Stop comparing bathrooms to water fountains

I get it, believe me. The hyper visibility of Blackness in America, the UK, Europe and any other anglo-centric country makes it difficult for white folks of any age to go through life without hearing of the transatlantic slave trade and anti-Black racism, at least a little bit.

It didn’t end with the Civil Rights Movement

Although The Civil Rights Movement in the US is recognised all over the globe, it didn’t necessarily end racism. While some things have changed and some aspects of society desegregated, desegregation is not synonymous with racial progress. While we might look back now at Ruby Bridges’ first day at her all-white school as the right step in History, Ruby Bridges didn’t require an armed guard to attend an all-black school.

I am not qualified as a white person to talk about whether anti-Black racism in America has got “better”. The best person to talk about that are Black folks. And before you scoff about that, let me remind you that if I were writing a guide to London as someone who’s lived in New York City my entire life and never even been to London, I’d probably be laughed at. So why is it so preposterous to assert that Black folks are the experts on their own experiences and that they know more about racism than I do?

What I can do as a white person is look at the statistical analysis around me. And what do I see?

• Fifteen charts that prove the US is far from “post-racial”
• Reviewers will find more spelling errors in your writing if they think you’re Black
• Babies start acting racist before they can talk
• Whites think Black people feel less pain
• Smart people are not less racist, just better at hiding it
• Racism can cause PTSD
• Black male incarceration jumped 500% from 1986
• Black students face more discipline in schools and are funnelled into the prison system
• More than 1,000 young black men were killed by US police in 2015
• Police target and profile Black folks despite the fact that white people are more likely to deal drugs

When it comes to the UK, not much is necessarily better with Black folks more likely to be stopped by the cops in the UK than any other ethnic group. Even abroad, in China during the Olympics in Beijing, bar owners were told to ban Black people.

I could write a book, and many more qualified others have, about anti-Blackness being global, about the popularity of skin whiteners in countries where white folks are the minority, about dark skin being hated worldwide — but let me get to why I’m bringing up racism in the US.

Bathrooms and segregation

Because a lot of people are walking around saying: “It wasn’t about water fountains in the 60s and it isn’t about bathrooms now.”

Semantically, this doesn’t even make logical sense. In the US, things like water fountains were constructed for white and Black folks to use and were inherently unequal. So you’d have the nice pristine water fountain and the crappy water fountain and guess whose was whose? Logically, that doesn’t even apply here. There aren’t separate but unequal shitty bathrooms for trans people. There are just bathrooms that some trans people can use safely and others, who are read as transgender can’t.

Not to mention, in protest of segregation, many Black Americans purposefully drank at white water fountains in protest. Trans people are not entering the wrong bathrooms in protest. And despite the never-ending parodies where someone who is completely passable is obviously and jokingly using the “wrong” restroom, the truth of the matter is that those trans people who do not “pass” well enough aren’t snapping fun selfies in the wrong restroom. ThinkProgress reported that 58% of trans people avoided going out AT ALL in response to bathroom threat.

So semantically the comparison just doesn’t work. It’s not even the same issue and the only way bathrooms and water fountains are even remotely comparable is that they both involve water.

What it really means to “play the race card”

But let me move on to what I believe to be a common thing for white folks to do and why it doesn’t work: comparing any struggle, whether it be transphobia, homophobia, poverty, ableism, to racism as a sort of catch-all card one can place on.

White folks, especially and even well meaning white folks, may have been told of the horrors of slavery when they were younger. They might have seen films like Amistad, X, or Mississippi Burning. The story of the Civil Rights Movement and the celebration of who white folks like to remember Dr. King as is a common social narrative. So it’s not surprising that when white folks want to talk injustice, the first thing that pops into their head is the Civil Rights Movement.

The problem with this is that the Civil Rights Movement is not over. And although I’m hardly qualified as a white person to say with personal understanding if racism is “better”, I can say for certain that we live now in a world where Black people are being shot and killed across the US with little to no consequences for whomever shoots them. I can say that everything I linked above is still happening today. And I can, unfortunately even say, that Black people are still harassed for using water fountains.

A social faux pas is not progress

People like to think that because it’s now a social faux pas to say the n-word that racism has improved, but if you’re not living under a rock and you can look around you at the obvious structural inequities facing Black Americans, you will realise that things aren’t exactly peachy with a side of keen. Oh, and the idea that white folks can’t say the n-word now is not even necessarily true when white rappers supposedly connected to hip hop say it all of the time and when Black folks constantly have to write think pieces and blogs about why white folks shouldn’t use the n-word.

White folks may not think too highly of saying it now, but they certainly love to argue about why they should have the right to.

The comparison of every other bigotry and marginalisation to anti-Black racism (because very few white people wish to talk about racism directed at other POCs when they make this comparison) also implies that racism is over, not as bad as whatever other marginalisation you’re referencing, and it also seems to suggest that if the world were a little more racist, that’d make you okay with the ableism, sizeism, transphobia, etc. And that just doesn’t make sense.

At the end of the day, if the Civil Rights Movement never happened, if white folks could still use the n-word with abandon and no social consequences, it wouldn’t make transphobia any better. If a Black trans woman couldn’t use a white fountain OR a female bathroom, it’s not a better world. And the assumption that Black trans women don’t run into any issues because of their Blackness, just because of their trans-ness is daft and just untrue. Not to mention, someone can be anti-racist and transphobic. Very few people are aware that Fred Phelps actually campaigned for racial equality way before he established his God Hates Fags campaign.

So, please, in the future, if you find yourself reaching for anti-Black racism as a talking point, as evidence, as a means to centre a conversation about any bigotry around something you assume is more digestible understand that Black Lives Matter. And Black Lives should not be used as a talking point.

Bathrooms are nothing like water fountains. And they don’t have to be for it to be wrong to stop trans people from using them.

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