> Days turned into weeks, weeks into months. Finally,
> she understood: all people do not think alike. No,
> not even people who share a group affiliation of one
> sort or another.
>
> She's embarassed by it all now and looks back at her
> self of a few years ago with a bit of disdain. I tell
> her to be at ease. Achieving escape velocity from
> racism comes in stages. For her, the first was
> turning traditional tropes on their head: black became
> all good and white mostly bad. The next stage was
> tossing that silliness aside to discover and accept
> complexity.
Well put, Dwayne. Now only if you could convey this to all of the other progressive activists out there. There are some examples that come to mind which illustrate how members of a supposedly homogenous group don't think alike. One is the failure of the Sharpton campaign, especially the South Carolina primary where <gasp> African-American folks voted for other candidates. Another example is the reparations campaign. I went to the reparations rally in Washington two years ago. The folks organizing it were expecting more people than turned out. It was one of those Washington rallies where the Port-o-Johns almost outnumbered the actual people. I'm sure the poor turnout confused many progressives who assumed that reparations is a big issue for all African-Americans.
I like to think of myself as having long been a white guy from Kansas City with few out-of-touch racist views, but I found that I learned many things after living for several years in a diverse city like Washington. One important thing I learned is that African-American folks are just as diverse as white people and everybody else. I learned what it was like to have an African-American woman for a boss who just totally sucked. I learned that African-Americans have a range of political opinions and interests. And last year a friend corrected me when I made some dumb remark about Latino music, when I was living at the time in a predominantly Latino neighborhood. Like, duh, of course there is Latino heavy metal, punk, and techno music!
Chuck0