I haven’t posted for a few reasons - mainly because I had surgery a few months ago and just went back to work so I’ve been trying to get myself back in the habit of sleeping normal hours and actually being a semi-productive member of society.  On top of that, I’ve really had so much I wanted to comment on that I didn’t know where to start!

However, Dan (who describes himself as a white Englishman), posted a comment that I think gives me a good starting place for a post and hopefully I’ll be posting as often as I should from now on!

Dan wrote in a comment to an earlier post, which I’ve broken up to respond to it.  However, should this blog end up being a discussion forum, I could always add an actual forum.  Something to think about.

Now, for content:

Well you still seem pretty idealistic at least to me anyway. How can you possibly live in a racially harmonious society when white people like yourself allow black people to speak about whites in a way, which would be completely unacceptable if it was the other way round?

Good question.  However - the use of the word “allow” there bothers me.  You don’t “allow” another group of people to do something or not do something, unless you’re talking about a teacher and their students or a boss and their employees.  The idea of white people “allowing” black people to do something rubs me the wrong way.

As for your actual question - I’d like to know what specifically you’re talking about, because I’m really unsure.  I won’t say it does or doesn’t happen, but fill me in on what specifically you mean.

I won’t pretend to know that much about the USA and its racial issues but an alternative view could be that the black students in your class came from a background, which encourages a victimized mindset as opposed to one which is prepared to accept people of different races on an equal footing.

There is no doubt in my mind that those kids in that class came from a background that reinforces the idea that society as a whole views them as “less than” - they are brought up (though it’s very different for black girls and black boys) to - in general - assume that whites will not trust them, whites will assume any young black woman with a baby is unmarried and on welfare, whites will assume any young black man running is running *away* from something, and that the police are not their friend.  So yes, they probably do have a victimized mindset.

That said, I would hasten to add that it’s not like white folks are “prepared to accept people of different races on an equal footing.”  They aren’t.  We aren’t.  In some ways, that’s wholly unfair because the “right” way to view the situation is that we’re all the same, deep down, right?  Well, no.  This is not to say that one race is genetically inferior or superior to another - that isn’t what I mean at all.  We are *not* on equal footing, though.

It’s ridiculous to assume that slavery, and the laws that sprung up in the 100 years or so after the Civil War, didn’t have a lasting impact on the people of this country today.  You’re talking about an entire race of people that were not allowed to learn to read, be educated in how a business is run, have a last name of their own, or have any sense of self.  Their identity was wrapped up in their “owner.”  Then the Civil War happened, and slavery “ended” (sort of).  However, it’s not like the US Government lined up to build schools for the black children, and they sure as heck weren’t going to allow them to go to school with the white kids.

So you have a race that has - in theory - just been “freed” but is still in many ways enslaved.  They don’t have a large educated population to pass education on to the next generation.  The freed slaves living in the south couldn’t often afford to move north, and they couldn’t get jobs where they were.  Even if they could find some sort of employment, things like looking at a white woman could get them beaten, arrested, or killed.

People fail to realize that this was only about 100-150 years ago.  That’s not that many generations back.  Can we really say that it’s reasonable for the entire black population in the US to have “fixed itself” by now - because it’s not like the  people in the government (who are mostly white) were going to help them out.

What I’m getting at is this - yes, it’s probable that the students in the class had a “victimized” mindset - but I can’t say that I blame them.  However, that being said, I do not think that all black people agree that this mindset is the way to go - and I think that more and more white people are realizing that they shouldn’t assume that every black person wants to be treated as “that poor black kid.

Speaking as a white Englishman I can’t understand why people are so obsessed by race (although it is definitely becoming more and more of a problem over here) - I’m glad that where I live virtually everybody is white so it isn’t an issue.

There’s a lot of people who would agree with you, about living with people who are “like them” - it has to do with being a non-white race being a “stigma” in places like the US and the UK.  It’s the same thing that makes people avoid people in wheelchairs or with obvious physical disabilities.  They don’t want to say the wrong thing so they limit contact to avoid potentially embarrassing themselves or making the other person uncomfortable.

I was - at one point - one of those people who read gossip magazines, though when I was growing up, I only really remember there being People.  My mom bought it, so I read it.  Once I got out of the house, I stopped, but with the internet being what it is, I occasionally find myself reading some of the sites out there.

The joke, of course, is that I don’t watch TV - I only ever use it for movies.  Every once in awhile I’ll watch a musician on a late night talk show, but I don’t even have cable.  I watch streaming video at some of the news sites on big news days (I did that a lot during the primary elections), but most of the time, I don’t know much about the people they feature on the gossip sites, save for when they talk about people who have been around 10+ years (Tom Cruise, Jennifer Aniston, etc).

