New York Times has a Conversation on Race
April 6, 2016 6:01 AM   Subscribe

 
Of course the only white people they got on record are relatively very educated about racism and say all the right things. Not in the post, and really interesting, A Conversation About Growing Up Black with current black teenagers.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 7:13 AM on April 6, 2016 [4 favorites]


Looks nice but all the people are hipsters.
posted by fraxil at 7:27 AM on April 6, 2016


I think that's a pretty giant mis-categorization, fraxil. At any rate, 'hipsters' is kind of just what many regular folks look like nowadays (on the coasts, anyway)
posted by BuddhaInABucket at 7:31 AM on April 6, 2016 [5 favorites]


Also, hipsters are people too, and it's not like they don't have their own issues with race.
posted by Panjandrum at 7:36 AM on April 6, 2016 [14 favorites]


See: ironic racism.
posted by imnotasquirrel at 7:40 AM on April 6, 2016


I admit that I've only watched the first four videos, but I really don't see that, fraxil. Not that that would make the video illegitimate.

And yeah, Potomac, a lot of the white people did say good stuff, but I don't think it was universally good. As for educated, maybe that's just because it's the NYT.
posted by timdiggerm at 7:42 AM on April 6, 2016 [1 favorite]


After I turned in a paper about being Jewish, the lecturer seemed taken aback, and scolded me: "'Jewish' isn't a race," she said, "it's a religion."

Hipster jewishness.

M is black. He has told me how middle-aged white women like me clutch their purses when they get into an elevator with him.

Hipster blackness.

At ten weeks old, when asked our son's name, people responded "He doesn't look like a Carlos!"

Hipster not-the-right-colorness.

The NYT effort could be better, yeah, but come on.
posted by zennie at 7:59 AM on April 6, 2016 [3 favorites]


I found the white cop with the buzz cut to be almost a caricature of willful ignorance and deliberate unawareness. Why, he asked, would people think that the police are their enemies? Why, he wonders, would they not know that the police are there to protect them. But he wasn't really asking, he was just using rhetorical questions to express his incredulity, and his offense that anyone would doubt the police are on their side.

Rather than genuinely asking himself or others why some people have a negative view of the police, rather than seeking answers, he simply hunkers down.

The older white woman cop was tying herself in knots to avoid ever actually addressing the problem. I note that both black cops spoke directly about police/black interactions. Buzz cut and older woman never did, they circled around the topic, they brought up teenagers of all races as the problem, they would very carefully mention many races (or, I loved this term, "racial characteristics") rather than directly discuss the issue of interaction between black Americans and the police.

And yet, Buzz Cut let some truths slip through. He clearly works from a segregated viewpoint, there are black neighborhoods (where one finds drugs and guns and crime) and white neighborhoods (where one finds innocent people and wealth) and if you see black people in white neighborhoods than they must be up to no good, and if you see white people in black neighborhoods than clearly they are there to purchase illegal guns or drugs. The fact that most drug trade takes place in white neighborhoods is simply missing from his mindset. The fact that official segregation ended a long time ago and that people can live in neighborhoods of the wrong color, or have friends in neighborhoods that don't match their skin color is not something he wants to think about.

For people who had a total of two minutes of screen time, they told us a lot about themselves. And for Buzz Cut especially, it wasn't good.
posted by sotonohito at 9:40 AM on April 6, 2016 [8 favorites]


To watch the Asian conversation I had to sit through that dreadful ad where the Asian astronaut is shocked that he's being redirected to "Pruto." Sigh.
posted by sjswitzer at 10:55 AM on April 6, 2016 [1 favorite]


sjswitzer Wait. What? I know anti-Asian racism is fairly common and doesn't generate as much outrage as anti-black racism but how did anyone decide that was a good idea?
posted by sotonohito at 11:33 AM on April 6, 2016


I really enjoyed watching these videos (and the one with black teenagers is also amazing). I'm confused and a little hurt that anyone would think of them as "hipster" because these are real people of color talking about their own, often very painful experiences with race and that's a very dismissive thing to say.

