Quite honestly, I expected more criticism leveled at the idea of Blog Against Racism Day. For instance, I expected questions like:
"Blog Against Racism? Who isn't against racism?" (Answer: Almost everyone claims to be against it, but actually saying something to oppose it happens far too rarely in many quarters. IN any event, I more or less modeled the name on Rock Against Racism, which merely indicates that I'm very old.)
"Isn't a single day kind of a meaningless gesture?" or "Isn't posting on a blog kind of a meaningless gesture?" (Sure, but for some folks it'll be a start, and for others a good excuse to write something they've been meaning to. A sustained campaign in word and deed to end racism would obviously be a better thing, and there are such campaigns already in existence, some of which were publicized as a result of BAR Day. Besides: nice way to commemorate Mrs. Parks, don't you think?)
"Oh, great, now the white people are gonna say they've done their part on racism cause they blogged." (This is a hazard of all such efforts. Point me at someone who says they've done their part and I'll help to correct them.)
But there was remarkably little such comment, and that I heard was offered privately and constructively. The diversity of viewpoint offered during Blog Against Racism Day was frankly astounding, with pro-life moms and Ayn Rand quoters and white and Black and Latino and Asian posters and remarkably few trite offerings about "how I hate those other people who are racists."
Of the public criticism, I most valued Jon Miller Whitney's. Jon is thoughtful and humane, and pushes up against a conundrum we've dealt with here in the past. Personally, I would rather confront evil than attempt to transcend it, but I thoroughly commend Jon's thought-provoking post to you.
Joel Sax, who has been doing some eloquent writing on mental illness and prejudice in recent months, punctuates a rather lovely post detailing an interaction at a support group meeting with a bizarre swipe at Blog Against Racism Posters in the mass, implying not only that all of us are middle-class sheltered white liberals (false on all counts) but that none of us have any direct experience with either racial inclusiveness or mental illness in our personal lives. (Also false: my bedroom, for instance, houses one person of color and one chronically depressed person with ADD.) But that's only a minor flaw in a post that would be utterly worthy of inclusion in the Blog Against Racism Day Canon if Joel hadn't made it clear that it was not to be considered as such.
The usually hilarious Ashley at Sedition.com gets included here as well as in the list of participants below, in part because I've been meaning to send folks his way for some time anyway, and in part because his post is a slam at Blog Against Racism Day as well as being a slam against racism. It's like all Meta and shit.
The forbiddingly erudite Chris Holmes snarks mildly at the whole concept, and offers the suggestion that multiculturalism is of equivalent harm to racism, but doesn't explain himself. No matter: at least it introduced me to his blog, which I'll be visiting again.
I've only seen one blatant racist slam at the idea of Blog Against Racism Day, and with the proviso that swarming another person's website to post hostile comments is bad form, I offer a link to said slam for educational purposes only. Before Joel Sax's writing on mental illness pointed out to me the unfairness of using such things as insults, I might have counseled Dr. Moonman to check his dosage of whatever he's taking. But I won't. Also: looks like I'm missing out on some ad revenue.
It's been a few days, and the Blog Against Racism Day discussion is still in full swing, and the entries keep coming in.
Which is what we all wanted, right?
A hugely diverse group of people made Blog Against Racism Day a startlingly successful project. Not successful in the sense of ending racism, of course, but in terms of how many people took part.
There are more than 250 bloggers in the list of participants below. I'm certain I've neglected some. Please let me know in comments if you know of an entry not on the list, and I'll add it.
Because of the sheer number of participants, this list was compiled without a huge amount of research. I consolidated lists from the comments and trackbacks here, from Tony G. at milkriverblog and Kevin Andre Elliott at Slant Truth (thanks guys!), from Google and Technorati.
Where it was possible to make sure of it, the links below will take you to the BAR Day post, and include the blog (and/or blogger) name and post title. At the very least, the link will take you to the front page of the participating blog, and you can look for posts from December 1 or thereabouts. I tried not to list aggregator sites that merely republish rss files, but I did include folks who linked without writing posts: every bit of attention helps. Again, if you have suggested edits to any of the links — or if I've overlooked a link or two that's inappropriate — drop a note in comments.
[Update] Also, as I update this list, MovableType insists on re-trackbacking everyone. I'm sorry about that. After this update, I'll put new additions in a subsequent post so as to minimize the incredible annoyance this is probably causing some of you. My apologies.
