Ignorance (was: rent-a-negro.com)

T. Whid wrote:

> I'd rather err on the side of calling a bigot a bigot when I see one.
> Of course not everyone in the south is an ignorant, racist redneck,
> but
> there are many and the culture in the south lets them carry on
> without
> feeling their ignorance ('we treat our black folks good'). In the
> north
> there are many ignorant, racist rednecks too (as I know very well)
> but
> generally one knows if they feel this way it's best to keep it hidden
> as the over-riding culture doesn't support it. But in the north it
> seems to be more an issue of economics, not race. In the south it's
> still all about race.

This idea – that prejudice only lives in slackjawed, inbred, back-country folk – is a misconception that's as easy as it is dangerous. Cosmopolitan sophistication makes a hedge against ignorance, but not necessarily a strong one.

When I first moved to New York, I was enthralled by the racial fluidity that you could see at times: In the first week, a cute black girl tried to pick me up on Astor Place by speaking to me in Korean. (I was too stunned to do much about it, unfortunately.)

But as I became more familiar with the territory, I encountered a number of surprising instances of subtle ignorance from the educated, cosmopolitan New Yorkers who were supposed to be better than that. Sure, if you had to rank racism on a scale of 1 to 10, I'd rank New York City a few points better than Georgia. But still, there enough NYC incidences that make me hesitant to describe this as a great land of racial equanimity.

I remember the way a middle-class housewife in an online discussion made some comment about asking her Chinese friend about some Asian-themed sex toy, as if Asian women were automatically experts on sex toys. Or Katha Pollitt's otherwise excellent New Yorker about her breakup, but it contained a line about how her driving instructor was "the only Asian I know" – and of all the discussion I heard about it, I was the only person who wondered how a woman in Pollitt's position could be that insulated. (It turns out that Pollitt meant "Asian" as distinct from "Asian-American" – a semantic definition that no Asian-American I know would consider meaningful.)

These aren't necessarily major cases of harmful racism. And seeing as how I'm not black I'm probably shielded from the worst of it. But it's taught me quite a bit about how people work: If their concerns aren't the same as yours, they're only going to be aware of your concerns if you bring them up a lot. (You can't bring them up too often, of course, or else they'll just get annoyed and ignore you.)

Ignorance is shaped in large part by social isolation from different peoples. The social isolation of whites in Georgia is shaped in part by issues of class and geographic mobility. New Yorkers don't have that excuse, but instead we've got other factors: A civil society that is at some level so market-driven and careerist that it atomizes us into tiny interest groups, composed of thirtysomething dot-com millionaires or Williamsburg net-artists or Nuyorican slam poets. New York City has probably the broadest variety of human life in the world. But in between the grant proposals and gallery openings, who has the time to take advantage of it?