It's not because I aspire to be racist. It's because I know I've got some racist assumptions about people, things ingrained in me from living in a racist society. And dealing with it the way that someone who doesn't belong in any particular camp does: with occasional bafflement, and a lot of apologizing when I get it wrong.
Take for instance, over in LiveJournal, there's this community called![[profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
interracial. When I joined it, I figured it would be about something a little more than shagging someone that doesn't share your skin color. In the interim, I've found out it's about little more than that.
Confusing Race Interaction Part The Billionth: Someone there says they're baffled and/or angry that black girls, especially dark girls with afroes are now considered "trendy". I roll my eyes and say, "Wait five minutes, blonde hair and blue eyes will be trendy again," because come on, we live in a society that touts it as a standard of beauty. For all the whimsy of having black girls be trendy for a minute, my experience has always been that white standards of beauty are going to reign in the end, because that's what gets shoved out there as NORMAL.
And then the person gets annoyed with me for coming to that conclusion, saying, "There's plenty of people that would prefer brunettes and dark-skinned people over blondes," to which I say, "Okay, then, enjoy your moment in the sun for being the look that's trendy, now."
Mind you, I also said that people will fall in love with who they do, regardless of what's trendy, but that point seems to have been lost in the muddle.
Not to mention that I'm not even sure what I said or the conclusion I came to was racist or not. Just because I acknowledge that there's a "normative" standard of beauty doesn't mean I agree with it, for fuck's sake. It just means I'm noticing that it exists.
I don't know, man, Sometimes it just doesn't pay to talk to strangers on the Internet.
That, and well, I have the elbow room to think about this all in a very abstract way. That's privilege for sure.
Take for instance, over in LiveJournal, there's this community called
interracial. When I joined it, I figured it would be about something a little more than shagging someone that doesn't share your skin color. In the interim, I've found out it's about little more than that.Confusing Race Interaction Part The Billionth: Someone there says they're baffled and/or angry that black girls, especially dark girls with afroes are now considered "trendy". I roll my eyes and say, "Wait five minutes, blonde hair and blue eyes will be trendy again," because come on, we live in a society that touts it as a standard of beauty. For all the whimsy of having black girls be trendy for a minute, my experience has always been that white standards of beauty are going to reign in the end, because that's what gets shoved out there as NORMAL.
And then the person gets annoyed with me for coming to that conclusion, saying, "There's plenty of people that would prefer brunettes and dark-skinned people over blondes," to which I say, "Okay, then, enjoy your moment in the sun for being the look that's trendy, now."
Mind you, I also said that people will fall in love with who they do, regardless of what's trendy, but that point seems to have been lost in the muddle.
Not to mention that I'm not even sure what I said or the conclusion I came to was racist or not. Just because I acknowledge that there's a "normative" standard of beauty doesn't mean I agree with it, for fuck's sake. It just means I'm noticing that it exists.
I don't know, man, Sometimes it just doesn't pay to talk to strangers on the Internet.
That, and well, I have the elbow room to think about this all in a very abstract way. That's privilege for sure.
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