I was kind of expecting, oh, I dunno, maybe 30 or 40 bloggers to take part. It looks like there will be over 200, considering Technorati's slightly hit-or-miss coverage, the posts that keep coming in (and keep them coming!) and the burgeoning participation of more LiveJournalers, whose Journals are inefficiently indexed by Technorati. It's not a little exhilarating to toss an idea out into the world and see it met with such enthusiasm and creativity. Some amazing pieces of writing and artwork have been posted as a result of Blog Against Racism Day: I have stuff to read for days now. And so do you.
The thing is, given this amazing response, there's no way I'm going to get your posts compiled tonight.
Tony G at Milkriver Blog has sent along a version of his compilation of a bunch of participants, and Kevin Andre Elliott — who's blogging a mere couple dozen miles from the town where I got my first library card — has compiled a few dozen more. Between Kevin and Tony and my site referrals here, I should be able to collate a roster during the weekend. Feel free to post links you think I might miss, even if they're not yours.
I have to say I feel privileged to be part of this. I'm honored that so many of you found the idea worth participating in. And it's not too late if you haven't done so yet: this is a discussion that needs to stay alive.
[Update: the first draft of the list of Blog Against Racism Day participants is here.]
"The soul, equal and eternal, emanates from bodies of different shapes and colors. Whoever foments and spreads antagonism and hate between the races, sins against humanity."
Welcome to Blog Against Racism Day! Here's what it's about. If you're participating, feel free to trackback to this post, or leave a comment here with the URL of your post(s). I'll do my best to compile a big list of posts later December 1 to help drive some traffic to your site.
(If you leave a comment with an URL, don't fret if it goes into moderation. It's supposed to. I'll get to it ASAP.)
Update: a quick note on the commenting policy here. Feel free to express disagreements with posts if you like. Cordiality is always appreciated, but I understand flying off the handle: I do it myself once every eight or nine years or so. But trolling with vile hate speech — such as in the two wacko Holocaust denial-type comments I just deleted — will not be tolerated. I'll be loose about the definition of "wacko," but it's my call. Play nice.
Updated again: Seems like a lot of people are having trouble tracking-back. The Trackback URL for this post is http://www.faultline.org/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/1463 : try copying that and pasting it into your blog posting client in the "ping this URL" field or form or what-have you.
It will be rather late before I can compile your entries into a big handy directory — budget planning time at Earth Island, and I'm in meetings — so feel free to cruise some of the wonderful entries people have noted in comments here. Or check out what Technorati has to say on the subject.
[Ed. note: My brother Craig left this in comments to my Pinole post, and it was so appropriate and incisive that I decided to promote it to its own post.]
Buffalo has changed to some degree. It's not quite as segregated as before, but only because as whites moved out of the city it opened up neighborhoods to others. The county is still something like the fourth most segregated in the country.
Every time I (or anyone else) on some of the otherwise liberal Buffalo discussion groups has tried to bring up the fact that racism is a huge problem there, we are shouted down with outrage.
A Buffalo elected official was arguing against letting Katrina victims have some of the tens of thousands of vacant city-owned houses because they were "the wrong element" and not the kind of people we want to attract, etc. He was repeating some of the worst Fox News stories about armed gangs of rapists, etc. that turned out to be untrue. He constantly referred to potentially relocated New Orleans citizens as "immigrants" and compared them to waves of people earlier came here from outside the US... saying they wouldn't assimilate, etc.
When I pointed out that they would not be foreign immigrants (though I would be just fine with immigrants coming to Buffalo) but merely fellow Americans, he snarkily corrected himself but maintained that that difference was only technical in regard to "these people."
This guy is a Democrat. One of the supposedly more liberal of Buffalo's elected officials.
I was trying to be diplomatic and persuade him and the others to see things differently — one woman just plain called him out as a racist. She was probably banned from the list. The outrage was incredible.
And that's the thing — they deny that there's racism in Buffalo when in fact the area reeks of racism. Buffalo is defined more by its racism than by just about anything else.
Snow, factory closings, Albany politics — none of these have had as dramatic an impact on the city as the racism. Its borders, the structure of city government, the housing stock, traffic patterns, where preservation and cultural groups are active — all of this is affected more by race than anything else. But nobody, nobody will ever suggest that race is a problem.
