What if your nearest and dearest bestie was a closet racist?

I originally wrote this as a reply to someone on Facebook, but then it got so long that I felt bad sticking it in someone’s conversation thread so instead I’m putting it on my own thread/timeline thingy, and on my cielemel.com blog, so if it seems slightly out of context to you, that’s why. Basically, one of my friends posted this question on Facebook: “What if your nearest and dearest bestie was a closet racist?” My short answer is: I immediately and completely drop them from my life no matter who they are or how close we previously were. The real answer though, is the short answer, plus: except when they are connected by family ties, in which case you pretty much have to wait for someone to die off before you can completely sever the connection between yourself and some closet racists.

Because Facebook is Facebook, I can’t say names or give any identifying info because I’ve caught people who were supposedly my fb “friends” who actually were taking things I posted out of context, forwarding them to other persons I know irl but don’t follow my fb who then took extreme exception to my out-of-context sarcastic sense of humor. Basically something meaningless said in a joking fashion was blown into a multi-relationship-destroying force because I had fb “friends” that simply weren’t. And even though I locked out the people who did that to me, it’s hard to be absolutely certain there are no others. As a result of that and the insane disregard for privacy demonstrated by fb, I’ve been on the fence of deleting my facebook account for about six months now and largely have stopped using it though once in a while, like today, I check in on things. I went online today because I was going to post an article I found really interesting. But then I saw this question from my friend about racism, read some of the responses, and found myself writing a response in the thread as well. Anyway, regarding the racism question posted by my friend, I can’t be specific in my reply post because this is facebook, which is quite possibly the single greatest source of misinformation on the planet.

But I think the question is very real, and I think if people were all brutally honest, then right about now facebook would be exploding with the friends of friends of friends of friends of people all outing the many people they know who are racist in some form or another. That probably isn’t actually happening though, both because people don’t want to out their friends and because they may not be aware of someone’s well-closeted racism. I’m not outing anyone. Those persons I consider racist whom I can eliminate from my life have been eliminated from my life. But some tethers are not of my making and cannot be of my unmaking, thus, I have no one to out. I do, however, still have an opinion on the subject. 🙂

Racism in Any Form is Racism

Personally, I am disturbed by racism in any form: deed, word, belief, secret, whatever. I gave all this some thought a long time ago and decided that I agree with people who say you can’t be just a little bit racist, you either are racist or you are not racist. Whoever in this thread brought up the fact that there are multiple forms/degrees of racism is, unfortunately, also right – people can be racist in deed, or not in deed but in word, or not in either of those but in belief – and there are differing subtleties. So, yes, there are degrees of racism, but also, in my opinion, “racist is racist” which in turn means I think there are countless more racist people than we take actual account of, because the vast majority of us, or at least the vast majority of people in my sphere growing up as a midwestern Caucasian-appearing female adopted by an Irish and Norwegian couple, we’ve been taught and raised by people who in turn grew up in a racist environment of one sort or another.

Racist Deeds and Acts

Let’s deal with the simplest form first: racist deeds. This ranges from the most obvious action like killing people in a synagogue because of their religion (which the guy stated outright, so don’t try to say that wasn’t a racist act) to what racists don’t even consider racist actions at all such as making hateful posters or memes regarding any particular group of people. And then there’s the non-racist situations where, for example, someone criticizes the country of Israel for arbitrarily killing unarmed civilians outside their wall and someone else claims that criticism itself is racist because saying Israel has ever done anything worthy of criticism is the same thing as being anti-semitic. I happen to disagree with that. Criticizing the Templars for killing Saracens is not a criticism of Christianity, it is a criticism of Templars (which was a specific order of Catholic monks, not the entire Catholic religion or all of Christianity).

Racist Words and Speech

You would think racist words wouldn’t be debatable, but to racists and those perpetuating hate, the racism of words apparently IS debatable. Take Trump’s very first speech announcing his presidential campaign announcement when he spoke about Mexicans, saying “they’re rapists, they’re murderers, and some, I assume, are good people.” I was offended by what I saw as Trump’s blatant racism in that speech, and shocked, again and again, that the Republicans never shut him down for all his offensiveness on countless occasions before (and after) making him the Republican presidential nominee at their convention. But last year I got into an argument with two fairly new friends at a party because they didn’t think Trump had ever said or done anything racist. I don’t remember now exactly what the conversation was about (it was not about racism), but as I brought up a point or question in our conversation I unwisely started with, “well, ok, Trump is obviously a racist, but . . .” and I don’t remember now what my actual point was or what any of that conversation was actually about. Anyway, hours later, these two people sought me out by the bonfire to ask me why I thought Trump was racist, and I started with his very first campaign speech, which these two people claimed did not contain anything racist. So I moved on to something else racist Trump had said on camera, but again these two disagreed with my ‘interpretation” of Trump’s meaning and they claimed Trump wasn’t being racist at all. Well, there’s no point dragging out those sort of conversations, so I simply agreed to disagree about our “interpretations” of what Trump has said, and I immediately let those two people fall away from my realm of contact. Because, well, I happen to know well that life is very short, so I do not waste my time with anyone that wastes my time. I choose who to have in my life and who to spend time with or on, and I choose not to maintain contact with people that are hateful in any way or think they are better than others for any reason. That weeds out racists very quickly, along with bigots, misogynists, xenophobes, homophobes, egoists . . . the list goes on and on (btw, if you are secretly on that list and I just haven’t figured it out yet, please save us any argument and just unfriend me immediately, right now, before reading another word I’ve written). Basically, the people who are my closest friends and the people I give my personal time to are generally of exceptional quality as human beings.

As frustrating and hateful as “debatable” racist speech is, the truly insidious racism, in my opinion, is racists beliefs.

Racist Beliefs

Racist beliefs can be hidden. Well hidden. Completely hidden. I know people who are aware of and avoid racist deeds and words but still have racists beliefs that cannot be erased from their psyche because they don’t consider those beliefs racist. I’ll give a minute example of something I’ve been told that people who are “just a little bit racist” in their minds would say is not actually racist at all: I travel a lot, road-tripping, and over time I’ve RV’d nearly every possible route between the Pacific Ocean and the Mississippi river. On more than one occasion, people have told me not to drive across or stop the night on roads across reservation land (relatively speaking, there’s quite a lot of it in South Dakota where my parents moved to be near their grandkids). Some people have simply told me they don’t think it’s entirely safe for me to spend any time there, and some people have been more blatant in saying I wouldn’t be safe going through “Indian” territory. Now, if you don’t think that’s racist, I’ll explain why it is and then you should unfriend me. The simple fact is that a single woman traveling alone in an RV is NEVER entirely safe and she must ALWAYS be alert and aware of her surroundings and what is around and near her motorhome when it is parked whether at a roadside or a rest area or a truck stop or a Walmart or a campground. Bad things can happen anywhere, and in the realm of road travel, there is absolutely no difference in my personal safety between me taking a highway that passes across land of the Lakota nation versus me driving across Nevada, and to imply I would be in any more danger crossing a reservation – for no reason other than that it is reservation land – is racist against Native Americans (you know Native Americans, those people we “white” Americans tried to exterminate for being on “our” “American” land before we got here). Again, if you disagree, please unfriend me now. Thank you.