Racism post

[icarus_chained]

Warnings: I am an idealist, and currently a blubbering wreck. Also, for once, I have not censored my opinions. This is an impossibly rare thing for me, and I almost certainly will give offense.

Yena, forgive me.

Okay, right. This is not something I usually do. I'm so, sooo not someone for reactionary posting, and despite my history as a debator, I'm very bad at arguing something I actually feel something about. To most, I seem to float along happily cushioned by an air of aloof apathy, and fair enough, because most of the time, I do. I'm not good at feeling, and distrust passion, and ... to be honest I'm afraid to care for the world, sometimes. Because, my gods, but even the moments I let myself see, let myself open my eyes, it shatters me. The pain of this world we live in, so many people in so much fear ... How can you look, and not suffer? So ... most of the time I try, so very, very hard, not to look, let alone speak.

But sometimes, I have to. Sometimes I see something and it is so ... so stupid, so blind and willfully ignorant, that I can't believe, I can't believe anyone had the guts to say it. Okay, I try not to look at the world around me a lot, and that makes me somewhat of a cold and ineffectual person, but I can honestly say that never once, never once, have I forgotten what it was I was trying not to see. I never once forgot it's existence, never once decided to pretend it didn't exist. I tried not to think about it, not to let it touch me if I could help it, but I never looked right at it and said it wasn't there.

Gah. I'm riled up, and don't know how to explain. So. Basics. This here is on the back of a post made by ilyena_sylph in which she reacted to the comment "But we live in a post-racial society now!", or versions thereof. Now, I hadn't seen that before, as I was fairly successfully insulating myself from the debate. That's why it hit me so hard, I think, because I'd no run up. That statement ...

Right. Some background on me is needed to explain this. Firstly, I am Irish. This has bearing. Secondly, I have never really known true hardship that did not stem from inside myself. I am privileged, and do not deny it. Thirdly, I have little enough experience of the kind of organised, entrenched racism of which Yena speaks. The racism I have met has been of a different, and newer flavour. Fourthly, there have been times when that poison has reached out and touched my life, before I could stop it.

Ireland ... oh, we are a complex little country. We know hate so very well. A reactionary little colony, never quite free of the shadow of past ... I meant to say enslavement. I don't know if that is quite true, but the feeling of being owned injustly ... that is there. We are divided amongst ourselves before ever anyone else sets foot on our shores. We are insular, an island in truth and in mind, and in our heart of hearts, after so long bound to another power, we long to hold ourselves completely separate, to taste freedom properly before we must share it.

And now, not half a century after earning that freedom, still living with the trauma in the North, the chains that just refuse to be broken still cutting into our ankles ... now our relative prosperity brings hopeful foreigners to our shores. For the first time, really, we have minorities that are not, in some way, Irish. And we are not kind to them. I mean, we're not kind to the minorities that are Irish, let alone the others.

A phrase I hear, from some family, from friends, from people who glitter in every other way with intelligence, is 'Them foreigners coming in and stealing our jobs'. My father, who is Irish born and bred, back through generations, was assaulted more than once because he has something of an anomalous Mediterranean complexion (to be quite honest, if he were the slightest bit darker, he'd probably look like your stereotypical Cuban drug-runner). He's a trucker, so he runs into the front lines of this secret conflict rather more often that I care for. He has many friends among the Polish and African communities in the business, and to be honest takes a certain perverse delight in conversing in bad German whenever he meets someone with enough German or Dutch or Africaans to pass, just so he can see the faces of the 'natives' as they mutter at the 'foreigners'. My father, in many ways, is rather childish.

This situation ... it saddens and frightens me in more ways than I can explain. But I have to try. I can't see a phrase like that, that these problems no longer exist, and look at what I know it really happening, and not try to explain.

Once, we were an emmigrant nation. Our biggest export was people. Right up to fifteen bloody years ago, we were shipping people off all round the world, hoping for a new life. We were poor, and desperate, and we spread out like the plague. And I know many of the host countries viewed us as such. I know that the Irish were percieved as troublemakers and lesser citizens in so many places, and granted not always without cause. But that's just it! We go to hostile territory, and react by becoming hostile. We wrap ourselves in defensive shells, sink into our native identity with a fervor that we would never show were we actually in our native land, and let the fear build between our peoples.

