conuly | What does he want, a cookie?

Prince Harry says he's had an 'awakening' on racism, in a world 'created by White people for White people'

Wow, buddy, did you come to this amazing realization before or after you got married?

"When you go into a shop with your children and you only see White dolls, do you even think, 'that's weird, there is not a Black doll there?'" Harry said.

...yes, I do! And I've been noting stuff like that since childhood, because unlike some people I didn't need to have Black family members in order to have functioning eyes and brain cells. You're not special.

I'm glad he's learned something, I guess. Maybe tomorrow he can learn that women are also not doing too hot. God, this entire article is insufferable.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

lilysea

I wonder if people who don't listen to

a) people of colour

b) women

c) people on low incomes

will listen to Prince Harry because he's None of The Above, and therefore gain a clue?

From:

conuly

Doubtful.

From:

oloriel

That's what I thought. Sometimes, unfortunately, the obvious has to be stated by rich white male people because the people who need to hear it won't listen to anyone else. So articles like this may be insufferable, but they're just as necessary as "water is wet" type of studies about (say) neurodivergent people: There are audiences who won't listen to anything else.

From:

calimac

"What does he want, a cookie?"

What makes you think he wants anything? This sort of scoffing is baffling and annoying. He's just explaining himself. A slow realisation is better than none at all.

From:

conuly

Some of us can come to life-changing realizations without going on mass media about it.

From:

wolby

OTOH, some people can't get coffee without being put on mass media about it, so I wouldn't say that it's *only* *his* fault he's on mass media about it.

It's one of the pathologies of our society that we encourage famous white men to believe their thoughts are always profound and important, but the existence of the kind of media culture that profits off these stories is another of the pathologies.

From:

conuly

Fair enough. I did say it's the article that's insufferable - I'm sure Meghan has enough self-respect that she sees more to him than this article shows.

From:

minoanmiss

This kind of Astounding Major Epiphany is, in turn, annoying to those of us who have to live these realities every day, and therefore talk about it, only to be consistently ignored. It took him falling in love with a woman who faces racism for him to care about it -- what does that say to the millions of us who have been pleading for people to care for all our lives?

OTOH, I hope that at least some of the millions of people who've never bothered to consider racism before do listen to him. I kind of have to hope, or drown. This Announcement demonstrates clearly how people in such a position rarely bother to listen to people like me.

Edited Date: 2020-10-02 04:50 pm (UTC)

From:

wolby

+1, well said.

Edited Date: 2020-10-02 05:21 pm (UTC)

From:

calimac

That would be an appropriate response if he'd claimed he'd made a major discovery that was new to humankind. But he was just having a personal epiphany that helped him understand other people's perspectives. You're not going to encourage people to get a clue if you mock them when they do.

And yes, it's annoying that, no matter how much you tell them, people don't realize things until they experience them personally. But the need for experience to impress things into one's mind is so basic and so well-established in all areas of life that it shouldn't be a surprise to see it happen.

From:

minoanmiss

You're not going to encourage people to get a clue if you mock them when they do.

Were you going to send HRH Harry a printout?

More broadly, your statement puts the responsibility for the eradication of bigotry on the victims of bigotry rather than the perpetrators. We have to be sweet and kind and grateful at all times or we bring it on ourselves when people close their eyes to reality and passively allow bigotry they refuse to believe exists, or worse, feel entitled to enact bigotry because "one of those X made me feeeeeeeeellllllll baaaaaaaaaadddddd"? Put succinctly, fuck that.

From:

calimac

There are other people in the world who might read this besides Prince Harry, you know, people who might take this as a lesson on whether they'd be welcomed or encouraged as they take steps along the road to enlightenment.

I'm not talking about people who close their eyes. I'm talking about people beginning to open them.

From:

conuly

If those people have been reading my journal and are unaware that racism is a problem, then I don't think my relative niceness is the issue.

For that matter, if they're going to stop on their journey of consciousness-raising because people are mean to them - or, not even, mean to public figures neither they nor I will ever meet - and didn't sufficiently hold their hands as they took baby steps into awareness, I really question how far they intended to get in the first place.

If you want to be super supportive to all those folks all the time, go for it. I hope it helps. I sincerely do, because it sounds exhausting and if it doesn't help I just despair.

From:

calimac

You don't have to be super supportive. Just don't go out of your way to be insulting, which sounds to me even more exhausting than the alternative.

