The Unpalatable Other (Class Assignment no. 1)

Wow. I am unsure how else to go about beginning to process, much less express my reaction to what I just came across. The shock; the desperate disbelief; the unmitigated anger. I was just looking through YouTube to find the video that I'm required to post with my weekly web-log entry for my "Multiculturalism and the Practice of Education" class. To my raw dismay, I came across the profile of a particularly vocal individual who commented on a tongue-in-cheek video commentary on race and romance. I'm not going to do him the service of posting the name of his YouTube channel. Intrigued by his nonchalant reporting of the fact that black men are wont to raping whites, I checked out his profile and suffice it to say I was floored by the bold, white-supremacist, negrophobic, antisemetic content. I could not bear it.


The individual was clearly well-educated, well-read and well-informed about what he was saying. I gathered that he took the time to do research to formulate his opinions. And he still had the certainty to make the claims that he made in defense of the white race. I'll spare any further details about his page. What was truly scary was the list of his friends... confederate advocates, Aryan pride brothers, someone with Hitler as his icon! Imagine in this day and age, such a large and such an active community of hardcore white supremacism.


I thought this was perfect way to both exemplify and expand what Victor in "The Color of Fear" said during his explosive rant. He says that as a black man, he (he being his morphology/appearance, his hair, his culture, his language, his dress, his nature) is unpalatable to mainstream, Anglo-America. That the social climate of the United States is allergic in a way to the ethnic other that must assimilate. After browsing through the active channels on YouTube rebuking mutlicultural politics and advocating for the rise of the white race (I won't even touch that), it becomes clear that this indigestability of the racial Other in America isn't solely because institutions like schools and the corporate sphere are adapted for Anglo-Americans in their cultural image. It's also because there exists a politic of resistance to the narrowing of the gap between the racial "self" and racial "Other." That there are those, on both the ethnic and the white-washed sides, who oppose potentially losing themselves in re-adapting American traditions to encompass disparate cultural traditions and such. This opposition can be overt--in which case it is very alarming and unbelievable--or more covert, which should honestly be just as alarming.



www.youtube.com/watch?v=UY04gIruZ4E#watch-main-area

This video highlights the contemporary discourses being used to address race in America. Now, keeping in mind this video uses the easy target of Fox News for it's case study, it is terrifying that these clips echo some of the same sentiments as those that are announced all over the page of that Wodinist White Power YouTuber that I came across earlier. The package and the delivery may be more apporpriate, but my reaction should be no different. And it's not. I can no longer fooling myself into thinking that White Supremacy is but a myth. Let no one say that Victor's anger is unjustified. We who are black are a challenge to the essentially white-centered framework of this nation. Just because the White Folk that I see on a daily basis are egalitarian, eager to understand me or are at least supportive of my progress as a Black person in a White nation, I should always recognize that there is much intolerance yet to be battled.

--TAHS