Q: Were you proud to be ashamed to be white?
A: There was a lot about white people I didn’t like.
Just because I was white didn’t mean I held to the party line.
I disagreed with a lot of the common prejudices.
I was liberal, politically. I studied social science. I majored in anthropology and minored in sociology.
I did it in part to examine my whiteness. To see what kind of blinders I was wearing because of race, culture, geography, climate. Education.
But (1) I didn’t like being called a bigot. To me, it was the worse thing you could call a person.
And (2) to point out what other groups were missing was not ethnocentrism and it was not blaming the victim: it was pointing out something they failed to see.
Anthropologists call missionaries plaguesters. They know the danger of misplaced zeal, of intolerance based on belief, on how easy it is to believe something that derives from conviction is true, or factual, just because your worldview supports it.
I did think there was something Group-Think and Thought-Control about the propaganda I was getting at work and in the media. That they were trying to sell us something. And I wasn’t buying.
I was skeptical.
We had to watch a movie of racial stereotyping and it was sickening, it was horrible to watch, we did this, I did this. But the politically correct stuff we got on television and in the movies was just as sickening to me, just as infuriating. It was like Aryans in Triumph of the Will, or Russian peasants stopping tanks with a scythe. A sickle.
The Grim Reaper is often shown wielding a scythe.
I don’t believe in the Grim Reaper.
The Grim Reaper is a metaphor.
I don’t believe in religious fundamentalism.
Snake handling and speaking in tongues.
I look down on it as low-rent.
At the same time I don’t doubt that other people believe it.
I know how powerful magic is.
In fact, the thing about magical thinking is you don’t realize it’s magical thinking, you think it’s logic. You think it’s science.
The Melanesian Gambit.
Cargo cults.
Cargo cults are real. But they’re cults.
I let my freak flag fly.
You can shit on my shoulder but don’t wipe your ass with my hair.