Being the fourth most segregated county is some kind of fluke. A coincidence not worth mentioning. I myself was shouted down for bringing it up.
I think the bottom like is that people equate the words racism and racist with active hate — and they don't feel that they hate anyone. They're just sitting in their houses in Orchard Park watching Everybody Loves Raymond, they don't hate anybody! Sure, they won't venture into the east side of Buffalo, but that's only because... well, you know... but they don't HATE anyone, only bad people hate people!
I remember years ago CNN's Bernard Shaw puffing up, sputtering and turning bright red when someone suggested that reporters might have a bias. He practically screamed that it wasn't true. Forget for a moment the "liberal bias" lie that the last several years have proven untrue... at the time I realized that Shaw's reaction showed that he did have a bias. The fact of the matter is, every reporter has a bias and it's only through understanding their own bias and taking it into account that they can report objectively. If they deny their bias as Shaw did, they can't hope to be objective.
Same thing with racism. Everyone has prejudices. If you deny you have them then you can't help but have them influence your actions.
That's Buffalo's situation. There's plenty of hatred and overt racism, but mostly its basically decent people who simply refuse to even consider the problem.
Fourth most segregated county, but no racists there, and don't you dare bring up the subject.
Pinole is a town under siege. An island of rusticated charm in a burgeoning megalopolis, our traditional way of life is under attack. We are hard up against the deepening crime of Richmond, the most dangerous city in California according to recent rankings. A short ride on the local bus, or in a (presumably stolen) car along Interstate 80, and the barbarian hordes are at our gates, had we gates, which we do not. So we are vulnerable.
Or so some of my neighbors would have it.
Two years ago we fought a development on church land immediately behind our house. Those neighbors who, like us, were adjacent to the project, thought mainly of engineering and traffic concerns. The plan would have shunted storm runoff into our property — likely destroying our foundation — and killed the live oak that overhangs our yard. Landslides would have threatened others' houses. Our next door neighbor would have had the project's traffic driving five feet from her bedroom window. We killed the project for those reasons.
Neighbors further up the hill, I am sad to report, objected to the target demographic of the development. It was a low-income and transitional housing unit. Being white myself, some of those neighbors decided they could speak frankly to me about their concerns. Those concerns seemed to revolve around skin color. "You see how the Alvarez Apartments turned out, a damn nest of crime and drugs!"
We watched the Alvarez Apartments being built. We watched its tenants move in. We are four houses and uphill from The Alvarez Apartments. If something happens at the Alvarez Apartments, we hear it. In the two years since that complex opened, we have heard one disturbance, a family argument. When the subject came up in discussion, aware that the theoretical Alvarez Apartments criminal element might cleverly schedule their nefarious activities for those nine-to-five hours when I am at work, I asked the Pinole Police Department daywatch captain about the crime rate there. There had been one domestic assault, and the perpetrator had been barred from the property. I relayed this information to the neighbor who'd been most adamant that the Alvarez Apartments were a drug, prostitution, and gang warfare headquarters, and he looked at me as though I were insane. Four houses in the other direction are neighbors to whom the police pay regular, unscheduled visits. They are white. There is some clucking about their antics. Still, the venom is reserved for our African American neighbors in the Alvarez Apartments.
I grew up, more or less, in Buffalo, NY: one of the most segregated places I have ever experienced. African American neighborhoods were strictly delineated. We lived in the suburbs for a few years before moving into Buffalo proper, and my parents invited my friend Kermit, a classmate, to stay with us for the weekend. His brother Stanley came along with him. I took them down to the creek for fossil hunting, and then we played kickball with some of the neighborhood kids. Kermit wanted to kiss one of the girls, who replied almost flirtatiously that she "would never kiss a darky." He told the story with a rueful laugh.
There is a peculiar splitting of the mind that takes place in racists of conservative and liberal stripes alike. One grants the existence of numerous friendly and humane individuals of the designated other, yet retains the fear of the other en masse. In school I had close black friends from about age eight, and I still feared my three-block walk through the nearby "ghetto" — a rather pleasant neighborhood, objectively speaking — on my way to school. What motivation the feared African American strangers might have had to jump an eleven-year-old I never quite spelled out in my mind. The notion that the neighborhood might merely comprise a few thousand people just like Kermit and Stanley, Christopher, Beverly, Billy, Akimi, Damon, and so forth, escaped me. It was a fear born of sheer ignorance.
