I didn’t get a chance to see this Ted Talk by Jay Smooth (ill doctrine) until now, and boy, should I have seen this earlier. I hadn’t realized that he’s also someone who’s encountered the “What are you?” question that I and so many other multiracials have to answer. Bad on me for not following him closer, as he totally deserves to be heard because of his special ability to converse into clarity. His calm explanation that as imperfect human beings, we sometimes build obstacles that disable simple straightforward conversations about race. This talk helps to diffuse a touchy subject that so many of us don’t want to have, but must because of that intensely painful question, “What are you?”:
- Social construct of race is illogical.
- Unconscious mechanisms push towards one extreme or another
These are just a small portion of personal efforts that we all need to accomplish in order to move past the talk that divides. The rest shows up in our social institutions that are designed to keep the barriers intact, for whatever reason. No matter how much we act as good people with our own conversations, it won’t matter if we don’t change our social structure so that there is no opportunity for divisiveness to keep cropping into those conversations. Yes, we’ve come a long way, baby. But man, do we still have a ways to go towards “perfection”.
Here’s Jay’s “How To Tell People They Sound Racist” clip – painful but necessary – still – in the 21st century…