However, for one reason or another, I did find myself at Yahoo’s attempt at a gossip site today - OMG! - despite the fact that I roll my eyes every time I see the name.  They had an article about the new ads The CW has put out for the show Gossip Girl.  The ads are seen as scandalous, because they feature scantily dressed - if dressed at all - young actors in sexual situations.  The article is here:  http://omg.yahoo.com/blogs/crush/scandalous-gossip-girl-ads/13

There’s a poll on the site asking if people think the ads are “too much” or if they’re awesome.  I viewed the results, and lo and behold - 60% of the people said they were awesome.  Now, I realize that the people voting are probably the same people watching the show, so I’m not under any false illusions that 85 year old grandmothers are happily clicking that they want to see those ads.

My problem with the whole thing - well, one of them - is that I wonder how many of those 60% of people slammed Miley Cyrus for her picture that caused the big stir - where she looked like she was just wearing a sheet.  I wonder how many of them roll their eyes and act superior when young women are pregnant and unwed - or even pregnant and single.  I wonder how many of them make catty comments about the impossibly short skirts and low-cut tops that they see on other girls, acting like wearing such clothing is distasteful and salacious.

That aside, the truth of the matter is that those ads weren’t created by 17 year old girls, they were created to shock and surprise and possibly arouse 18-34 year old women into watching a bunch of teenagers behaving badly.  They were created by advertisers - maybe men, maybe women - but people who are certainly out of their teens.  Are the ads effective?  Well, they’ll probably pull in more viewers, sure.  However, the larger question - at least to me - is if we’re going to pretend that these ads - and the others out there like them - don’t have an impact on teenagers and how they think they’re supposed to behave.

This is a really big issue for me and one I’ll no doubt touch on a lot, but it scares me and disgusts me that adults - be they parents or advertisers or other people with influence over kids - really refuse to take responsibility for what they’re doing.  Not all parents - of course - are like that.  Some parents actually realize their 8 year old daughter shouldn’t be dressing to show off breasts she doesn’t have yet.  Some parents actually realize that playing baseball video games isn’t the same thing as playing an actual sport where kids learn team work and how to keep active.  However, there are many, many parents out there who seem to think that once the child can talk back, they’re in charge.

I wish I had some great response to all of this.  I have more to say, for sure, but this post is getting long and I want to do some research (scary, right?) before I talk about some of it.  I wish I knew how to fix it.  I wish I knew how we got from Baby-Sitter’s Club to Gossip Girl.  I’m not under any delusions we can go back - or even that we should completely - but it feels like we’ve lost something and that worries me.

I sent the link to this site to a few friends and one mentioned that she wanted to know what had caused the nasty comments at CNN’s iReport site.  It wasn’t just CNN - I posted the same post a few places, and the response was mixed.  Some of it was anti-Obama, but some was anti-me.  Rather than report on that, though, I thought I’d repost what I had written here.  It’s mostly unedited, save taking out things that place it at the time it was originally written.

This should, if nothing else, give some insight into my view of things.  Oh, and as much as I am an Obama supporter, he’s not going to be mentioned in every post - he just happened to write the speech that led to this post originally.

The post -

I want to tell you a story.

When I was in college, one of my favorite classes was Social Inequalities. I was young, idealistic, and - to be honest - I was searching for something that would show how “open-minded” I was. I wanted to be a liberal. I wanted to distance myself from the place I was from - a town in St. Louis County where it wasn’t a question of you going to church or not - the question was which one. At the time, I wasn’t a church-goer, so I saw college - where my first class was the size of my entire high school - as a chance to be the “real me.” Nevermind that I had no idea who the “real me” was.

The professor in the class was a white female who I would guess was in her mid-thirties. She was driven and to the point, but wasn’t unkind about it. You could tell she cared a lot about the class and the subject. We discussed racial inequality, gender inequality, housing inequality - lots of different things.

Mid-way through the semester we were asked to write a short paper - 3 pages or so - that addressed what we had learned in the class and our thoughts on how things were going.

It’s important to note that at the university of 23,000 students, there were very few students who weren’t white. I won’t pretend I know the number, but I think that less than one percent of the student body was black.

This class of about 50 students, though, was about half white/half black with one girl with an Asian background.

We turned in our papers, where I’m sure I talked about how I hadn’t really thought about the idea that “flesh colored band-aids” weren’t flesh colored for everyone. As a pale white girl, it hadn’t ever really occurred to me.

When the professor addressed the class about the papers, I was excited to see if all the other white kids were learning as much as I was, and if the black kids thought the portrayals of racial inequality were correct.

The response broke my heart.

The professor drew a chart on the board to show the results. The majority of white students cared - or at least said they did in their papers - about racial injustice. They wanted change - though they admitted they didn’t know how to bring about the change that they wanted. A few of the white kids thought it was just a bunch of complaining about nothing, but they were - by far - in the minority.

