I haven’t been called racial slurs very often in my life; when you’re a middle class white girl from the South, it’s just not something that happens on a regular basis. The only time I distinctly remember being called a cracker, actually, was when I was in the fifth grade: a little boy declared that I was a cracker and he was a black-eyed pea, and that made him better than me. I recall being vaguely hurt by this, in the way that you tend to be vaguely hurt when someone you’ve just met takes an immediate dislike to you. Mostly, though, I was just puzzled. “Why did he say that to me?” I asked one of his friends after he’d run off.
“He has a bad home life,” she shrugged, and that was the end of that. My great experience with racism ended with me playing with the kid’s friends while he went home and sulked.
I understand that not every white person has my experiences; I understand that there are, in fact, white people who grow up being the only white kid at school, and that that’s usually not much fun. I’m not saying it’s okay when those white people ignore hundreds of years of American history and claim that they’re the ones who are really oppressed, but I get it. I understand taking an extremely traumatic personal experience and making it into a universal one. What I do not understand are the white people who grew up in situations like mine who try to claim that having individual black people dislike them or mistreat them is the same thing as being systematically oppressed. And I have a really ugly reason for not understanding that. Because my reaction has always been, “Why the fuck do you care if someone calls you a cracker?”
I have had a lot of insults hurled at me over the years: “fat dyke” was the favorite when I was in middle school, but “mentally ill bitch” has been more popular of late. When people called/call me those things, it hurts. But it hurts because those are not “good” things to be. Being fat is not socially acceptable. Neither is being gay, or being mentally ill, or being an bad-tempered woman. Or a woman, period. Those insults hurt not because they actually apply to the person being insulted, but because they’re all socially unacceptable. You don’t want people to think that you’re crazy or gay or fat or a bitch.
But being white isn’t a bad thing. In fact, as our culture is currently constructed, being white is a good thing. So screaming, “God, you fucking WHITE CHICK!” kind of lacks punch as an insult.
And I mean, animosity hurts. It does. It hurts to have someone dislike you, especially when they do it on sight and seemingly without provocation. It does. I can understand reacting negatively to that. I can understand being upset by that. But it gets on my last fucking nerve when most white people claim to be deeply hurt by “reverse racism,” because I know they aren’t. They’re shocked, they’re surprised, they’re a little wounded, but they’re not hurt.
Hurt is looking in the mirror and wishing you could rip your skin off because your body is huge and ugly and fat and wrong and somebody called you on it in class today.
Hurt is not being momentarily offended by something someone said and then holding onto it because righteous indignation makes you feel good. Because deep down you know things are tipped in your favor and it’s not fair to everyone else but you don’t want to deal with that.
Hurt is not believing that you should have everything, including the right to always be the victim. To never be in the wrong.
White people mouthing off about “reverse racism” are nothing more than yet another expression of privilege: the privilege of never being wrong. The privilege of pretending the scales balance when they don’t. The privilege of believing that my momentary discomfort and embarrassment is equal to a black woman’s spending her entire life in a culture that devalues and dehumanizes her.
I’m sorry, but x /= y. And only someone with an ENORMOUS level of privilege, someone wrapped in a cultural cocoon of epic proportions, would believe that it does.
I find the phrase “reverse racism” so damn irritating. It’s racism, plain and simple, no matter the perpetrator. Why make it something different when it applies to white people? Something that suggests that it’s, oh, unnatural, or more unnatural, because it’s happening “in reverse” – the “wrong” way around?
And the other thing is that, when I hear white people talking about somebody being “racist” to them, it’s “That (black) teacher is just failing me because she’s racist against white people!” Because it doesn’t have anything to do with them being really, really bad at calculus. And then they walk to their giant truck with the Confederate flag bumper sticker.
And blare gangsta rap out the windows, because that’s how my high school is.
I’ve had at least two white boys complain to me about how they didn’t get into the very prestigious colleges of their choice because of “the minorities” taking “their” spots.
One of the schools in question? At the time, it had a student body that was 80% white. But it never seemed to occur to these kids that they might not have gotten in because their grades just weren’t good enough. And they were both A/B students with the occasional C.
And they wanted in Carolina, which is like North Carolina’s version of Yale.
Even at the time, when I wasn’t terribly socially conscious, their sense of entitlement astonished me.
I assume a cracker as in “white” is soemthing other than an addict of crack. Where does the term come from?
Here’s the wikipedia article on it.
I never thought too much about the origin; when I was a kid, I assumed very simplistically that I was just being compared to a saltine. Which are white. And bland. Like white people.
Hush, damn wop!
You know when my dad was up here this past weekend, he flinched every time I used that word, or “guido”? I have a bad feeling he’s actually been called that before. Man, the world is a very different place than it was fifty years ago…