I’m Christina, 38, blonde, Northern German. A typical case of whitespreading, you might say.
Still, I venture onto the thin ice of racism contemplation. My feeling is that the debate could use a little more adjustment towards honesty.
Of course it is important that we demonstrate against police violence in the USA. I am glad that the issue is getting more attention. This case is terrible, appalling, to condemn and hopefully punish with consequences…but it is quite self-deluding to think that only the people in the United States have this problem. We do have this problem!
And I even go one step further. I think it’s quite a self-delusion to believe that there is this one small (or large) group in Germany that are racists, but to which one does not belong.
You can try to change the world with the view that it is the “others who are”. But I think it is much more effective if we all look one layer deeper.
The beginning must be that we first of all look at ourselves, what beliefs and assumptions we have against others. I’m going to start with myself. My friend is Arab, I wrote a whole blog article about my prejudices that I went through. I faced a lot of fear when we got together. You can be sure, I was a super cosmopolitan and tolerant, active in refugee help, had a mixed circle of friends, etc.
And yet my own mindset hit me like a punch, when suddenly it was about publicly admitting to a relationship with an Arab. Those were not the thoughts I am proud of or the thoughts I like to tell out loud. But I had to admit that I was already brought up to be wary of Arabs. That “wankers” basically have something bad about them, which you can see in their eyes.
Complete nonsense of course…but the more I tried to resist this thought, the more unnatural and posed I became before mine.
There’s only one thing to do: be honest, talk about your outdated assumptions and beliefs, which at some point you heard and adopted when you couldn’t think very rationally. That doesn’t mean that this is something you would want to consciously believe today. But the less we speak honestly about it, the more these things control our lives. And it also means that it should be OK to talk about these things without being judged directly.
There is this term of “positive racism”. It is exactly when you absolutely have to get a PoC in your circle of friends, when you like South Americans especially because they can dance so great or because you always ask people first where they “actually” come from… This is the flip side of the secret conviction – you try to play it over. By the way, that annoys PoC just as much.
I and certainly many who read this are brought up by a post-war generation of the Second World War. It would be such bullshit to think that everything we were taught by our grandparents, teachers and parents a few decades ago was pure human love towards other cultures. And I don’t want to judge or blame these people at this point either.
Responsible are only for ourselves and for our thought system in which we live. We are not our thoughts, and we can learn to change something in our own thinking. But in order to achieve this, we must first see where exactly we stand and what is there. A kind of stock-taking, without us allowing anything to be there in advance. (little hint, if it annoys you terribly what someone else says, this is exactly the area where you have to do work for yourself)
Do you want to follow a path that leads to more authenticity, which will make you more effective on the outside? Send me a message and I will show you how to use Avatar techniques to achieve this self-reflection and make the world a better place.
“The mission of Avatar in the world is to catalyze the integration of belief systems. When we perceive that the only difference between us is our beliefs and that beliefs can be created or discreated with ease, the right and wrong game will wind down, a co-create game will unfold, and world peace will ensue.”
Harry Palmer, Author of the Avatar Materials