *hanging around* (not merely passing by, XXXXXX, although can I understand why you're angry) should warrant enough suspicion to have the police involved.
Right, so people who aren't People X,Y, and Z, but who do happen to be white, what about them? They get a pass because they're white? Sorry, that's not logic. That's racism.
And the rest of the folks who chimed in to defend these racist comments really can't be excused. They can only be pitied and reviled.
Labels: Durham, metablogging, racism
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