A World's Fascination with Race

Friday, January 30, 2009

While thinking about YouTube and the bounty of videos focused on race, a thought came to mind: You cannot criticize a man for what he does not know, but you can criticize him for not knowing any better. I'm not sure if that was a personal thought or a line dropped into my mind by God, but either way, it pretty much sums up my opinion of the YouTubers that troll various videos on race and pounce on opportunities to share bigoted views. As a result of watching plenty of these videos and noticing the comments, I thought it best to never make a video dedicated to the topic of race and thereby avoid the hassle of deleting unnecessary and bigoted comments that may come flying my way. However, there is a part of me that is tempted to create a video dedicated to the "Youtube Race Trolls" and their incessant obsession with making racist comments on plenty of videos. They don't even realize nor care how their comments affect the video's viewers, and appear to operate out of some sort of insecurity or personal vulnerability every time they make a racist remark. (The verdict is still out on that decision :).)

Which brings me back to my original statement: You cannot criticize a man for what he does not know, but you can criticize him for not knowing any better. What I mean by this statement is the fact that people who live in their own universes of bigoted bliss appear to indulge their prejudices with enough fodder to excuse themselves from the obvious necessities of knowledge and awareness of the world and its history. I personally think it is a waste of my time to spend a second educating a man on what he never bothered to learn about the realities of their "other" (whatever that "other" may be - a woman, an African-American, an Asian, Muslim, etc.), but I would take a moment to shake my head and think that is a shame that he doesn't know any better than to live in a culturally-invented bubble of untruths and babble. I understand that prior to the age of television and the internet, it was very easy to not know any better and not have as much access to knowledge that would burst stereotypes and expose people to the humanity of all people, but I clearly underestimated the willingness of a large segment of the world's population that is bent on maintaining bigoted views and is determined (regardless of how much scientific or sociological studies state to the contrary) to carry out incorrect thoughts for the purposes of having some sense of comfort that they have indeed figured the world out, and have nailed it down to some sort of mathematical formula of how the world works, and how society is "truly structured."

However, I will now take a moment to express a lot of faith in the idea that the world is becoming more open-minded to difference and the "other" as nations find themselves increasingly dependent on one another in a intense context of globalization, attempting to understand the "other's" history and its complexity, rather than box it into a cookie-cutter white/black standard that never fits into our gray realities. Let's all therefore take a moment to challenge our belief systems, and take some time to uncover subsumed pyramids of knowledge that we knew existed, but never bothered to explore.