"That awkward moment when I realized my white “liberal” friends were racists"

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

17. Where have I been most of your life? On the sidelines with all the other racially ignorant folks.

I wasn't born actually thinking about race issues. I grew up in whitebread flyover country, and vaguely knew exactly one black person in highschool, a guy who'd been adopted by white parents. I sat through the same 'boring' history classes, no doubt not caring about learning about slavery, civil rights, or anything else race related any more than I did any other part of history, not seeing how or even that it was going to affect my life.

I like to think I treated black people like I treated white people, but that's not saying much - I've been pretty introverted (ie, self-centered, in a very literal way) my whole life. And that was me for the first three decades or so. It's only been the last decade, decade and a half that I've begun to pay attention to what's going on outside my own little universe. And in terms of racial issues, that's thanks to the AA and NA posters over at Daily Kos. I was a skeptic too about how bad folks with more melanin had it in the US - a denialist if you will, until I simply started learning what was going on in the society beyond the little cocoon I'd built for myself. By listening when they taught, hearing the things that I'm not hearing anywhere else. The media remains mostly useless, schools are largely either afraid to address the issues or simply unwilling to face the blowback from denialist white parents.

I know that it's unfair that the people who are being oppressed have to also take the time to teach the folks who benefit from the oppression. But it really does work. Not quickly, but unless someone is willing to teach, no one learns. Without black teachers at DK slogging on in the face of continual self-centered ignorance, I would have simply gone on thinking 'We live in a largely post-racial world' like so many others do.

And those who know what needs taught are those who live most intimately with the problems. We need black, brown, red voices speaking up loudly and continuously in spaces dominated by whites to break down the walls of indifference and ignorance. Because we're not good at paying attention for long periods. We've been trained by television to expect quick resolutions to things, to think 'we can make it better in 30 minutes, then we can go back to ignoring the world others are experiencing'.

(BTW, the one show on tv I do think is extremely useful is Melissa Harris-Perry. She is unapologetically addressing the racial facets of various issues every single show, and in a way that helps us pale-skinned folks peek out a bit from behind our blinders.)