Lost in transit

a person should not believe in an ism

This starts with some stuff I've been reading about recently (racism), derails briefly with a book analogy, morphs into some stuff I've been thinking about a lot (culture), and then gets sort of preachy. Like most stuff I write, I guess.

First, I think racism is sort of boring. If you have made it to adulthood and still think a person can be meaningfully judged on the basis of skin color, then you are a bore. That people do so is beyond question, as is the fact that those people are boring. That people who are judged on the basis of their skin color tend to be upset about it is reasonable; sometimes I will complain about how stupid romance novels are, and sometimes I find it entertaining to sit with people and ridicule romance novels to bits, and sometimes I find talking about them in disparaging terms (or despairing terms, which sounds similar but is different), to be almost as boring as the books and the people who read them. True fact, though: Romance novels outsell any other genre. So: read them openly, or read them in secret, or deny having ever read one ever, but denying that they exist and have true financial power is not merely ignorant. Racism is the same: whether or not you personally contribute to the 55% of paperback sales, and whether you feel qualified to discuss lunch counters and workplace nooses, and whether your book was passed over because it didn't have a heaving bosom on the cover, and wait: boy am I tangled. Anyway I'm saying: Racism is boring. I don't find discussing it to be quite as boring, although it can be exhausting. I don't doubt that it exists. I don't have a single clue what to do about it.

Culturalism is the thing I've been thinking about more, though. I left Japan largely because I felt I was becoming a real culturalist, and a bit of a racist as well. It is very hard to have your hair pawed at, your breasts discussed, your body grabbed every time you're on public transit. It's hard to regularly field questions about whether all Americans are fat like you, ugly like your president, stupid like your television shows. It's hard, particularly when presented with a culture that seems so uniform, to not start turning around and judging that culture, as a whole, as you feel like you're being judged. It's hard to not remember that there are 248 people on that rush hour train that may not be trying to touch you, that in one day you probably had at least one intelligent question for each insulting one. It's easier to start saying, "These people..." and then you get words like "always" in there and pretty soon you sound as horrible as the kids who point or throw stones at you in terror; as the man who turned you down for an English teaching job because you have blue eyes. Like a devil, he said, or a ghost. Stupid nip.

But I didn't want to be that person. And that's one of the main reasons I left.

I do understand that it's instinctive to want to make sense of things by grouping them somehow. Look, I'm the kid who "played" with Legos by sorting them into little piles by size and then by color. You mean you can build stuff? Huh. So I get why even people with the best intentions say, "In this culture, everybody does things this way"-- among other things, you want to do your best to not offend people, go marching across the tatami mat with your shoes on, whatever, and making a note of the differences is one way to avoid making a mess. And I understand that it's interesting to evaluate things as if there were some universal scale of "good" and "bad". I understand these feelings, I've experienced these feelings, I've acted on these feelings. I've explained knowingly that it's a Czech tradition to do X or Y, that X is better than the US way or Y is worse, whatever. I'm not saying I'm perfect.* But there's a point at which you're not talking about the behavior, you're talking about the people, and that's right when you step into a bad ism.

*I've also slept on the occasional sidewalk, and while I'm not denying that I did so, I'm saying it's in my plans to avoid doing so again, and I'd advise you to do the same.

And now we get where we were going. I think that most racism in the US is actually culturalism, and I think that the "different culture" justification is used by means of saying "but I'm not a RACist" and I'm increasingly thinking: so what? In a way, culturalism is worse than racism, because it's more easily justified. But they are different, says the culturalist, and it's true: if your culture prefers certain behaviors, even if you personally do not, then you have a different perspective than someone from a culture that doesn't accept that behavior. But the minute you start judging a group of people on the basis of that one thing, you're doing the same thing the racist does. Your "pioneering vanguard" does have the whiff of a burning cross to it, to be honest.

I've lived here 1/3 of my life, and the longer I live here, the more I realize that for a small, nearly monolingual, nearly monoracial country, the diversity is pretty impressive. When I got here, I wanted to make sense of the culture and I had to take on a lot of things as being representative of a whole in order to see where I fit into the picture. It should also be noted that I was much younger then. Czechs like beer. Hey, you're black, do you like soul music? Czech students are unabashed cheaters. Hey, you're Asian, you must be really good at math. The thing is, at some point you should be able to come to terms with the fact that just because most things are true doesn't mean all things are true, and therefore you might be better off assuming that no things are true. It might be easier to set down the romance novel and try a different book, something with a plot you can't predict. You might try a mystery novel. You might try thinking outside of genre altogether.

Posted by anne at July 2, 2007 07:38 PM