I, as a black female, have often been vexed by racist and sexist comments I've had to endure over the years. If the Brown v. Board of Education research done half a century ago still holds true (which it does) racism can lead to the corruption of self-esteem. And I'm convinced the same can be held true for sexism. Not that I would ever believe that there are any wide differences between races or sexes, in fact, I will say that I see men as a subset of women, since all newly conceived embryos are female in nature. And as for race? Stereotypes never hold true for every individual, and culture matters a great deal more than race. But even though I know this to be true, it doesn't stop me from feeling at times that everyone looks down on me, and that everyone already has preconceived notions about me before I have a chance to commit an action or to utter a thought. I wouldn't say that racism and sexism combined are the largest undermining factors of my self-esteem, but I would say that at times the uneducated, ignorant views of others have caused me great self-pity, great horror, or great anger.
I feel like I should take a second or two to just point out the irony of me being vexed by racism or sexism. I am only half "black". My mother is white, born in Chicago. My father is from Nigeria, he is African, he was born in Lagos (or close to). I am also not very feminine. If anything I consider myself painfully androgynous, and probably bi-sexual or asexual. So it really is a shame that any comments concerning my race or sex would offend me in the past, since I'm not really sure of what I am actually. Quite a confusing situation.
Sexism Apparently, and I heard this from one of my guy friends, men are only sexist in order to try and maintain a power structure which puts them on top. Women are the only ones that have the potential to be more powerful than men, and they are also the only thing men really want. (A common stand-up comic theme is a grand example of this. Why do men go to work? For money. What do they do with their money? Buy nice cars. Why do they need nice cars? To get nice women.) Without sexism, women would see themselves as equals, have more leverage in relationships, and men wouldn't get what they wanted.
Racism Racism, apparently, is a theme founded usually by lighter skinned people. In India, darker people formed the lower, less privileged castes. In Southern Black Universities, some fraternities only admitted "brothers" who were lighter in complexion than brown paper bags. And of course, in America as a whole, white people have been discriminating against black people, middle easterners, and people of Hispanic decent for as long as each individual group has been in America. The evolutionary reasoning for this is very simplistic. Light skin is a recessive gene, just like blue eyes. If a white person marries a black person, the resulting children will look much more black than white (just like me!). Racism, the division of races based on the color of skin (which still makes little sense to me), is an evolutionary trait to preserve recessive genes. By dividing people, by making laws that prohibit interracial dating and marriage, white people are preserving their genes. This would be a noble goal, I suppose, if skin color could tell us more about a person. But in reality, skin color is probably less informational than a host of other things that we can see in a seconds glance, clothing choices for example. Even so, light skin is less beneficial than swarthiness, which protects against skin cancer and hideous wrinkles. There are estimates that within the next half decade, half of Americans will be bi-racial. I couldn't be happier, because that means eventually, I won't be an obscure minority, and races will slowly meld together. Still, I feel slightly bad for racist white people who really believe that skin color is important. If that was all racism was, the preserving of skin colors, maybe I wouldn't feel so bad about it.
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