Feeling Out of Place (a.k.a., an environmentalist at a lecture about racism)

I was convinced by a good friend of mine to attend this lecture yesterday about racism.

It’s something that’s not really my forte, and it’s certainly not my passion. I don’t mean to suggest that the problems caused by racism are irrelevant or trivial; they’re not. But they’re problems I feel my talents cannot solve.

That said, as a person of mixed race (my father’s Japanese and Hawaiian, my mother is Irish and German), I thought the panel made me feel a little bit uncomfortable at times. There were certainly ideas and insights given I could never dream of, but for a good portion of the time, I simply felt, well, ill at ease.

Now, I haven’t had a lot of time to really think about why, for the love of God, I felt that way. It wasn’t like anyone there was accusing me of being racist. At least, not directly. But I can’t help but wonder if my feelings about racism now are somehow linked to the way I formerly felt about feminism.

Okay, wow. How much more of a tree-hugging Seattlite could I be right now, right? Racism? Sexism? Talking about your feelings? Writing a blog?

Anyway, self-deprecation aside, I wonder if this makes sense for people out there who might also feel uncomfortable about these issues.

When I was in a theology class last quarter, my teacher frequently brought up some interesting points about institutionalized sexism in the Catholic Church (of which I nominally, I guess, consider myself a part). It bothered me. At times, I felt myself wanting to defend the Church; at the worst times, I wondered if feminism wasn’t just a bunch of made-up crap. But part of me knew that what my professor was saying was true, but for some reason, I couldn’t quite come to terms with it.

I thought about it a lot. It really bothered me. I thought about my mother, my grandmothers, my female teachers…I knew I didn’t think less of them because of their sex. In fact, I believed vigorously that women are equal to men. So what was the deal? Why was I having such a tough time recognizing sexism in the Church?

After some time, I came to a pretty weird conclusion, but I’m pretty sure it’s true. I had a problem with learning about it because I so radically disagreed with what I knew was going on. I was uncomfortable to learn about it, because it was uncomfortable to realize that sexism is negatively affecting the lives of women, women that I know and love, even though I believed firmly and wholeheartedly that it’s wrong.

It was a sort of awakening. Once I realized that it was because I was afraid of allowing my abstract concepts of sexism to be actually, viscerally present in the real world that was the ultimate cause of my discomfort, it went away. It was nearly instantaneous, and that’s pretty strange. Seems like things such as this take time to get over, but for some reason, this doesn’t.

And so I can’t help but wonder if the same sort of thing is going on with my feelings towards racism. It’s easy to say that people who are so active in the struggle against racism are just a bunch of “angry black people blaming whites for their problems.” God, it feels terrible even to type that. But isn’t it true? It’s so much easier to think that the problem doesn’t exist, that you’re an enlightened twenty-first century citizen in racist-free society, than to realize that there really is a problem in this country.

I don’t really know a lot about sexism, and I certainly don’t know a lot about racism. I’m an environmentalist. But maybe, and this is a big maybe, the way I feel/felt about sexism and racism, that feeling of unease and (I’m blushing just a tad as I write this) that feeling of fear, maybe that’s how people feel about environmental problems, too.

So how do we teach each other not to be afraid? I really don’t know. I think that with racism and possibly sexism, it’s easier to have hope. Things are getting better; no one disagrees. But with the environment, can we claim the same thing? So much of fighting social ills is based off of hope, but I wonder if environmentalism, because it affects not only our quality of life but even our ability to survive, has a strategy based off of fear.

I don’t know, though…in all honesty, I’m just thinking “aloud,” without bringing up concrete examples. Just some food for thought; I’d love to hear what people think, especially people involved with issues of race, sex, and gender.