As with the many examples I could highlight surrounding President Obama, I’m alternately amazed and (equally) despondent over how far we’ve come as a country — or not — with respect to racism.
The latest example is the ugly aftermath of last night’s Miss America, which resulted in the crowning of the first Miss America of Indian (south Asian) descent.
I wasn’t aware of any controversy until I saw this tweet on my TL from Salon.com:
“Wow. Miss America is a damn dot head”: The most disgusting reactions to the Miss America pageant http://t.co/bG4ZyfZWbI via @prachigu
— Salon.com (@Salon) September 16, 2013
I went to the url in the tweet and saw even more examples of ugliness from the ignorant masses. I won’t recap the “best of” tweets, but I will share with you why these types of tweets aren’t outliers. As far as we’ve come with respect to racial diversity, we haven’t come as far as we think we have.
Back in ’82 when I was a freshman at Northwestern, my roommate and I participated in the prospective freshmen program. This meant that we had someone come stay overnight in our dorm room who was thinking about attending the university. The guy that stayed with us was a pretty cool dude who was jazzed about coming to Northwestern. He also happened to be Indian.
After the weekend was over, one of the white guys from upstairs in my dorm came to the common area while some of us were hanging out. What he said to me that night has rung loudly in my ears for years, and is part of the reason why issues of racism are so important to me.
He said with bemusement, “So I see you had a dot head staying with you this weekend.” I was stunned by the ease with which the words came out of his mouth…literally. I’m not often left speechless, but this one really got me. Particularly because he wasn’t simply saying this to just anyone, he said it to a minority who is not to happy about hearing racial epithets used PERIOD.
I said, rather loudly, “Don’t you ever fucking say anything like that again. It’s rude, it’s unacceptable. Got that?” He was like, “Okay, okay…” and walked off. I turned to my roommate and said, “If he can say that to me so easily, he can just as easily call me a nigger to someone else and think it’s okay.”
Mind you, this wasn’t the type of guy you would expect to say such a thing. He was a fairly intelligent white guy from Valparaiso IN, and he attended Choate. I don’t necessarily think he was representative of white people, people from Indiana, or people who went to Choate.
But as you can see from last night’s tweets, he was no outlier.