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You have completed the African American - European American IAT.

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When you are taught a history that does not include you, it could lead
to a feeling of alienation, as though you are not really a Canadian (or
American, or whatever). It's yet another way to feel marginalized, and
I do not think that this marginalization should be blamed on the people
that feel that way. That's simply part of the way that your world has
been framed. Although I strongly identify as Canadian (and Quebecois,
and as a Montrealer) I have never really felt as though I have a stake
in the history, and therefore historical fabric of this country.
English or French people grow up knowing that they are part of a
"good", "valuable", "normal" group that can freely judge other groups
while ignoring certain struggles. Everything begins and ends with them.
This is huge. For me, this hasn't been that much of an issue until
recently, and I can see why it might be for others all the time. I
think that my brother and sisters all reacted to this quite differently
even if they never concretely identified exactly what was going on
growing up. It's like knowing that something is just "off", but not
necessarily knowing what. Anyway, you're too busy trying to fit in, or
preventing your ass from being kicked or spit on.

One thing that I find endlessly fascinating is how people perceive things compared to how they actually are (and I admit that I am taking a rather narrow view of what reality is). One field of psychosocial study involves implicit association tests, or IATs. These tests are designed to determine what people really think about certain things when they are either unwilling or unable to state their true feelings. For example, a person may have a strong bias against gay people, but is unwilling to say so for fear of being stigmatized socially (which I find rather ironic).

Project Implicit is a Harvard University-based research group that specializes in IATs and getting to the bottom of people's views and perceptions. One interesting IAT, for me at least, is the association between ideas of goodness/whiteness, and badness/blackness. I took the test, but I won't reveal my results until some of you have, because I would rather not influence your test-taking. (Although there are controls within the test that are designed to prevent this type of thing, I would rather not take any chances.)

Please take the test here to reveal information about your association of attributes to black and white people. (You may want to read this first, though.) There are many other tests available as well. I particularly encourage the ones about sexism and sexuality, but all of them are revealing. You don't have to, but I would appreciate it if you either left a brief summary of your results in the comments, or posted the full results in your blog, notifying me in the comments. I think it could be an interesting meme. As always, I am looking for similar information in a more local context. For example, is there a good/bad association to being perceived as English or French? I would LOVE to know, especially if the data were broken down by age and geography. I expect the same question for Native Canadians would be glaring.

There are some things I don't really talk about much, not because it's insignificant or too painful, but because it hasn't happened all that often; at least not overtly. But when I do think about these things, I just shake my head. I am referring to assumptions made about you by people based on the way you speak, or the name you are given. Please, PLEASE read this blog post by Daisy, if you haven't already. Daisy is a blonde-haired blue-eyed American woman with an African-American name. Some highlights:

And I only got my silly record and book reviews published when I started using a pseudonym. Were they suddenly more readable?

Or even better:

When I did customer service, I worked with mostly black women.
And we were supposed to give our names, like good customer service
robots: "Thank you for calling blabbity blabbity, I'm _____, how may I
help you?"

"WHAT did you say your name was?"

Here it comes.

I always repeated it, obediently. And I often heard lots of illuminating stuff after that. A few:

"Are you a n-gger?"

"Are you black? Give me someone white. I want someone who can find their ass with both hands, no offense."

"Oh, God no."

(to someone else in the room) "Oh guess what, guys? I've got ______ on the phone, and she's gonna -solve- our problem!!!!" (room responds with hoots, hollers, boos, laughter, etc.)

"Give
me someone white, and don't argue with me about it, just do it." (On
these calls, I very much enjoyed getting the black supervisor with the
British accent on the line; we both enjoyed putting one over on them.
But I always made sure to tell the supervisor what was up.)

In other cases, I dug my heels in. Fuck you, I thought.

In
short, on the phone, when assumed to be black, I reacted that way. When
asked point-black if I was black, I wouldn't tell. "Why?" I'd ask.

"Because
I need to get someone who KNOWS WHAT THEY ARE DOING," they'd reply,
screaming. They would wait a half-hour for a supervisor they believed
was white, before they'd let me deal with their situation, as I could
have done in 5 minutes or less.

They made all sorts of
assumptions when I wouldn't tell. "Most white people don't want to be
mistaken for black," said one woman authoritatively, "so I think you're
black, but you don't sound like it." Obviously, she thought this was a high compliment.

Why is there a separate word for racism against Jews? Is this a racism separate from other racism? Is it different? Special? Why isn't racism against Asians some other word? Actually, maybe there IS another word and I and most other people don't know what it is, or that it even exists.

What do you think of when you think of racism?

Is it the image of a Klansman burning a cross on the lawn of some innocent black family? Is it the bar owners in Longueuil that refuse service to black people? Is it perhaps your father promising to disown you if you bring home a (fill in the blank)?

Some of the above things still happen to this day, and the perpetrators are the people you know. It is still a reality for most PoC (people of colour) in North America and abroad. But there are many that absolutely insist that racism no longer happens, and if it does, that it's not such a big deal. And with any good virus or aggressive cancer, it changes the more it spreads. With the largely forgotten struggles of the civil rights movement came the awareness that burning crosses and lynching people aren't very nice things to do. And believe me, that is pretty much where the empathy ended for many people. Name calling and discrimination are
not nice. It still isn't really understood that it was far, FAR greater than that, but it is a huge accomplishment, especially when you look at history that goes back a few hundred or thousand years.

Here's an example. My sister is 15 years older than I am. Her experiences in Brockville were FAR different from mine. Where I was occasionally made fun of in Grade 1 for being different than others, and the usual jokes were made about my penis and so forth, she was openly shunned and literally spit on. People would laugh at the very idea of her being of equal status to them. She suffered physical and mental trauma that I did not. It's for this reason that she avoids going back there as much as possible. 15 years later, the younger brothers, sisters, nephews and nieces of her peers largely knew better than that. I was openly treated as an equal, or even as a superior at times because of my good grades. But there was often something more subtle that grated on me. Something that I could only start to express very recently. Something wrong.

With the American election race hoopla happening right now, many bloggers and writers and colour have weighed in on the various aspects of the concept of race and its implications on the lives of PoC. They have put into words and published the very feelings that I thought that I was crazy for even thinking. They are talking about New Racism, or what I like to call Next-Gen Racism.

I read Racialicious every day. This is an American site that discusses "America's obsession with race". I really enjoy the discussions about the mass perceptions about large groups of people. I enjoy the fact that someone doesn't actually believe that we are past racism, and that they are not sick of talking about it because it still affects them. To sum up why race discussions are still relevant, I'll quote Lauren Williams of Stereohyped:

I don’t want people to be blind to the fact that I’m black. I just don’t want to be treated unfairly because of it.

I read about all of this stuff but I wonder: I don't live the lives of these black posters. Sometimes I don't think I even compare to the blacks in Montreal, or Toronto if you want to go with an English-to-English comparison. My race is, on the surface, unimportant to those that know and work with me. Sure, there are regular instances of "otherness", which I have been meaning to write about for some time, but by and large, it seems quite different from these Americans. I should correspond with them more directly about them and why I don't always feel qualified to compare myself to them.

Related to this, I think about my own privilege in society. Apparently I wield immeasurable social power because I am a man, even if I am black. I was quite happy to find the following meme that I got from the blogger Tami. Let's see just how privileged I am.