Cancer, John Mayer and "Please Don't Call Me Racist" : Diffusing the R-Bomb

Look: Let's use a less inflamatory word for a moment. Call it tribalism. The natural tendency of an individual to want to sped time with, and favor, one's "own," however you define that, is almost universal. Race, gender, religion, political party, home team--we do this in a thousand ways. As individuals, whites aren't any more "tribal" than anyone else, on average. It is the fact that their culture has been so successful at controlling territory and memes that gives that natural tendency "unfair" advantage. Every group would like to think itself better, smarter, sexier, and closer to God than everyone else. While of course it would be nice if whites woke up to their privilege...but they aren't any more "awake" than any other group, and I've never been around a group of whites, blacks, gays, straights, men, women, liberals, or conservatives who didn't start organizing the world to make their position the "right" one, and try to manipulate or force the other groups into doing things "their way." Octavia Butler said that two things worried her about humanity: the tendency of people to create hierarchies of human value, and our tendency to place ourselves higher on that hierarchy than we place others. We can't expect groups to be more conscious that we are as individuals. Love and fear compete for the same space in our hearts.



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