the return of the comment-post [19 Dec 2009|05:01am] grammarcookie I made what turned out to be a really long comment in response to springheel_jack 's much briefer post (quoth he: "Happy Holidays from Huffington Post! Look how white we are! We're almost as white as the crowds that show up for Spencer Tunick's "art" photography sessions, and those are the whitest things imaginable! Whiter than rutile!").   It kind of seems like it should be a post on my own lj, though, because (1) it's dithering and (2) it's navel-gazing and (3) it's probably naive and (4) it's long, like I said.  And (5) if anyone has any good insight for me, I'd like to know it but feel like my flist might be more interested in helping me out than s_j's -- I may be a naive ditherer, but I'm your naive ditherer!  Right?  Anyway, here was my main rumination:  I do wonder what organizations that find themselves white as the driven snow should do. Like, obviously there's a good chance they're in that position because of something they've been doing wrong, or at best (?) something structurally wrong, but how do they start fixing it? Diversity-minded recruitment seems appropriate to me (though not sufficient), but how on earth do you avoid the likely and understandable reaction to perceived tokenism? On the other hand, it seems wrong (or impossible?) to go about making your operation, whatever it is, more POC-friendly without the participation of any people of color! So then what? As a Middle-Eastern woman who has mostly white friends and passes for white in a lot of situations, and who has found herself with mostly white colleagues, I am plagued by these questions. I'm uneasy about some of the organizations I'm a part of, and increasingly contributing to leadership in, not because of anything they do or say but because of the voices they happen to be lacking. How to confront this without being a different kind of wrong? I really do think about this quite often, and in the process how to deal with, or set aside, my own uncertainty about how I identify -- more succinctly than "a Middle-Eastern woman who has mostly white friends and passes for white in a lot of situations," I mean, which isn't even fully accurate in itself because I probably should have written Middle-Eastern--American or even better Lebanese-American which drags in the extra complexity about how religion and ancestral village affects whether many Lebanese people identify as Arab or white or "just Lebanese" and whether they mean it as a race or something else, and does that mean my family's religion matters and does it still matter if I personally couldn't care less about religion?... See what I mean?  Most days it's enough to make you throw up your hands and call yourself white and get on with your professional and social interactions with all those white people -- where you promptly re-remember that you aren't exactly like them.  This personal stuff that surfaces usually gets pushed to the side daily so that I can do the shit I have to do (including figuring out how to unwhitify my orgs, as I meant to be talking about), but I'm nearly 26 years old and it'd be nice someday to have a name that feels like home when I think about race.  1 comment|post comment

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