The Last Anti-Racist Interview

I had to sneak into the office where I work on my day off on the stealth tip to get this interview. It was the best place for us to meet actually. This is where they normally meet in the evenings for their reading group. We both made good time. I showed up just a few minutes before he did and found a classroom nearby where we could sit. I have to say, I've been learning a lot, both about my research topic and about myself and this whole process of interviewing. I hate the sound of my own voice for instance when I'm mmhhmming and uhhuhing and basically making the usual sounds of confirmation that I am indeed listening and or I understand. Hate that. I often wish I could either just sit there and take notes (actually I uses a digital recorder because I suck at notes and don't wanna miss anything) or interject and make it more conversational, but I hate to think that anything I say might be affecting the subject's response although I imagine it would be impossible not to. The subject was really forthcoming and shared a lot of his very honest, critical and thought provoking experiences with being white and how that related to his experiences as an activist and hs relationships with people of color. At my site visit, when I observed him in the group, I recognized in him, what I felt to be the closest thing to the voice a person of color might have. What I mean is that he seemed to raise the kind of issues that were hard to intellectually skirt around. He pointed out things that might make some white people uncomfortable the kind of things that would force a white person to confront certain contributory aspects of their conditioned personality to racism. That's one of the main reasons why I picked him. And when he told me about his background, growing up in rural Pennsylvania and his own unique take on that, his resistance to a kind of learned racist environment, I was even more fascinated. We went over the alloted 20 minutes that I have been limiting all my interviews to and I think we made it just under an hour. He and I both had a lot to say.

So anyway, now I am faced with the daunting task of somehow shaping all this data into something cohesive and compelling: a basic ethnographic write up. This is what I will be doing for the holidays. That and stuffing my face, and getting drunk. But I'll also be thinking about race and how, even though essentially I think race means very little, save the skin pigment we are born with, we are obsessed with it. And how important it is for white people to interrupt the lazy, dangerously subtle color blind racism that has become pervasive in this country. Luck to me.

Anti-Racist Reading Group

I really really kept on top of the contact person for this group in order to be able to gain collective permission to observe this group which meets in my building and met last night from 8:00 until 11:00.

My Urban Cultural Diversity Professor would not have minded of I had not been able to do the site visit for my mini-ethnography project but I was so psyched to observe this group and have the most detailed and thorough write up possible to support my research question and theories. In that regard, I can't really go into detail here about everything that took place until I have completed all my interviews.

This group is comprised intentionally of whites only in their 20s and 30s. The all white space is intended to be a safe place to express and discuss issues and experiences with racism including ways in which they have perpetuated racism without feeling uncomfortable or judged. And to a degree I understand this but I do believe now that I have had the chance to sit in on this group that whatever progress they feel they have been making will slowly begin to deteriorate if they don't open the group to people of color.I think it is really important that whites take responsibility for the huge role they have played in oppressing and continuing to passively oppress people of color but when you have white people alone educating other white people about these things an issue of unrealistic social reflection emerges. It just starts to sound like that safe space is about remaining safe and deluded. That's dangerous. The truth is that undertaking something like this can't be made easy because it simple is not! And it's not painless either, but I do think there must be a way to facilitate this kind of organization in a manner that draws the best out of everyone so long as everyone has similar goals in mind. And it's those goals that I need to study. I'm sure it's different for everyone involved.