So we know. We know what it was like to be those hopeful foreigners. We know what it was like to be treated harshly because we were different, even without obvious markers like skin-colour or easily identified religious trappings. Or at least, we should know.

But it seems we have forgotten. We suffered through all that, through poverty and alienation and slavery, and when eventually we seem to break free of it a little, enough that others come to us in hopes of finding that same scrap of freedom ... we turn around and do to them everything we once suffered through. Because we have power, and we suffered so long without it that we want to use it. Because we are afraid, because our freedom is so recently gained that any foreign incursion seems like an invasion. We can spread, but the home-country must remain pure. The Irish may live the world over, touch every other nation, but no other may touch ours.

It's fear. Deep down, so much godsdamn fear. Fear that our slender grip on power will be taken, fear that all we once suffered will be ours again if ever we let another race thrive on our island. Fear that if we give them any power at all, they will take over. And so, out of fear, we treat them as we were once treated. And it makes me want to weep.

Post-racial society? My gods, how blind can you be? Seriously. The world over, people live in fear, over and over again, and what power we grab we spend trying to make other people lose theirs. Because we are all so afraid, of anything different, of anything 'foreign', be it skin or nationality or religion or ... it doesn't even matter, I think. Humanity just doesn't trust itself, always afraid of every other part, and always acting on that fear. Blacks in America. Polish in Ireland. I don't even know where else, but I know, I fear, that everywhere an example. Everywhere.

It ... offends me deeply, so deeply, that someone can look at that, look at all that suffering, and ... and just not see it? Think that a few platitudes, a few policies, in any country, can eliminate it. Think that if we pretend hard enough, those of us that have power, that we are not wielding it as a weapon, that we are not handing out scraps of dignity to our slaves and expecting them to be grateful for something that should have been theirs from the start, that we are not deliberately forgetting everything we once went through to gain our own scrap of power ... my gods, can no-one understand how it cheapens it. How it makes a nothing of our victories, makes a joke of our dignity.

Dignity means nothing if it is not granted to all. There are no comparative levels, no man or woman more deserving of dignity than any other, save for those who have forfeited the right to it at all in their cruelty.

Everything we fought for, everything we suffered, we dishonour by not learning from it. There is no worse master than he who has once been a slave, and we have to, we have to realise it. We have to recognise the fear and cruelty inside ourselves. Otherwise ... the cycle will continue. If you look at history, if you look at the world right now, all who are now powerful were once not, and all who are now slaves were once in their way powerful. There will always be differences, but they, and the fear they cause, are no excuse.

And me? Am I afraid of difference, of losing my power? Yes, and no. Not of difference, because it simply isn't logical. Humanity has it's monsters, but they are not decided by race or anything else. They appear everywhere. My power ... yes. Instinctively, yes. But more than that, I am afraid of the fear. I am afraid to let myself touch it, to let it touch me. Because people who are afraid lash out. The world is full of wounded, frightened people, all lashing out at each other. To speak, to react, is like walking into a melee in hopes of calming it. I am afraid ... and in my fear have maybe done something worse than lash out. I have withdrawn, and let all I have seen mean nothing to anyone save me. And that ... that is as damaging as if I had joined the attack myself.

I meant to f-lock this. In fact, I promised Yena I would, and I'm sorry, hon. I truly am. But. This ... I need to finally say this.

My people. My world. My beautiful, wounded, angry humanity. Gods, you destroy me. Every time I open my eyes and let myself see you, in all your destructive glory, all you pain and your hope ... you are so beautiful. All of you. All my friends and my enemies, I love you all so gods damn much, and I am terrified to my core of every single one of you. My nearest and dearest, my family itself, my loved ones. Even you. Especially you.

I was raised Catholic, you know. I was raised with the words of Jesus. I've read of Ghandi, too. I don't like religion, I don't trust it, it divides more than it unites. I don't know or even particularly care if there is a God. But what those men, those humans, said about humanity, about turning the other cheek ... that I believe in. God can do what the hell he/she/it/thing likes. It's humans I care for, humans I want to see learn to not fear each other, humans I want to see prove themselves worthy of not being feared.

Then, and only then, will we live in a 'post-racial society'.

*bursts into tears*