I found Taylor's focus on identity to be particularly important. Namely, his point that it is incredibly difficult to get people to see you as you wish to be seen, particularly in the face of negative conceptions of race, stereotypes, and prejudice. Within this society, our social capital is largely dependent upon how we are perceived by the world, rather than our internal perceptions of ourselves and our values, goals, etc. As a white, middle class American, I possess countless privileges, such as invisibility through normalization (aka I am seen as the "norm" and not called out for racial or ethnic differences). Although it is not as extreme as racial discrimination and stereotyping, I can, however, sympathize from the standpoint of a woman within a patriarchal society when attempting to shape my social identity, which is largely out of my hands. There's the fear of voicing my opinion in male-dominated environments and the risk of being dismissed or not taken seriously. Or having my behavior generalized as "the way girls act/are." I think this idea of fear of social identity can also apply to why we have a guilt obsession in our class and such trouble maintaining conversations, particularly for us white students. I've noticed many of my classmates making qualifying statements like "I'm not prejudice because..." or "Yes I enjoy these privileges, but I didn't ask for them..." We want to show we are sympathetic to injustices and want no part of past and current racism, yet it doesn't always seem genuine. We are trying to present the image of non-racists, because we don't want others to see as politically incorrect or intolerant (and it may be true that we don't have conscious prejudice or racist thoughts, but our motivations for telling the class this are questionable and doing so doesn't add any substance to the conversation). At he same time, we want frank discussions in our class but don't seem able to. This may be in part because we don't want our comments to jeopardize how others perceive us. I am definitely guilty of this at times, and I'm wondering how to get past this anxiety in order to have real, effective conversation.
To turn it back to race, nonwhites are fighting against years of stereotyping, restrictive racial scripts (that often come in conflict with other "scripts" from other societal groups they belong to), framing as alien "others," fear of whether their actions or words will reflect badly upon their race. For example when I took the writing fellows course, we talked about how minorities often struggle to make their voice heard in the class room because oftentimes teachers and fellow classmates see them as representatives of their entire race and not their individual beliefs. What's more, there's the idea that one should adhere to certain loyalties and values as per their racial scripts, regardless of their personal preferences.
Understandably, this leads to existential crises and questions like "why bother?" Why bother to be ambitious when no one will take me seriously? Why bother to fight against systemic racism when it seems to adapt and grow stronger? This brought me back to part of the discussion we had last class. In the face of so much oppression and knowledge of historical and systemic injustices, it's hard not to feel apathetic and hopeless. This reminded me of the conversation between Florka and Tyrell about capitalism and white supremacy. I could sympathize with Tyrell when he said something along the lines of "It doesn't seem very likely that the current scheme of things will ever change." In the face of such ubiquitous systems and dominant yet invisible ideologies, it's hard to see how our society could change as drastically as we need it to. Yet, at the same time, there's no guarantee that these systems will remain or worsen. To borrow from Taylor, I think this is why the idea of "double consciousness" is so important and in this instance I'm talking about the double consciousness that white people need to adopt: the dual acknowledgement of past and current violence and prejudice and the knowledge that there were/are many whites against these systems. Apathy only perpetuates the systems and makes one a participant in the inequalities, indirectly or not.
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