welcome to downtown coolsville

Last night Amy and I went out to dinner with her mum, her ex-stepfather, and her stepbrothers. It was going quite well overall- there was wine and pasta and at one point the stepbrothers were yelling about their sister, who lives in Ottawa and seems to be universally hated, and it's always interesting to get a sudden window into other people's family drama- and then I had a conversation I've had more times than is strictly necessary. Which is to say, at all.

One of her stepbrothers was cold, and asked if anyone had a jacket he could borrow. I wasn't cold, and he looked kind of sad and puppylike, so I gave him mine. It's a green jacket with a yellow smiley face button on the lapel. He noticed it after a few minutes and asked- slurring a little because we were most of the way through a bottle at that point- what it was.

"It's a smiley face button," I said.

He shook his head. "It should be an anti-immigration button," he said.

Please note: we were not talking about immigration. We had not been talking about immigration the whole evening. As I recall, the last thing this gentleman and I had actually spoken about was his partner, Steven, and how they might be breaking up soon. So I suppose immigration was just on his mind, and he wanted to have a good long gumflap about how much he didn't like it. Or something.

I said, "My mother's an immigrant."

Now, in this conversation, saying that a person close to you (a family member or spouse for preference, although sometimes a close friend or coworker is good enough) is an immigrant has one of two results. Either 1) the person gets very embarrassed and backtracks, often naming all the perfectly lovely people they know who are immigrants, or 2) they ask where exactly the person is from. Which this gentleman did.

"The UK," I replied.

The gentleman made a face I've seen a fair few times during this conversation. When I tell people that my mother is an immigrant, they tend to assume I mean that she is not white, because that is the picture they have filed inside their head under "immigrant." An immigrant is a person of colour, or at least a delightfully "ethnic" shade of white. (Like a kooky Greek, maybe, or a fiery Italian.) The face is a sort of relieved grimace, an oh-thank-God-I-thought-you-might-be-one-of-them expression.

"Oh, well, that's different," he said. "That's not the kind of immigration I was talking about."

You always know the kind of immigration they're talking about. Always. But I bit anyway.

"What kind of immigration were you talking about?" I asked.

He waved his hands expressively. "You know," he said. "Terrorists!"

I shut the conversation down after that.

Derailing For Dummies! Just follow this step-by-step guide to Conversing with Marginalised People™ and in no time at all you will have a fool-proof method of derailing every challenging conversation you may get into, thus reaping the full benefits of every privilege that you have. YAY.

Ceci n'est pas une excuse. A useful analogy that compares systems of privilege to rigged exams.

I particularly like the distinction he makes between calling people out on what they did and calling them out on what they are. Note to self: keep this in mind for future confrontations.

Fuck you, Dan Savage.

Oh, no, those scary black people are threatening the nice white gays! (Because there's never any crossover between those two groups, nuh uh.) Let's blame THEM for Prop 8 passing. Not conservative scare tactics. Not the far right. Not fundamentalist Christians. Not the SCARY OLD WHITE DUDES WHO DRAFTED THE GODDAMN THING. Nope, it was all up to black folks and THEY BLEW IT GOSH DARN THEM.

FUCK. YOU.

Dear stupid, stupid white people:

When someone says "Hey, I think that's racist," here's what you do:

You sit the fuck down, you shut the fuck up, and you listen.

You don't give them a pat on the head, say "But it's not racist, you silly little reactionary!", then get all huffy when they call you out on it.

Seriously, what's wrong with you?,
Me