Sauntering Vaguely Downward

I have a little anecdote from yesterday that I feel nicely illustrates that racism isn't just for foaming bigots with shaven heads and small intellects. It isn't always obviously easy to disparage and avoid engaging in yourself.

I hopped onto a packed train headed to Birmingham from London. Well, I say "hopped". It was more like, "dove through through the doors being held dangerously open for me and three others by a platform attendant four seconds before it departed". The three other people started walking down the train carriages in front of me, looking for spare seats. The first person found a seat at the end of the first carriage. We went through three more carriages before encountering another that appeared empty.*

The two people in front of me went straight past it.

I stopped and asked the three men sitting quietly next to the unoccupied seat, "Excuse me, is anyone sat there?" They looked at me. (They looked surprised.) "No," one of them replied, "it's free. Take it."

This becomes a story about racism when you learn that the two people in front of me were white and the three men sitting around the empty seat were black.

I was reminded of a scene at the opening of the film Higher Learning.** It lasts about thirty seconds but it's burned onto my memory and I only saw the film once when it came out nearly twenty years ago. A young white woman gets into a lift with one other occupant. The other occupant is a young black man, also a student, who regards her with friendly curiosity, ready to say hello. She presses the button for her floor without looking at him, then stands in the opposite corner of the lift. As the doors close, she clutches her handbag to her a little more tightly, still not looking at him. He sees this and shakes his head, smiling sadly.

Racism can be subtle. It's ingrained in our subconscious and enforced by influences that we don't necessarily recognise. Those two people in front of me probably would have been horrified if confronted and asked, "Did you deliberately avoid that seat because it was surrounded by three black men?" It's hard to correct yourself for prejudice, I realise that. It falls on the person feeling the effects to point them out to you, which is damnably difficult, and for you to be strong enough to apologise, simply and succinctly, if required, and incorporate your new awareness into your future interactions. But we must try.***

* Please note also that this seat was nowhere near a smelly toilet or a person listening to loud music. Nor did it appear to have anything else wrong with it.
** I can recall very little else about the film, so can't recommend or discourage viewing.
*** I do not agree with Yoda in this instance.

My dad and I went to the Barber Institute, the art gallery at the University of Birmingham, a couple of weeks ago. The (self-identified) Jamaican-Black-and-Chinese security guard greeted us in a jocular manner, then later came to talk with us while we were wandering through the permanent collection. After a few minutes of the standard where-are-you-from, gosh-the-weather-is-cold stuff, he peered at us keenly and said,

"I have a story for you guys. I think you'll like it. My stepmum is white. She used to take great pride in introducing me by saying, 'This is my son.' Then she'd watch people look from me to her with puzzled frowns, and she'd say calmly, 'Is there a problem?' They'd look embarrassed and reply 'No, no, of course not.' She'd smile at them and say, 'Good.'"

My dad and I laughed sympathetically.

"I gotta tell you one more. I took my Jamaican Chinese relatives out to my local when they were visiting Birmingham and introduced them to my mates. When my uncle started talking, one of them dropped his pint and the other one stood there with his mouth open for a good few minutes. I love doing that. I love showing people how stupid racism is. All right, I'll leave you alone. You enjoy your time with your granddaughter."

♥ ♥ ♥

This Eastercon business has got me thinking about race and the perception of it. One more post on the topic and then I promise it's back to photography, kitties and anecdotes for a while.

I've gotten so used to passing for white among unobservant people that it's still a bit of a shock to me to think of myself as a Person of Colour. I would even go so far as to say I feel awkward labeling myself as such in public, even though it's true and I identify (mostly inside my head) as one. In fact, I suspect a good many of my friends would probably feel uncomfortable if I started making it more obvious that I don't consider myself white. I have spent my entire life teaching myself to behave in a manner that makes people fail to notice that I'm a PoC. This is probably why I got really into the industrial scene as a teenager and into being a geek as an adult, as these are subcultures with carefully defined parameters that are relatively easy to follow if you pay attention. I'm so good at "playing white" that often people who are of the same racial extraction as I am (southeast Asian) sometimes don't even see it.

The social system that exists for middle-class people in America and Britain rewards silence - and humour - on the subject of race, especially when it comes from someone who is visibly a Person of Colour. It does not reward serious attempts to engage people on the subject of racial stereotyping. For instance, upon telling someone that my father is Asian, I have heard many variations on the following responses:

"You must have had a really strict upbringing."
"No wonder you're so good at science/maths."

I have learned through experimentation over the years that the following are acceptable replies.

"Yes I did." [This is a lie.]
"Nah, he only locked me in the shed for three hours a day. I was lucky! Most kids got six!" [This is also a lie.]
"Actually, I'm just a genius." [Said in a joking manner that makes it blindingly obvious this is Lie Number Three.]
"Oh, I always liked counting." [Actually, this one is true.]

What is not an acceptable response:

"Please can you not make assumptions about my parents and my abilities based on racial stereotypes?"

That'll put people right off their canapés. It might even cause them to walk away if I were to allow my anger to show. So I've learnt to keep quiet, to deflect the tension these remarks cause inside me away from myself - and away from the people who've inflicted it, because it makes life easier. Sadly, it doesn't make life better, for me or for other POCs. I would love to stop. It's difficult to figure out how to do that without earning the labels "confrontational" and "aggressive". That may not sound like much of a cross to bear, but in cultures that thrive on keeping everyone in the conversation comfortable (and when you're female, in which case this becomes a double burden), it could cost a person a lot.

The lesson for Eastercon is, I think, that if there are PoCs in attendance and they are minorities, they may be the type, like me, that have conditioned themselves so well that they can't bring themselves to be critical, even if they do hear racist remarks. I certainly wouldn't be at all comfortable doing so in a feedback session that consisted of a room full of white people. It may take an ally - say, someone like foxfinial - to point it out for them. It may also be that such people are only willing to make remarks from a degree of removal, say, in a written survey or in the comfort zone of a blog post in a sympathetic community. (Hi, sympathetic community! I love you.)

I was sitting peacefully on my train home this evening. I decided I couldn't cope with Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson just then. I opted instead to melt my brain by doing the puzzles in the Evening Standard - which is the only reason I pick up the Evening Standard because I certainly don't read the damn thing - when this happened. And I gawped at it for a while in disbelief. And then took photos of it. And then gawped at it some more.

And then decided the interwebs needed to know about it.

I...just...you REALLY couldn't find yourself a less loaded word to put in your crossword puzzle, ES? REALLY?! WHAT THE HELL WAS WRONG WITH 'NEARS'?

So I sent off this e-mail a week ago, to the Communications and PR office at NPL.

Today, I finally got a response.

Thank you for your email.
We take diversity very seriously and have taken not [sic] of your comments.

Kind regards,
[Redacted]

Is that it?! Really?

I think I feel slightly insulted that it is a two-sentence e-mail and it still contains a misspelling.

If anyone needs me, I'll be in my corner, sulking.