During the school day today I had to have private conversations with two different white students who were really worked up, borderline angry, at how "the African Americans" were responding to Obama's election.
"How come if a black person is elected, they can make a big deal about it, but if I made a big deal about a white person being elected, that would be racist?" one of them asked me.
"How come right after they announced his victory, the TV stations only interviewed African-American people? Why can't white people have an opinion?" the other student asked.
In each case, I talked to the student about how it was okay for them to feel frustrated at what feels like a pressure for white people to not talk about race as a way of avoiding the "racist" label. I get that. These kids go to a school with a fairly diverse student population, and they don't want to act like everyone's the same. And they shouldn't. That's not the way anti-racism works. Anti-racism isn't colorblind, and it's not non-confrontational. These kids' ideas were racist, but these are not "bad" kids. Racism and big-jerk-ness are not the same. Their awareness of an oppressive forced silence is legitimate, even if their notions of "reverse racism" are not. And yet their lack of knowledge about the ways that racism works, and their lack of satisfactory vocabulary for describing their hurt feelings, led them to say things that made them, for sure, look like big jerks.
I finished the school day with the hopeful thought that Obama's election may really serve as a catalyst for many more honest, personal, and productive discussions of race and racism like the ones I had with these students.
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