Willful Ignorance — On The Perception of Race
From the Perspective of Someone Too White to Be Black and Too Black to Be White.
This is a very difficult piece to try and start. Its concept is one that I’ve thought about nearly every day for the past few months, and one that impacts my life every single day. If I had to choose where to begin it, though, I’d say it starts with the phrase “willful ignorance.”
I have always been a Black kid that lives in a White Neighborhood. This is not something I was told. It was shown to me over the years, as I progressed from elementary school, to middle school, to high school, and beyond. I was labeled as “gifted and talented” in my elementary years, and as I progressed through academia, I was one of a handful of Black students taking part in the International Baccalaureate program. And as I have mentioned in previous articles, the fact that I’ve been so successful academically is because, as defined by my White peers, I don’t “act Black”. You see, I don’t speak in ebonics, or wear my pants low, or my hats backwards, and as such, I’m not “like those Black people”. Being told who I am aside, this sort of labeling that has been placed on me is all the more surprising when I hear something like “racism isn’t that big of a deal anymore. If we stopped talking about it, it’d just go away.”
Here, then, lies the willful ignorance I spoke of. I wish I was paraphrasing in the previous paragraph, but you really don’t have to make this kind of crap up when you’re in undergraduate social-science classes. I have always thought and thought and thought about this sort of viewpoint. It seems simple, but I suppose it isn’t. The conclusion I’ve come to is that the type of people who say these things are also the “default” in whatever context they’re placed in. This makes even more sense when, whenever I bring racial issues up, I am quickly asked why I “always have to make things about race”. Perhaps it is because race is something that will always be prevalent in my life. Perhaps it is because I am stopped by police officers who believe I am casing houses, when in reality I’m with friends, selling cookies for cancer research funding.
When people say that race issues are “over-highlighted”, it is because they have trouble acknowledging that their personal experiences living lives that aren’t constantly shadowed by racism has changed their views on the aspects themselves. It means that they are being willfully ignorant: “This doesn’t happen to me, or around me, and thus, it does not exist.”
It is this willful ignorance that also makes rappers like Macklemore incredibly, hilariously mega-popular. This is not a dig against Macklemore — the man is insanely talented, I enjoy his music, and he worked very hard to be as good as he is. But anyone who tells me that he is not praised by the large majority of his fans as being a “real hip-hop” artist only because they find hip-hop created by Black Rappers to be “uncultured”, is lying to me. These people are willfully ignorant of the powerful, emotional, and poetic hip-hop that comes from the Black community, and content with the belief that all rap not created by White Rappers like Macklemore and Eminem is represented by songs about “money, bitches, and drugs” on the radio.
What is very funny about this is that songs like Under My Thumb, Stupid Girls, and Blurred Lines are as misogynistic as any rap found on the Billboard 100. Yet when these songs are criticized, it is on the basis of the artists personally being bad people, as opposed to broadly brushing an entire genre — like hip-hop — as being sexist.
I think the biggest problem with how racism is perceived by the majority of America is most succinctly put by Peggy McIntosh — racism is perceived as something that can only occur through vicious, individual mean acts. But it is less likely to be perceived as an invisible system, used to consistently push down minority groups. This is why, when I sometimes tell people about the story of the Police Officer stopping me while selling cookies for cancer, I am scoffed at as “thinking too much about race.” That when I get out from an international flight and am told to go through a random baggage check, it is truly random — even though it has happened to me every time I have flown overseas.
Racism didn’t end because we got a Black president. It isn’t something that disappeared simply because you haven’t experienced it. It isn’t an issue that is over-talked about because slavery happened “hundreds of years ago.” And I am afraid that if we continue on this path of willful ignorance of the racism that continues to permeate our society, we will continue to see cases like that of Jordan Davis, who was shot to death in Florida last November. Why?
The man who killed him was upset over the volume of his “thug music”.