The black kids, however, overwhelmingly didn’t think a white woman had any place teaching a class on inequality. They thought that white people - including their class-mates - didn’t care about them and didn’t understand what they had gone through to get to college and the obstacles other blacks faced. A few of the black kids didn’t feel that way - but the majority seemed to think it was something that either couldn’t be fixed or that wouldn’t be fixed because white America really didn’t care, for all their pretending.

I sat there, my little bubble of idealism and “bleeding heart” liberalism slowly leaking as I saw the anger on the faces of the black students. I wasn’t mad - how could I be? I had gone to a high school that was 60% white and 40% black with a few Asian kids. I knew the cops in my town were much more likely to stop a black kid walking at night than a white kid. I saw how the white kids causing problems in class were told to stay after and the teacher would work with them, or in some cases, would just try to ignore the student. The black kids causing trouble were sent to the “resource” room where they did worksheets on grammar lessons meant for third graders. I saw how in my AP English class of 8 students, only one of them wasn’t white.

I couldn’t blame them for their anger and it hurt to know that at such a young age, they were already so jaded that it felt like there was nothing that could be done.

It’s been a few years since then, and my interest in social issues has only grown, though my idealism is tempered by realism (and 6 months working in a homeless shelter for young mothers).

I live in St. Louis City now, which is quite different from St. Louis County, both in racial make-up and personality. Still, though, I always hesitate before I talk about race. I try to smile and nod when people tell me they’re color-blind, because I realize how any white person that would say that doesn’t see how advantaged they are. I keep my mouth shut when black people on the bus go on tirades about white people while watching me out of the corner of their eye.

Obama’s speech - located here - is the most honest speech on race I have ever heard. The response I’ve seen from fellow Obama supporters has given me back so much of my hope that we can make this better. There are other pale white girls who feel the same way I do! There are also black girls (and guys) who know that there are whites out there who want to work with them to help make this better. This is not something anyone - or any race - can do alone. There are white people out there who realize what we have done to keep inequality alive, despite our best intentions. There are blacks out there who understand the pressure on black kids not to excel in school for fear of being seen as “acting white” and being shunned by their classmates.

I know that Fox News - and probably other media outlets as well - will turn Obama’s speech into something other than what it is.

I know what it is, though. It is the heartfelt call from a man who has lived to experience so many things - from growing up in Indonesia to going to Harvard Law School - and sees that we can do better. We can’t do perfect, but we can do better.

I’m starting this blog for a lot of reasons.

First, I suppose I should introduce myself.  I’m Teresa.  Nice to meet you.  I’m a 26 year old white woman in the midwestern United States, living in a primarily black city surrounded by a primarily white county.  My high school (in that county) was 60% white, 40% black, and had a graduating class of about 50 kids.  We started freshman year with 100 students, but our drop-out rate was horrible.  Most of the kids who dropped out were black.  That’s another post for another time, though.

Anyway, why start this blog?  Why call it what I called it?  Well, I wanted to start it because I see so much in the news that I want to comment on, primarily issues involving socioeconomics, race, and gender.  This seems like an effective way of doing that.  I called this blog Pale White Girl because…I am.  Irish/Scottish ancestry.  Dark hair, freckles, and pale skin.  Living where I live, during this time, it’s hard to pretend that being a white girl doesn’t have an impact on how I view things.

If it matters, I generally consider myself socially moderate and financially liberal.  I tend to vote Democrat, and that won’t change in November (I voted Obama in the primaries, and will vote for him in November).  I generally try to remain open-minded and I don’t like fighting with people.  Discussion is one thing, but once name-calling or trying to make the other person feel stupid enters the conversation, I bow out.  I have better things to do than to engage in a glorified pissing contest.

Given the reaction to a post I wrote over at CNN’s iReport site a few months ago in response to Obama’s speech on race, I have no doubt that people will probably be angry - at least a little - at some of the things I say.  It is not my intention - nor will it ever be - to anger people, as when people are angry they don’t think clearly and what good is that?  However, I am going to be as honest as I can here.  I think people are scared of saying what they think - at least the white folks I’ve talked to about these issues are.  None of them want to come across as racist or unfeeling - they want to be “liberal” and “open-minded” and they’re afraid that what they secretly feel deep down makes them racist or unfeeling and they want to keep it hidden.

The problem with hiding it, though, is that it can’t be confronted.  Without it being confronted, the thought process behind it can’t be analyzed and no change can come from it.  If the view is an erroneous view, it can’t be changed, and if it’s a view based on a reality, there’s no impetus there to help mold society so that the situation changes.

So, again - I’m making it my goal to be as honest as possible.  I won’t intentionally offend or anger, but sometimes honesty takes the scenic route to understanding by way of offending people, so it might happen.

That’s all - for now - but thank you for reading.  We’ll see where this takes us, shall we?