I especially enjoyed the Asian and Latino videos and teared up a few times. All of it felt terribly familiar.
posted by armadillo1224 at 12:21 PM on April 6, 2016 [1 favorite]


mattdidthat I refused to look at the cop one because I was pretty positive it would make me angry but, even with that negative presupposition going in, I still thought your quote was a made-up exaggeration until the end :(

They have to take a psychology test before getting a gun, right...??
posted by Mooseli at 2:22 PM on April 6, 2016


The older white woman cop was tying herself in knots to avoid ever actually addressing the problem.

Coupled with the White Person video, its painfully, PAINFULLY obvious white people are terrible when it comes to talking about race because in their day to day lives because they don't have to. Every possible use of tone-deaf language was on display.

When the middle-aged white gentle discussed how he's a target of hate because he's a white male and how that's a 'burden' makes me want to flip a table.

At least the middle-aged women coped to their complicity in the system. If this video is a representative slice of Caucasian, we as a race have abysmally or morally failed to elevate the discussion of race to a point where constructive change can begin. We aren't even using the same language..
posted by MiltonRandKalman at 2:24 PM on April 6, 2016 [4 favorites]


This is probably wholly pedantic, but "race" in the context of "a conversation about race" is (I feel) often a euphemism, isn't it? It's racism that needs to be discussed, and not some neutral ubiquitous "fact" of "race". It's not that there are these various races whose existence itself is the cause of problems, the problem is racism, and I don't see why we don't use that much more loaded, much more direct term for what the conversation should be about. But: you, MetaFilter, will tell me if I'm being naive.
posted by the quidnunc kid at 2:42 PM on April 6, 2016 [10 favorites]


Nah man, you're bang on. But since, at a wild guess, this entire project was largely framed by white people, it becomes a discussion about 'race' and not racism.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 5:24 PM on April 6, 2016 [2 favorites]


The Asian-American video rang so true for me, especially the parts about how parents would conceive of "American" as white, and how "Asian-American" is a political identity.

When some of the speakers started listing off ways in which they weren't model minorities (cousin with a criminal record, going to a school full of gangs) I thought oh no oh nooo we shouldn't have anything to prove! Like, my friend (also Asian) has talked about how he feels like he played right into stereotypes by becoming a software engineer and how he's a little disappointed because of that. And I find myself falling into the same trap sometimes - I was surprised the other day to meet an Asian girl who was an art school dropout and kind of... ??? (I don't want to say "happy", because dropping out of school is not fun and in this economy it's going to be tough) that there was someone out who was definitely not fitting into stereotypes. No matter how materially successful you are, you're never seen as an actual fellow human being, you're always "some Asian". You can't be unmarked. I personally don't even mind being seen as a bit "foreign", because I'm 1.5 gen, retain my other citizenships, and in some ways, purposely maintain my "foreignness". But I can't help but view, to have to view many of the things I do through a racial lens.

And if you think these people look like hipsters, you haven't been to Bushwick ;)
posted by airmail at 8:27 PM on April 6, 2016 [4 favorites]


Well I'm watching the white people video now and I think to say "race" instead of "racism" was an interesting and possibly correct choice, because for a lot of these people, talking about race (not racism) at ALL makes them squirm. E.g. the girl who remembers asking her parents' black friend why he was called black when his skin was brown and her parents freaked out and shushed her. The question was uncomfortable for them because of an overwhelming context of racism, but I think the question itself didn't have anything to do with racism.

They should do one with mixed race people! This is totally a self-serving opinion but I do think we have an important perspective here.
posted by sunset in snow country at 10:03 PM on April 6, 2016 [4 favorites]


Like when people are like "Well, what I think about this as someone who's a mottled shade of pink..." or "paler than a ghost..." or whatever because they just can't goddamn bring themselves to say the word "white." This is often a preamble to talking about racism, which is equally uncomfortable, but it's uncomfortable because it's an awful topic. But to not be able to get out the words "I'm white"! THAT to me is crazy.
posted by sunset in snow country at 8:08 AM on April 7, 2016


or they don't want to be mistaken for a person who does love to talk about race (and not racism), and who does love to say that they are white. because that is not classy.
posted by eustatic at 8:17 AM on April 9, 2016


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