That ignorance took a while to dissipate — and honestly, I'd be the last to claim it has dissipated entirely. By the late 1970s I had moved into African American neighborhoods in Buffalo, or at least into their fringes. Shopkeepers' dogs would wag their tails at me from behind their counters, then bark viciously when African American nine-year-olds entered the store. And then came a move to Berkeley-Oakland, and then to DC. DC eradicated the bulk of my reflexive racism. If you have a problem being around black folks, you won't last long in DC — at least if you live somewhere other than Georgetown, Kalorama, or the 1600 block of Pennsylvania Avenue. Was it waiting on thousands of friendly Black folks at the florist where I worked? Was it learning a trade from wonderful, patient African American supervisors? Was it that long, unspoken crush on Juancara Bennett? Was it just me growing up? I don't know. Whatever it was, before long that stupid fear was gone, mostly.
I lived in DC twenty years ago. I have spent four fifths of the time since living in places where the majority of my neighbors were African American. This is a badge of neither merit nor phony political authenticity on my part: it is merely how things work in the East Bay if you are not rich enough to own a home. Integration, at least among the lower middle classes, is just a fact of life in Oakland. Moving to Pinole, 11 percent of its population African American according to the census, and with most of the Black folks conveniently isolated in the unincorporated Tara Hills subdivision just outside of town, has been a bit of an adjustment.
Our part of town is still more integrated than anywhere I lived in Buffalo. A few African American families live nearby, not all of them restricted to the Alvarez Apartments. There are about twice as many Asians as Blacks in Pinole, and Latinos edge out Blacks city-wide by a couple percentage points. Compared to where I grew up, Pinole enjoys paradisiacal diversity.
And yet that ignorance, that irrational fear I had already decided to root out by the time I reached 14 years of age, has a deeper hold here than I've seen in a long time.
There is a youth center near Fernandez Park, in the middle of town. The affluent in town can pay to have their children entertained: free daytime summer activities are the province of the poorer among us, which means that some of the youth spending time at the youth center live in Tara Hills. Kids cause problems: it's inevitable, especially if the kids are poor. But the talk in the neighborhood, the complaints about upended trashcans and teens leaning against cars and foul language in the park? Three guesses what the focus of those complaints is. I stopped going to one barber after one too many rants from her about Big Black Men scaring timorous young mommies away from the toddler playground. I found another barbershop with a diverse staff. A neighbor routinely stops me on the street, friendly like, and rants about the threats that "diversity" is bringing to his town. "It's too easy for people to get here from Richmond!" he yells. "We should close down the bus line! And," he continues, derailing his thought processes with little apparent discomfort, "widen the freeway!" He threatens to move to a place where there are "only white people," somehow thinking that I'll forgive him the slur against my wife.
His neighbor, a former mayor of Pinole, rants at meetings that everyone in town should carry a gun. This will be helpful, he explains, because then we can shoot suspicious people. I suspect that he doesn't really want to arm everyone.
My town most recently made the local papers when a proposal was floated, in response to perceived teenage ruffian activity in Fernandez Park, to remove the basketball courts so that they would no longer attract, as a city councilperson was quoted in the paper as saying, "the wrong element." I am pretty sure he wasn't referring to bismuth. The proposed replacement for the hoops: a bocce court. "This is a great idea," I explained to a disbelieving friend online, "because as we all know, old Italian guys are 100 percent crime-free." She scolded me.
Enough people spoke in favor of the basketball courts that they will stay, until the next manufactured crisis. The bocce court will go in sometime next year. I look forward to that, and may volunteer to teach a class in bocce at the youth center.
Despite the ignorance in Pinole, I am optimistic. An ex-mayor may be threatening vigilante justice, but the current mayor is on the board of directors of the youth center. My wingnut neighbor will move to Wyoming, change his ways, or drop dead of racial apoplexy. The Pinole old guard will senesce comfortably and pass away. As people leave their homes, through white flight or mortality or just moving on, others will move in. The neighborhood is in transition, and it won't come soon enough for me.
