Ever wonder if you're a racist?

Interesting question to ask yourself actually. My default answer, I guess, would have to be 'yes'. Because if I'm honest with myself, I do have my biases. But then, so do we all. If we deny it, we're probably being dishonest; all humans have biases, and sure, some of those have to do with people who look different from ourselves, or come from different cultures, or whatever.

But then, let's not water down the word 'racist' so much, shall we, so that it describes the biases we all have? Human brains are made for categorizing things, including other humans. If we don't always immediately look past a stranger's appearance, to their inner soul, we should be able to forgive ourselves. As long as we try to look past it, whenever we can.

If on the other hand we conciously let those biases take control of our actions, then perhaps we're behaving like racists. That's a different story entirely.

Erica Jong, noted feminist, writes an opinion piece on the Huffington Post about circumcision, vis-a-vis Jewish male sexuality:

Ever wonder why Jewish boys are so f*cked up about sex? Ever wonder why they fall for mile-high models from Slovenia who wear those big cold crosses? Ever wonder why they like Chinese girls, Chinese-American girls, Blonde shiksa cheerleaders from Kansas? Or those cool black models who dance like Beyonce?

I didn't even bother to read the entire piece, but none of circumcision, sexuality, or Jewishness are my point in this case. The thing that struck me about this is the race-consciousness. Man, that's a whole lot of racial and cultural stereotyping in four pseudo-sentences. I am happy to say that really, honestly, compared to Erica Jong I really don't notice 'race' or ethnicity all that much, or at least I don't consciously think about it, much less write about it. Maybe that's easy for a white guy to say. Maybe it's even more difficult in some ways though, if you think about it. After all, we white guys are supposed to be the racist, sexist ones. We're always told that we are, in any case.

Something brought that home to me recently. There we were, a straight, white couple, out for dinner at the home of a gay couple. The other guests were a straight, mixed-race married couple (she's white, he's black). During the evening I mentioned that his voice and accent reminded me of a character from a television show here in the UK, "The IT Crowd". There are two guys in the show, so I said, obviously not the Irish guy... The wife replied "you mean the black guy" pretty accusingly. Apparently (this was confirmed afterwards) it did not go down well, my comparing the voice/accent of a black man to - err - a black man.

But actually, this whole exchange came as a bit of a revelation to me. Because despite the touchiness of this particular wife, who is insulted when her black husband is compared to any other black man, I can honestly, with clarity, claim total innocence and colour blindness for almost the first time in my life.

You see, I grew up in an overwhelmingly white place. Nothing wrong with that of course. But when I was talking about the television show, and accents and whatnot, and was trying to describe which guy I meant, it honestly didn't even occur to me that the fellow to which I was referring was black. It wasn't that I, as a politically-correct and terrified-of-making-offence white guy, skirted saying 'black' in the presence of a black man -- I just honestly failed to recognize that the television guy I was talking about was black. The first thing that occurred to me was that the other guy had an Irish accent.

Maybe that's personal growth. Give the man a cookie. It's a shame though, that at a moment like that, someone's right there in your face, implying that you're a racist. For people like me, who don't want to particularly care or think about race, and who would rather it wasn't a big deal and that we could all just get along, it would be a little easier if we didn't always feel like we had to tiptoe around the subject.