When You Realize You’re Racist

By Benji Nason

It’s an uncomfortable thing to talk about.

Realizing you’re racist.

After all, my daily routine strictly centers around the ‘ol Parental Idiom: ‘Treat Others how you’d wish to be treated’. I would never wish harm or misfortune on anybody else, no matter what race or background they were. Never in a million years!

But you see, the thing about racism is it knows many masks. And, just like a mask, it’s not always worn. We pick and choose when to whisk it from it’s hiding place and allow it’s exposure to the world.

I’ve struggled with how to accurately represent my thoughts on racism, my realization and subsequent internal conflict, and finally how to best speak my mind on the topic without turning into a ‘white savior’.

I decided to tell my personal story. Because this story is mine and mine alone; yet one that so many people retain in their unconscious (or conscious) brain and remain viciously in denial.

Rural Oregon is my home. Grew up in the heart of the stunning, one-of-a-kind laptop background that is the Oregon Coast. When I lived there, my ocean-side town had a population of 564, 96.5% white. The County, 24,262, 93.86% white. A population mix, as is common trend throughout Oregon, of aging white hippies and confederate flag-wielding die-hard Trumpers.

The popular groups in my high school body held a sizable majority of future Trump-voter personalities. Racism was disturbingly open and rampant, student and teacher alike.

If you read that statement and tried to dismiss it as an overreaction; how I am attributing the school and everyone that went there as disturbed people who openly wore nazi attire and attended weekly ‘How To Be A Putrid-Pile-of-Human-Excrement-Burning-In-A-Oversized-Dumpsterfire of a Human’ courses-

-That’s not what I’m saying.

Most people solely contribute racism to extreme outward expressions of violence or physical intimidation.

That’s simply one mask of many.

Racism is viewing people of color whom achieve great successes as ‘Atypical’.

Racism is asking a person of color where they’re from- *then*, when unsatisfied with ‘California’, exclaim ‘But before that!!’.

Racism is growing uncomfortable passing by a person of color at night, and then again when that internalized discomfort is not challenged.

Racism is when you’re alerted to an old classmate’s post on Facebook, and following a passionately pro-Trump rant:

“I bet the liberals enjoyed being fucked in the ass by that n***** Obama for 8 years”.

I checked the likes. I recognized four other dudes from my grade- My high school graduating class was 38- amongst them. I couldn’t stomach going back to see if it had grown in popularity.

With outward displays of racism still so prevalent in my old community, it was difficult to come to terms with how I could possibly have anything in common with men like that.

…

It was a long road getting here, but I (metaphorically) stand before you a proud gay man. A self-described Queer Democratic-Socialist Liberal; who holds a Bachelor’s in Sociology with a Minor in Theatre Arts.

Sophomore year of high school I was one of 3 boys in the Drama club (One was an international student). Senior year of high school I became president of our Speech, AKA National Forensics League, Team. Growing up, it’s not difficult to imagine how I felt roaming the halls, essentially the walking antithesis of what was socially expected of me.

I moved to Portland as soon as I was able. And for the first time I was meeting people from all over the world, people who came from all sorts of diverse backgrounds and whom had homes in lands of which I knew nothing about.

I started to make friends with people of color for the first time.

As a result, a particular statement became increasingly common:

‘Portland is Racist’.

Never would I correct anybody aloud, but in my head a nagging part of me would always think ‘They’re wrong’.

After all, how could a city that was my saving grace; my beautiful, queer, open-minded home away from home, be racist?

They don’t know the real Portland.

In order to fully release myself from that stubborn pest of a feeling, I had to move away.

I followed the love of my life to San Francisco. For the first time, I was fully immersed in a major, ethnically-diverse U.S. city. I found myself constantly surrounded by people that were different than me.

I was the racial minority in the neighborhoods I lived in, and in the job I worked at. Suddenly I was coming face to face with a lot of weird biases and prejudices I hadn’t fully realized I had harbored before.

Getting uncomfortable when I was the minority walking down the street, especially at night.

Whenever I witnessed an arrest, I remember always being surprised if the suspect was white, and thinking ‘I wonder what that person did to deserve that’.

I realized the same thought never surfaced if the suspect was a person of color.

After my first heartbreak, I enjoyed an incredible year of self-growth as a single gay man in the beautiful Queer-Opolis of San Francisco. By then I would have a lengthy list of men from every corner of the world of whom I have had intimate relations with.

And then I met the second love of my life.

As a first-generation Mexican-Spanish-American, who also grew up in rural Oregon, he became a major factor in my fully realizing the depth that societal racism had affected me.

I remember four major arguments throughout our relationship surrounding the concept of my white privilege. The accusation always blindsided me, and a familiar voice would start its usual extreme behest at the very notion. After all, I was familiar with the concept, and I felt like I did a damn good job acknowledging it within myself.

I remember our first walk together along the Mission district of San Francisco. How he remarked on my change of energy, how tense I got while we were walking around. He commented on it being my first time in a predominantly-Latino neighborhood.

I quickly laughed off that notion of his, I wasn’t being racist! Those guys I grew up with- they were racist!

He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

I proceeded to chase this second love of mine back to Portland.

Although our relationship only lasted 6 months prior; with all that I had experienced in those 2 years away from the Rose City, I came home with a new lens.

I began listening when friends would say ‘Portland is racist’. I finally began to wonder why, and what was it about this person’s experience that had brought them to this conclusion.

Suddenly acts of racism became more common.

I paid more attention to people’s behavior in public, noting every clutched purse and sudden jaywalk.

Again, if you read the above statement as ‘Every time someone touched their purse or crossed the street they must be a racist’, give me the fucking benefit of the doubt that I, as someone who observed similar behavior in the past, can generally recognize the same in others.

I also started making a mental list of just how many white people I knew that made comments regarding observations eerily similar to what I had observed through that cloudy, self-focused lens from before.

It’s an uncomfortable thing, realizing you’re racist.

It’s an uncomfortable thing realizing you’re homophobic, misogynistic, ableist, transphobic, anybody-whose-any-different-phobic.

Guess what:

Everyone must accept the uncomfortable duty of realizing our own internalized biases and prejudices.

Because when those biases and prejudices go unacknowledged for long enough, they will become poisonous.

And that is when lives are lost.