Not Everyone’s Laughing At “Shit White Girls Say To Black Girls” by Tami Winfrey Harris
Monday Jan 9, 2012 – by Tami Winfrey Harris
As the video exploded across the Internet, some folks, particularly white women, including ones who deem themselves liberal, anti-racist allies, pushed back. A cruise through comments over on Huffington Post, Jezebel and Facebook reveals some unhappy responses, including 1) This is reverse-racism/stereotyping! 2) Everybody says dumb racial stuff equally. Guess what this black girl said to me once? 3) Nobody really says this stuff. I mean, maybe in the South/Flyover States… 4) How come this is okay, but “Shit black girls say to white girls” wouldn’t be?
Sigh.
You think talking about “big” racial issues like loan discrimination and redlining and police brutality against black men is hard? It’s often a lot easier than discussing race-based “microaggressions.” Microaggressions is a word coined by psychiatrist Chester M. Pierce, meaning “brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative racial slights and insults toward people of other races.”
The discussion is hard because it requires good, well-meaning people to admit to and examine their own racial privilege. It requires those who may think of themselves as anti-racist allies to do more than tsk tsk along with black friends about some madness, say, Rick Santorum said, and recall the things they personally (and perhaps innocently) may have done to make friends, family and co-workers of color feel othered. That’s tough. And it’s not just tough for the “white girls” mentioned in Ramsey’s work. It’s hard for everyone who has any kind of privilege, be it educational privilege, sexual privilege, gender privilege, etc. (All microaggressions aren’t tied to race. Just check out the Microaggressions Tumblr to see the many non-race-related ways this can play out.) But “Shit white girls say…” is centered on racial privilege and that is what much of the push back seems to ignore.
Look, individual black folks say plenty of stupid stuff about race, likely some of it to non-black people they know. This ignorance is neither right nor good. Nor need it be tolerated by white friends. But it is not microaggression. The difference? Power, racial privilege and historical context. In an essay about reverse racism, anti-racist educator and author Tim Wise explains:
As a white person, I always saw the terms honky or cracker as proof of how much more potent white racism was than any variation practiced by the black or brown. When a group of people has little or no power over you, they don’t get to define the terms of your existence, they can’t limit your opportunities, and you needn’t worry much about the use of a slur to describe you, since, in all likelihood, the slur is as far as it’s going to go. What are they going to do next: deny you a bank loan? Yeah, right. So whereas “nigger” is a term used by whites to dehumanize blacks, to “put them in their place” if you will, the same cannot be said of honky; after all, you can’t put white people in their place when they own the place to begin with.
You cannot simply flip the script on these scenarios–exchanging white with black. White and black people have very different experiences in this country. When a college friend told me that I was “cute for a black girl,” her statement had weight. It was spoken to a black woman on a campus with a 2 percent black population, in a state where black people were equally scarce, in a country where race bias is still pervasive. She was speaking in a culture where her own white features were prized and considered beautiful and mine were not. She was speaking to a black woman on a campus where black women often went dateless, because the majority white male population was indifferent to us and the small “of color” male population often was, too. She was speaking to me–a woman who had come of age in the 70s and 80s rarely seeing people who look like me in magazines, on television and film, etc. She was speaking at a time when dark skin and big lips and broad noses and nappy hair were regularly mentioned as insults in school yard fights. She was speaking in a town where there was not one salon that did African American hair and no drug store that carried beauty products geared toward black women. Had I offered that she was “cute for a white girl,” it would have been plenty offensive, but would have different context and far less weight. She had racial privilege; I did not.
The fact is that black people face microaggressions regularly. (And not just in tiny backwaters and Southern towns.) To ask that we not speak about them, or that we focus on “something more important,” is to erase our lived experiences and to ignore the ways the accumulation of little things can add to the weight of racism. In a post on Huffington Post, Ramsey says the video was borne of her personal experiences:
...I always seemed to fall in with the white girls from upper middle class families. I quickly became the “token black girl” in my group, which came with a whole host of awkward questions and first experiences for my peers. Unfortunately, the awkward questions and comments didn’t stop after I graduated from high school. Throughout college and even today, in corporate America, I find myself fielding inappropriate questions and swatting hands away from my waist length dreadlocks.
Over the years I’ve found that dealing with white people faux pas can be tricky. If I get upset, I could quickly be labeled the “angry black girl.” But if I don’t say anything or react too passively, I risk giving friends and acquaintances permission to continue crossing the line. So I decided to create my own parody, “Shit White Girls Say…to Black Girls,” to make all people laugh while, hopefully, opening some eyes and encouraging some of my white friends and acquaintances to think twice before they treat their black friends and associates like petting zoo animals or expect us to be spokespeople for the entire race.
Ramsey did a fine job tackling this issue with humor. Talking about race can be difficult, but talk about it we must, if we want to make any more progress toward equality. The least we can ask of anti-racist friends is that they be willing to sit with the discomfort of analyzing their own racial privilege. That is like the baseline of race work. Anyone who can only talk about that racism over there, but not the bias in their own heart is less ally than part of the problem.
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