So I had a conversation with one of my awesome sauce Grad School class mates the other day. She’s cool and is especially handy in offering insight into the societal privilege of being white. I’m white and grew up happily in a small town, oblivious to racism and quite convinced that it was a thing of the past.
Since my childhood, I’ve gotten more aware, but am always learning fun new facts. For instance, she was visiting my home town the other day and felt genuinely frightened at one point because she is not white. She’s a Native. In my home town she was scared. And she had her kids with her.
Now I love my town and I love my State but we are, as a whole, rather racist, and also in a whole lot of denial over it. “After all,” (I’ve heard as a common sentiment) “we don’t really have a lot of black people, we can’t be racist!” Holy crap.
But people hating on other people is nothing new. Hardly. We humans like to repeat our indecencies. Slavery dates so far back that the first known ‘civilization’ of Egypt had ‘em in spades. Fast forward a few millennia and Rome had so many slaves that their politicians vetoed the idea of having all slaves wear uniforms so that slaves wouldn’t be able to identify each other, realize their numbers, and revolt. Because gods forfend there was a repeat of the Spartacus disaster.
Fast forward even further and you get examples of people hurting people without even using the excuse of “But they’re only property!” WWII gave a nice sample here in the States as we rounded up American citizens whose grandparent’s, parents had been from Japan and were labeled a threat. Oh proud moment!
The famed concentration camps in Germany have yet to go out of style, since their ugly cousins have cropped up in North Korea. These cheerful places have decided to provide housing for entire families, for life, when one’s second cousins, wife’s, brother’s in-laws speak out of turn about the government. Yup, entire families, gathered together forever, because Uncle Jung complained about food shortages. I do wonder, do the children of the children sent to live there get to ever leave? Or is it a forever generational thing? Or maybe that is a moot point since no one is healthy enough to reproduce.
Now there is a horrific fear to live under. “I’m hungry,” thinks you. “Hungry and really want to live. And healthy enough that I think I could make a run across the border. BUT, if I do, my entire family will be thrown into a death camp. Hmmm, choices.”
Ah the evolution of the ingenuity of the cruelty of man. North Korea swiped Hitler’s idea, those clever thieves. And Hitler nabbed it from…wait, what’s this? The U.S.? Nooooo, that can’t be right. Oh wait, it is. Those darned Nazis! Stealing all our ideas! Can’t they think for themselves that they had to pattern their concentration camps off of U.S. Indian Reservations? And they claim the Aryan race to be superior. Pfft! (See how I came full circle there?)
But no, we have no racism, no generational oppression here. Everything is fine. Everything is just perfect.