maloney's musings

[Jay Smooth’s] TEDx Talk, “How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Discussing Race.”

“But that’s not how these things work; when you go through your day to day lives there are all of these mass media and social stimuli as well as processes that we all have inside our brains that we’re not aware of, that cause us to build up little pockets of prejudice every day, just like plaque develops on our teeth. So we need to move away from the tonsils paradigm of race discourse toward the dental hygiene paradigm of race discourse. Basically, if I might just offer one piece of advice.

And in general I think we need to move away from the premise that being a good person is a fixed, immutable characteristic, and shift towards seeing being good as a practice, and it is a practice that we carry out by engaging with our imperfections. We need to shift from, we need to shift toward thinking of being a good person the same way we think of being a clean person. Being a clean person is something that you maintain and work on every day. We don’t assume that I’m a clean person therefore I don’t need to brush my teeth. And when someone suggests to us that we’ve got something stuck in our teeth, we don’t say “Wh-what do you mean? I have something stuck in my teeth? I’m a clean person! Why would you—”

I think this is awesome.  Not only does he (Jay Smooth) reiterate that it’s SUPER important to focus on actions of a person rather than some sort of immutable characteristic of racism, but he also (gently) reminds all of us to be open to criticism when it comes from a place of love and to recognize that we all mess up.  This is true when dealing with any privilege/oppression dynamic in addition to race.  Good feminists screw up and express internalized misogyny and androcentrism.  They also can unintentionally reinforce patriarchal norms and expectations.  This reminds us that resisting/undoing oppression is a constant practice and not a state of being.