Healing Trauma: Perspectives And Attitudes, 43

First, Gentle Reader, my email this morning to the Ideas program on the CBC. In the small hours they were broadcasting the program "Whose Lives Matter?" All the participants were black women and of course Whitey gets blamed for everything. And I agree, white people, especially white males, have a lot to answer for. Anyway, Gentle Reader, read my email below, and draw your own conclusions: "I just listened to Whose Lives Matter, with interest. I think there is racism on both sides, and of course an imbalance of power. But on the whole, I tend to believe that white privilege is a socially constructed myth. I am white, male, early sixties, healthy, and I have always been poor and live now in social housing. I have also been threatened and robbed on three occasions in my life by black males, never by men of other races. I believe that my race was a factor, or I was targeted by their hatred of white people. I am not blaming them, African people have been through the worst possible hell. However, I think the argument lacks nuance. It isn't just white men who are privileged, but white men with money, social connections, good family situations and upward mobility. I have had none of those things, I am poor and therefore find it hard to believe in white privilege. It's the race card, you know. And gender. No black men were interviewed on this program. By the way, I generally get along well with others regardless their race and have enjoyed rich friendships with people of African heritage, among others. Please give my blog a read, if you have a moment. https://aaronbenjaminzacharias.blogspot.ca/2018/02/healing-trauma-perspectives-and.html The legacy of slavery. Of the wrong-headed notion that one human being can own another. And the equally wrong-headed idea that some races are superior or inferior. This has been a problem since our Neolithic ancestors discovered farming. Slavery has had over ten thousand years to develop, mutate and fester in our collective unconscious. However, our species has been around a lot longer, some say for almost a half million years. I find it interesting that, at least for diet and health reasons, there are some academics as well as New Age fruits, nuts and flakes (your basic granola bar!) delving into our hunter-gatherer origins, if only to see if they were doing it better than we are now, and chances are, in some ways they were. However, unlike us, they also had larger brains. And much higher infant mortality. And a much lower life-expectancy. Whatever we do, we are all responsible to address and challenge our ways of thinking and to change our attitudes. Not easy. I really think that we have to live together, or close together, and work at building communities based upon reconciliation and common interests in order to really learn to appreciate and value one another, and to celebrate equally our similarities and our differences. But I would imagine that our similarities are going to take precedence. I had to work hard not to be impacted by a hatred of black men after: in 1991 in Amsterdam a little African guy robbed me at knifepoint of close to five hundred dollars and almost got away with my passport; in 1994 when two very large black men visiting from the US threatened and intimidated me for wearing a bandana on my head, and two women (I suspect they were street nurses) had to come in and rescue me; in 2007 or so when a young black man started aggressively swearing at me and threatened me with violence just because I inhaled as I was getting close to him, so I could hold my breath long enough to not have to inhale the second hand smoke from his cigarette (for me, second hand smoke has no skin colour. It is all toxic, deadly and offensive to me, with absolute equality.) I have also felt threatened on occasion by white guys, but not to that extreme, and never by East or South Asians or Latinos, nor by Middle Eastern people. By a couple of aboriginals, yes, and more recently in my apartment building by an agitated African tenant. Just black guys and a couple of white guys and a couple of aboriginals. You know, I really wonder if we need to stop playing the race card altogether and start looking at socio-economic differences, inequalities and structures. This isn't to say that race doesn't play a role. Of course it does. We still have racial profiling. Recently I overheard an aboriginal woman in the local Shopper's Drug Mart complaining bitterly to the Filipina cashier about an allegedly white store detective constantly harassing her, as though by being aboriginal she was also a shoplifter. I appreciate her honesty and her generosity, when she refused to file a complaint because she didn't want to see him lose his job. As I have said, this racial issue is very nuanced, and with most of us being so intellectually lazy, it is far too easy for us to simply play the race card and forget about the other details of systemic inequality and injustice that prevent many of us from moving forward. As well as the stubborn refusal on all sides to move effectively towards reconciliation and mutual understanding. I think there is a lot of grudge-holding implicit here, understandable, but still an obstacle to resolving anything. When I see so many people of Chinese and South Asian heritage doing well professionally in my country, despite the historical obstacles of racism and discrimination, I am more than a little inclined to just wonder if there is more to this picture than what meets the eye. I wonder what real reconciliation would look like?