Tags
colorblind racism, ignorant Americans, internalized racism, interracial fetish, interracial relationships, people who don't actually know what racism is, pop culture, popular culture, racism, restaurant, television, tv, What Would You Do
Quick run-through of the situation:
- Television show, What Would You Do?
- Mexican man dating a white woman, in a restaurant,
- a Latina at a nearby table asks him “Why are you even with her?” and questions his loyalty to their race out loud in front of other customers,
- other customers and management respond by berating her openly and making even more ignorant declarations than she did, pulling the reverse racism card
- the reason I don’t watch television and need to stop going into my sister’s den of ignorance (This post is happening because I walked by her door and made the mistake of asking her what was so funny)
Many people will agree that its racist to hate people of different races being together. Fewer people understand how some interracial relationships can be inherently racist and they don’t bother to learn either, especially Americans.
The media deliberately misinforms and disseminates disinformation about what racism is and how it operates. This hidden camera ignorance called What Would You Do? (judging by this segment) looks like a great example of that. It takes people who really pay attention to know the difference between racism and what they want you to think racism is.
Because of how internalized racism works, beaten into the Black people in America by whites, I DO NOT think or believe a Black woman who sees a Black man with a white woman in a restaurant and silently wonders, “Why is he with her?” is necessarily racist. Because sometimes what she’s really asking is, “Is this Black man with this white woman (or INSERT NON-Black race) because she’s NOT Black?” Black men are known to associate white women with beauty, cleanliness, upward mobility, and docility because white people have deliberately taught everyone that Black women are the opposite (barring docility). Black men deliberately go after and engage with women of other races oftentimes because they view Black women as inferior. I believe that Mexican women and other Women of Color have similar experiences.
One man in the episode tries to discuss the issue with the Latina dissenter, saying “I’m American first, Latino second”. So you prioritize nationality (a nation violently and unjustly shaped and continuously and disproportionately influenced by white hate and greed) over your race which made you? And he said it so proudly. The responses from the customers leads into a very familiar and frustrating territory: reverse racism. Which typically only exists in the land of white logic where they faithfully believe they are regular victims of racism instead of the unapologetic perpetrators in general.
Black Pride and white pride are two different things. While white pride comes from a place of hate and an unfounded sense of superiority, Black Pride comes from a place of love, sorrow, joy, pain, and strength. This demonstrates an inversion: One is inherently racist and the other is not. Even generalizing can be different when white racism is involved. In exactly the same way, it reasons that a Woman of Color wondering why a man of Color is with a white woman is NOT necessarily the same as a white woman saying out loud in a restaurant why a white man is with a Woman of Color.
Interracial relationships are usually complicated, race tends to bring specifically complex dimensions to it. So outside of voicing my observances and experiences on how they can be horribly racist by their very nature, I stay out of the entire affair. I would never say something like what the Latina in the segment said even if I silently wondered how deep the Mexican man and the white woman’s relationship is. Not only because I would likely be attacked by “well-meaning Americans” who think they know what racism is but because I have no idea what the interracial couple’s relationship is like, I don’t know them, and its none of my business until they make it my business, which is hard to do.
My rule of thumb, however, is that interracial relationships are suspect because people are typically dumb, shallow, racist, and impulsive. They are socialized that way.