HOW TO: (Not) Date a Racist

Every morning I wake up and check my white privilege. No joke- it’s actually the name of one of my alarms. I start my day by acknowledging that despite my plights there are more trying identities I could have been landed with and that according to arbitrary categorisations I’m relatively well off. Maybe I’m like this because I was born in South Africa and have first hand experience of extreme racial tensions, or maybe it’s because I’m one of those cushy sensitive-creative social justice warrior types. 

Either way you can imagine my horror when I realised my boyfriend was a racist.

Don’t get me wrong- he’s a wonderful guy and for the most part pretty politically aware and harmless. I’d say he’s the least racist member of his friend group if that’s any compensation (it’s not, but that’s a whole other issue). The truth about his lack of racial sensitivity reared its ugly head when I came across a picture of an old friend on my Facebook wall dressed as Kanye West for Halloween.

I assumed that ‘Blackface’ was near the top of the list of recognisable and completely inappropriate expressions of racism. But alas, when I tried to moan about it to the ol' BF he leaned more towards the “It’s just a costume, why does it matter, its not about race” school of thought. Which is in itself evidence of just how entrenched our Eurocentric perspective can be. 

I warned him this was not a fight he wanted to pick with me and that I was prepared to intellectually shred him, and so unfolded our most cataclysmic argument yet. 

There was yelling (mostly me) there were tears (exclusively me) and there was a very real feeling that this wasn’t something I could ‘agree to disagree’ on.

I recited articles and statistic and he kept asking “why black people could dress us as white people without being racist” and what that said about our ‘so called’ equal society (Maybe that it's NOT equal??) It was a nightmare, but I stood my ground and narrowed my argument down to 4 key points outlining exactly why 'Blackface' is not "just a costume lol"

• It is a caricature of a black person that exaggerates a whole ethnic group into a homogenous stereotype and reinforces the fallacy that black people are 'all the same' and an ‘inferior race’. It should not and can not be separated from its history
• Wearing black-face says that you care more about your costume than the sensitivities of a group that have been historically mistreated and marginalised. Which doesn’t do a lot for the self-esteem of those who are already systematically demoralised.
• Saying that people are too easily offended is an act of privilege. Saying that members of an oppressed minority group are too easily offended is both absurd and RACIST.
• Recycling old expressions of overt racism is a great way to perpetuate racist ideologies that encourage society to treat black people like crap.  

In retrospect I would also add 'What about a white person pretending to be black is supposed to be funny? and is it not obvious that's problematic??'

This argument wasn't fully resolved that night, but what we both got out of it was extremely valuable. 

He learnt that his privileged perspective was something to be actively acknowledged and adjusted and I learnt that when it comes to trying to challenge peoples entrenched attitudes it's not actually that useful to cry, yell or call them names. We're all learning, and being too vehemently opinionated in any direction shuts down discussion. I'm starting to be more understanding and less quick to tell someone they're wrong and need to check themselves before they wreck themselves, and my boyfriend is expressing less problematic attitudes. 

I guess the lesson here is that no one is perfect. 

And while it's okay to not be perfect, it's not okay to be racist.

Thanks for reading, 

Vik.