Again, an elementary knowledge of human psychology should suggest not underestimating people's ability to reject a course of action if they know they'll be jeered at for it; but I'm thinking less of that than of clamming up and not seeking feedback on your tentative journey, the presence of which would be extremely helpful. Again, that positive feedback doesn't have to come from you. But why bother to give negative feedback instead?

From:

conuly

I'm not going out of my way. It was actually really easy to make this post.

From:

calimac

That's what makes this so sad.

From:

mindstalk

If you mock people for learning things, you get less learning.

Also https://xkcd.com/1053/

From:

minoanmiss

Oh please. Today's 10,000 is about learning the different kinds of clouds, not learning that Black people are human beings, and it is truly insulting that you're drawing an equivalence between these two kinds of facts.

conuly, I apologize for getting into it in your journal, and I don't feel like having to do the three part proof that Black people are as human as anyone else, so I'm bowing out now.

From:

conuly

Don't worry about it. It's plenty easy for me to be dispassionate, after all. (Well, relatively - I do worry about my nieces, who are some of the most important people in the world. But if it weren't for them I could treat the entire subject academically if I wanted and nobody would judge me for it.)

From:

conuly

I don't think he reads my DW.

From:

marahmarie

I find myself replacing the word "racism" with "sexism" to set up a framework myself and others might understand without having to put ourselves directly in the shoes of those experiencing racism (who therefore are falling short of understanding what

conuly might be trying to get at, I should add for clarity).

The result is the same: if not for some men (relatively few, at that) falling in love with a woman experiencing sexism, they'd never care about it...said with all understanding that sexism and racism are indeed entirely different beasts.

It's the "if not for" that gets me...like if they hadn't, then...and "if it takes living with someone who"...which makes it feel almost like -ism tourism, not a real effort and not borne of spontaneous say, empathy for another.

Edited (clarity) Date: 2020-10-03 05:33 am (UTC)

From:

nicki

I'm not surprised it took him this long. People in Europe don't talk about racism very much. They like to pretend that racism is a thing that mostly happens here because we talk about it, but you can't change a social issue unless you are aware of it and you confront it and to do that you have to talk about it.

From:

conuly

Oh, yeah. Have you ever seen any of the comments any of them make whenever Roma come up? They recite a whole litany that might as well have come from the minutes of the most recent KKK meeting (just replace the slurs) and then say "It's totally different - it's not their race, it's their culture, they just don't want to assimilate with us!"

Well, gosh, I wonder why that might be.

And honestly, even when it comes to racism against other groups, white Europeans have always seemed a little backwards with their understanding of race relations, probably in no small part due to their insistence that racism doesn't happen there.

From:

nicki

Yes, it's pretty ugly. They also, variously, have problems with the Turks, plus the various Asian groups, and various African peoples who moved to their countries when the colonies started to take back control. On top of that they aren't really open to assimilation either. They very much prefer that those different people stay in their different people group. They want their immigrants to act like them, but not really be with them, if that makes sense.

From:

mindstalk

My impression is that modern Brits can be racist against Polish immigrants. Thus, in part, Brexit.

From:

marahmarie

Just like COVID only happens here in the US when we get tested for it? The lies people tell themselves and each other...

From:

nicki

Pretty much. Sigh.

From:

greghousesgf

I don't have kids but I did go into a toy store once and bought a doll with very Latinx looking features for my niece and the jerk who worked in the toy store assumed I would have some objection to the way the doll looked. :(

From:

conuly

Wow, fuck that.

From:

sabotabby

Maybe he can live his awakening by giving back his family's stolen riches to the people that they've historically trodden all over??

From:

conuly

If he did that, I wouldn't snark.

From:

marahmarie

I'll never get why this family (or any royal family to gain power the same way, which is probably pretty much "all of them") are so celebrated. Like, they took all the money and land from anyone's ancestors ever, but they let at least some of them live? Yes, that must be it, yay.

Edited (pronouns) Date: 2020-10-03 05:41 am (UTC)

From:

silveradept

I am glad that the lived experience of his wife is helping him understand the reality of the world. I wish it didn't have to be like that, but I suppose it's better than him continuing to live in ignorance.

From:

janewilliams20.livejournal.com

I'd guess he hit it after he moved to America. Because here, to have a range of dolls and all of them white *would* be weird. He's quite young, he may well not have seen that before.
You do realise that the UK didn't think of his wife as "black" until America started making a fuss about it? And then we looked at the photos and said "is she? You sure?" The fuss here was because she was American.