But the biggest reason I'm optimistic is across the creek. The town of Hercules is there, on the other side of a fence placed by the flood control district. Hercules is a typical suburban town in many ways, with cul-de-sacs and too much driving. Its homes are comfortable and well maintained. Its residents are friendly and well educated.
And whites and Blacks each make up 19 percent of the population. Hercules has the second largest African American population, by percentage, in the county — second only to the industrial sacrifice zone of Richmond. People seem to get along.
This summer we had contractors working on our house. One of the men was a redneck through and through, a nice enough blond guy though a bit of a slacker. Another was a skilled, efficient electrician, and African American. I found out a few days into the project that they were family: Blond guy's ex-wife had married the electrician and the two men had worked out their differences, become friends and co-parents. Some of my neighbors seem to have their ignorance wedged tightly into their minds, so that neither friendship nor experience will root it out. I would like to think that they are the only real minority the human race possesses. The future of Pinole lies across the fence.
(On the occasion of Blog Against Racism Day, I thought I would post this story first published in another venue.)
I worked in a nursery in Washington DC from 1984-1987. The outdoor plant business tends to slacken to zero in the winter months in the northeastern US, and so in order to keep cash flow at healthy levels, most large nurseries will maintain seasonal stock to take advantage of holidays: valentine crap in February, pumpkins in October, like that.
Which meant that by the time December 2 or 3 came around, all of us nursery employees were mightily sick of Christmas ornaments that needed to be priced and hung on Christmas trees, Christmas trees that needed to be cut and carried to cars, tapes of tinkly Christmas carols cycling at 35-minute intervals ten hours a day seven days a week, poinsettia sap on our hands and people being increasingly rude to the help as the month got older, this being Washington during the Entitlement Era, waiting on Reagan Appointees.
So when the actual 25th came around in 1985, my coworker Aubrey and I decided we were going to get as far away from Christmas as was possible. No television, tapes on the car stereo so that we didn't have to risk hearing carols on the radio, heading through the Virginia suburbs into the hills of West Virginia where no one had the money to do more than hang a wreath, and especially never on their Mercedes' radiator grilles. It was snowing, and got cold, and after a few hours we decided we wanted some coffee in that era before Starbucks, and we saw a cafe in the woods along the road — the Green Lantern Inn — that had lights on and people inside. And no decorations.
Aubrey, who was African-American, was a little hesitant. "Are we sure we want to go in there? It looks a little, you know, 'de nyooow de dyoow...'" — imitating the twang of a banjo to indicate the vague "Deliverance" look of the place. But I really wanted coffee, and I twisted his arm. We walked up to the front door of the cafe.
Which was locked. And just as our cold-addled brains were realizing that, a big burly West Virginian with a bloody apron opened the door, looking a bit concerned and skeptical.
"Oh," I said. "You're closed, huh? Looked like you were open." "Yeah," said bloody apron. "We're closed; we're just serving Christmas dinner to the folks that live here. But, um, you guys look cold. Come on in. We've got some coffee for you."
We drank coffee with the folks for about twenty minutes. Got up, left a five on the counter — figured about a 150 percent tip was appropriate — and bloody apron didn't unlock the door for us to leave until we'd agreed not only to take back the five bucks, and a thermos full of a fresh pot of coffee, but a couple of turkey sandwiches he'd been back in the kitchen wrapping for us.
And I'm still not entirely sure what I'm going to write about. There are just so many potential topics.
But my old friend from Buffalo days, Elissa Feit, has found a great solution to that problem: she's been spending the last week writing about racism for Blog Against Racism Day. (She lives in Australia now, and thus there may be some way in which the International Date Line affects her blogging early.)
This post especially grabbed my attention, in which Elissa briefly connects slavery and Peak Oil. It's a economical read in the senses of topic and brevity both.
It's not too late to get in on the project, of course: you have a whole day to think of something to say, even if you limit yourself to a pointer to some of the other writing people are doing. (Traffic's important too!) And just between you and me, if you accidentally wait until Friday to write something, I don't think anyone will complain.
Because Twisty shouldn't be puking all by herself, I present the worst thing about being a white guy in love with an Asian woman: people sometimes mistake you for one of these assholes.
Creek Running North is the web log of Chris Clarke, a freelance nature and science writer. Chris lives in the San Francisco Bay Area but spends as much time as he can in the arid southwestern United States.
