Here's an excellent article we recently found in a few month old issue
of a Columbus DIY publication, specifically pertaining to tokenization
and racism perpetuated by people in the city's music scene. Though the
intent is to point out very specific personal things that the author saw
with their own eyes, we think it overlaps into the things we may see
and deal with on a daily basis outside of the milieux we each find
ourselves a part of.
Columbus Is Racist
Because You’re Racist: Shit I’ve Seen You Do
By: Eimhin Avast
For all intents and purposes, this is a collaborative effort
to point out really fucked up racist stuff that has been seen and heard in the
Columbus punk scene. Get your shit together, dudes.
In order to protect the identity of certain individuals, I
tried my best to not use specifics when vaguely describing situations involving
people of color.
Not all people of
color look alike.
This is different than hanging out with a big group of
people and accidentally addressing one of your friends when you meant to ask
another a question.
The most common root cause of this stems from simply not
knowing people. Perhaps someone in the scene tells you a story about someone
you don’t know, and when you ask who they are, they say “Oh, you know, they’re
black.” A few days later, you’re at a show and find yourself in a conversation
with someone you’ve never met, and, without hesitation, you assume that this
person of color is the same person your friend told you a story about.
This is racist for a few reasons:
1.
Your friend’s only description of this person
was their skin color. We live in a world where white and white-passing people
get the privilege of being described by their hair color, their stature, their
body type, even their bike or their back patch. Even when people of color are
described in this way, it includes their skin color. You might hear “the big
black dude with a Crucifix backpatch”, but you’ll never hear more than “the
dude with the Vitamin X shirt” when describing a white person. This is because
whiteness is seen as normal, as the standard, in society. Anything different
has to be described and listed as an “other”.
2.
You assumed there was only one person of color
involved in the scene whom you’d yet to meet. It’s not an exaggeration to say
that CSBYS is heavily saturated with white kids, but it is an exaggeration to pretend that there’s only one or two people
of color involved. It’s also pretty clear that the Columbus scene is changing
and growing. This plays into that “white as normal” society shit. Don’t do it.
Yelling “white power”
isn’t funny.
And there’s a reason people react negatively to you when you
do this. I mean, come on. Don’t you see that you’re negatively reinforcing a
system of domination and white supremacy that people of color already have to
deal with on a daily basis?
Skrewdriver and other
white power bands are not acceptable party music.
Even our most un-PC friends understand that. Again: system
of domination and white supremacy. Not. Cool. Dude.
It’s never okay to
use racial slurs. Not even if you replace the “er” with an “a”, and not even if
your “black friends said [you] could”.
Louis CK says that saying “the n word” instead of the actual
word is like making someone else say it in their mind. On the other hand, Jay-Z
said in an interview that white people should just call his 2011 song with
Kanye “Paris”.
Let’s play a game: Next time you think of a derogatory term
used for any non-white ethnicity or non-Christian religious group, try and see
how long you can go without using it. I bet you could go years… Maybe even the
rest of your life!
Tokenizing or
fetishizing someone for their nationality or ethnicity is trashy.
Don’t assume someone knows everything about the country
their family originated from. Don’t mention how much you like Yau’s to a
Japanese girl. Don’t talk about how much you love [insert ethnic group here]’s
style, spirituality, struggles and/or resistance movement, etc. Don’t hit on
someone in ways that make light of perceived or known histories, race,
cultures, and all that other shit you probably read about on Wikipedia.
Don’t assume that
just because “white American culture” is a monolithic being that other
continents or countries are the same way.
In the same way “European culture” isn’t a term that can be
used to distinguish all the people in Europe (think how different Spain and
Ireland are from one another, or Germany and Italy, for instance), there is no
such thing as “Native American culture”, “African culture”, “Asian culture”, or
“South and/or Central American culture”. Each of these places consists of
dynamic regions and groups of people, with hundreds to thousands of individual
cultures, traditions, and religions. Obviously the most laughable of these
examples is “African culture”: IT’S AN ENTIRE CONTINENT!
Pro-tips:
1.
There are indigenous cultures as well as white
Europeans in Mexico.
2.
There are 510 federally recognized Native
American tribes in the United States, even more which aren’t federally
recognized, and even even more First Nations tribes in Canada.
3.
Africa is home to white, black, and brown
people, including the indigenous Amazigh of Northern Africa, who sometimes pass
as Arab or white.
4.
There are 48 countries in Asia, which is split
into Central (Kazakhstan, etc.), East, North, Southwest, South (India), and
West (Middle East) Asia, and comprises 60% of the Earth’s population. There are
more than 1300 languages spoken in Asia, with 415 of those in India alone,
along with diverse cultures, traditions, and foods in each territory, country,
and region.
Come on, don’t ask
someone where they’re “from” when you know damn well they’re from Ohio.
