Finding a way to learn from the harm we do.
This is a story for anyone who has found themselves in a position of privilege, and has felt the discomfort of being reminded of that privilege.
I’m going to tell you about a time I said something racist, and what I learned from the experience. Inevitably, this story centres a white person’s experience. I hope it’s still a story worth telling and worth hearing, but you can be the judge of that.
It was many years ago, and the context was Facebook. (This was before it became unavoidably obvious to me that Facebook is an absolute cesspit, although—of course—it was absolutely already a cesspit.) A college friend of mine, an academic specializing in music theory, made a post about hip-hop and rap.
I wish I had kept a record of exactly what I said in my comment, but it was something about misogyny. Rap and hip-hop were really misogynist, right?
A friend of my friend, a Black man whom I didn’t know myself, responded, saying that he was just waiting for some white person to say something racist. Again, I wish I could remember his exact words, but all I remember clearly is how obviously outraged and disgusted he was.
I felt something that seemed like maybe hurt, maybe indignation. Autistic people often have trouble identifying and interpreting our emotions; it’s often hard for me to label emotions more clearly than “bad” or “really bad” or “truly awful”. This feeling was just “bad”: some kind of uncomfortable, combined with what I now realize was injured pride.
I wrote a response. Yet again, I don’t remember the exact words. But I know my response was defensive of my moral status (“I am not a racist...”); pitted my own minoritized identity against his (“I’m a woman, so of course I’m worried about misogyny...”); and tried to distinguish what I saw as “genuine” racism from valid criticism. That last point is the only one where I do remember my choice of words: “There is no artistic merit in misogyny”.
None of this went down well. He misunderstood me as saying that there was no artistic merit in rap or hip-hop at all, and called this flagrantly racist.
I experienced some new emotions that were squarely in the “very bad” category, along with the righteous indignation of having been misinterpreted, and started writing an even more outraged response: if he’d bothered to take just a moment to read the words I actually used, rather than the words he expected to see, he would not be accusing me of...
And then, thank all that’s holy, I experienced another emotion. It was in the “truly awful” category, and it was one I could actually identify: it was shame.
Why, I asked myself, would he expect to see me say that rap and hip-hop have no artistic merit? What did that expectation say about how he had previously been treated by people like me, or seen people like me treat people like him? What did it say about my specific behaviour in this specific situation?
I took a moment to do a little research into the history of discourses about rap and hip-hop, and particularly the performative outrage from white people around matters such as violence and misogyny. I tried to think honestly about the kind of popular music I grew up with: mostly white folk and rock music. I realized that my music is full of women being infantilized (“baby”, “doll”, “little girl”); treated as commodities to be consumed (“honey”, “brown sugar”—a little side-order of racism from the Stones); subjected to casual threats of violence (“You’d better run for your life if you can, little girl...”) and coercion (“Every move you make, every step you take, I’ll be watching you...”) which are treated as the epitome of romance at white weddings.
I’m so used to the way white rock and pop singers express their misogyny that it barely even registers for me any more.
There's been a lot of discussion about misogyny in rap and hip-hop. Some great work has been done by African-American feminist scholars, and examines negative portrayals of Black women specifically. I'm not claiming that there is no misogyny issue, or that these critiques are not valid. But there's a difference between speaking from experience and from cultural understanding, and speaking from ignorance and stereotype. I was doing the latter.
Rap and hip-hop have a misogyny problem. Every culture in existence has a misogyny problem. Scholars have compared rap and hip-hop with traditionally white genres such as country to make a similar point: the misogyny is everywhere. So for me to think that it’s a specific problem of Black genres rather than a systemic problem that infects popular culture in general, and decide to raise my voice about it without doing even minimal reading and research, was racist.
I tried, very hard, to imagine this interaction from the perspective of my friend’s friend. I knew little about him, except that he was (at least, his Facebook profile presented him as) a young, Black, American man. Standing in his shoes was, without doubt, an exercise in stereotyping. But it was the best I could do.
From the imagined perspective of this man, I saw a white woman make a racist comment on a post celebrating Black popular music. I reacted with anger and a little contempt. She did the classic white-fragility thing of denying that she’s a racist, and tried to turn this around on me by making it solely about misogyny (implicitly making herself the primary victim). Finally, reading through my anger, I slightly misinterpreted part of what she said.
I came to the conclusion that the unflattering misreading of my words was, ultimately, my own fault. I had given this man every reason to expect that what I wrote would be yet more racism disguised as feminism. Saying that there was no artistic merit in rap and hip-hop was perfectly in character for the white woman I had presented to him in this interaction.
I’m grateful to that man for having the courage to speak, and I’m grateful to whatever impulse made me hear him over the mighty roar of my own fragility. If he hadn’t spoken so vehemently, with such emotional force, I don’t think I would ever have realised the racism of my comment.
Experiencing harm legitimizes fury. His outrage wasn’t just the medium; it was also the message.
I deleted my own outraged response to him and started again. I apologized for my racism, and for trying to defend it. I probably also said that I didn’t believe at all that rap and hip-hop have no artistic merit, but that I understood why he’d misread my comment.
He never acknowledged the apology. I felt emotions about that, too. It took me a while to understand that I wanted him to comfort me; to tell me that it was okay, and that I had done well to recognize my racism. I wanted him to say that, indeed, he saw now that he had misunderstood part of my comment. I wanted him to tell me that I’m not racist.
I realize that this is also racism.
I can’t say how my original comment made that stranger feel. All I know is that I wrote words that added, in however banal a way, to the traumatic burden of racism borne by any Black man in the United States. And having, belatedly, come to recognize my own ignorance, I wanted the person I had harmed to comfort me.
But he needed not to comfort me. Whether he needed to be comforted, I don’t know. I hope he was. I hope he vented about this with people who understood and who helped him feel however he needed to feel about it.
And I needed not to be comforted. I needed to sit with the discomfort of having perpetrated racism, of having hurt someone through that racism, and of being unable to make it right.
That man would never become someone who hadn’t experienced my racism, however fully I apologized and committed to doing better. And so I would never become someone who had not perpetrated racism through my ignorance and thoughtlessness.
I’m not telling you this story so that you will think well of me. I’m not asking you to vilify me, either. This isn’t an exercise in self-flagellation, any more than it’s fishing for compliments. I don’t think I deserve any particular praise or blame beyond what I received at the time. But I do hope you might find something worth taking away from this story.
I will always be that person who said something racist on Facebook. And I know I’m capable of speaking out of the ignorance of privilege again. The only hope I have of avoiding that is to chip away at my own ignorance by listening to, and hearing, people whose experience of the world is not like mine.