Fugitivus Discussion Forum

[I'm ashamed to say that I've said the above far, far too many times and meant it. my young and stupid days.]

so an incident on the bus tonight brought up a question. Is me wincing when a large black man almost sat half on me racist when I would do the same for a white man? for me it's men, large men in particular, that trigger the OMG UNSAAAAAAAAAFE reaction, but I understand that there's obviously a big issue wrt to white females reacting in the OMG RAPIST! fashion to black males.

but if it's all males...?

I dunno, I'm just kinda lost here.

Holy shit, yes, this is such a huge issue. I wish I could help, I'm just saying yes, I understand what you're going through right now when it's possible racism wrapped up in a justified wariness of men.

I think this may get into the intent-vs.-context thing, which is always sort of complicated and depressing and unsatisfying when I find myself running across examples in my own life, because there's not really a happy answer. So you may not have intended to be racist when you flinched from a large black guy because the concern for you was the "large guy" rather than the "black" aspect, but since we live in a racist society where black men have been repeatedly villainized and cast as dangerous to white womanhood in a number of social narratives, the flinch still plays into those narratives even if you didn't intend it to. So while it doesn't mean "Kaie as a person = horrible, evil racist" or anything like that, it does still contribute to racist structures in a way that it wouldn't if it was a large white guy you flinched away from.

Which doesn't mean that you need to become totally fine with men invading your personal space. And of course, that tendency for men to crowd women also supports a social structure of sexism - even if in this case his intent wasn't to go "oh, silly women don't need personal space like manly men do!" but rather "whoops, didn't see her there because I was so busy worrying about what I need to do tonight" or whatever may have been his reason, the action in the context of a sexist society was still another example of women's space /comfort/ need to not be sat on being treated as less important than men's.

Sorry, that got all rambly.

It seems kinda likely that your perceptions of who is threatening to you are influenced by the internalized shit in your head. For example, you said that large men are more threatening to you, but it may be that you are less likely to see a white guy as being "large" or in your space. I know that at my work, sometimes customers are jerks or plain unpleasant. That's a fact. But I have internalized my coworkers' ideas of who is "unpleasant" and for whom we drop our level of customer service, and that's heavily based on class markers.

I guess I would ask, so say you determine that yeah, there is racism implicit in how you reacted to this guy and how you have reacted to other men of color. What would you do about it?

yeah, that's the thing: I don't KNOW how I would change it. because again, there's that icky "large men" bit and I'm really REALLY not willing to go through desensitization therapy for it. Not now, at least.

I know that the way people view this reaction will likely be ugly, and the only thing I can think of to change is the flinching... which again ties into the severe feelings of "being unsafe" around certain types of men. so I dunno.

Then my next question is, if you don't think it would change your behavior either way, then why are you asking? I don't mean that as an attack, I'm just wondering what you would come up with if you thought about REALLY why this question bothers you enough to make a topic about it, even though it won't change your behavior.