Weekly Blog #9: We've Changed, But Are We Different?

I had a really difficult time getting this blog post started because, in all honesty, the readings from the last few weeks left me rather uninspired. I wanted my own spin on what we'd read about, but I couldn't come up with anything that didn't sound really similar to what everyone else had already written. However, I now believe that I've formed an original enough collection of thoughts based on an interpretation and application that, up until the weekend before last, I hadn't developed.

Though I'm grateful to finally have a topic for my blog post, I would trade that and about a million other things to have not have experienced the incident that led to this inspiration. Events essentially played out as follows:

Of all things I could have been doing with my weekend, I had chosen to sign on to Facebook early Friday night. Upon entering the site, one of the first "recent activities" in my "news feed" was that of a boy in my grade using his "status" to explain quite harshly his dislike of the decision of one of his favorite musical artists to sing a song with another obviously less enjoyable (at least to this individual) artist. The status had received some feedback from the Facebook community, all of which came from this individual's friends and all of which were sentiments of agreement, and for whatever reason I decided read these comments.

Instant regret. The first word I saw was "gay" followed shortly by context that I already knew I'd hate. These boys (all of them, boys), these ignorant, insensitive, intolerant boys, spewed that formerly innocent word like their lives depended on it, leaving a sickening trail of negative connotations behind it as their words blazed down my computer screen. And they did it in ways I wasn't exactly expecting. While some were obviously using the word to express that the artist's choice to do this duet was stupid, others were actually implying that doing the song together qualified this artist as a homosexual and that that was a bad thing.

Reading this made me sick and it made me angry. So angry. So I did something. The only thing I could think to do: write my own comment asking them not to use the word like that. I ignored the idea that it wasn't my place or my business. In anger, it just was.

And do you know how they responded? They fed off of that comment like maggots on a carcass. They were fueled by it--inspired maybe. And their comments got nastier, sometimes aimed directly at me. I was disgusted. I had honestly expected more, if only a very little bit more, from them, people of this time period--of this generation, who I was quickly realizing I had little more than age in common with.

But it did really get me thinking.

And you're probably wondering how I managed to relate it to anything we read last week, and, to be honest, you might still have questions by the time I'm done. . .but I'm willing to take that risk.

I actually ended up thinking about the piece of writing we read by Valerie Babb, "Crafting Whiteness in Early America", from her book Whiteness Visible after I was so generously provided the extreme displeasure of this experience. In the chapter and the entire book, Babb explains the history behind the values and customs that created whiteness in the United States. According to Babb "whiteness" was partially defined by identifying other races, usually negatively, to show, rather, what "white" wasn't instead of what it really was.

This basic process of forming a concept of any sort of group by defining another first is still incredibly prevalent in America. In fact, as my situation proved (at least to me), this means of label-making is much more frequently applied and is applied to so many different things other than race these days.

The boys who said these terrible things were prime examples of not only disrespecting a group of individuals that are (apparently) so unlike them but also of incorrectly using one group of people to describe another. Though the insolence to homosexuals is what bothered me most about the situation, it was something a little different that proved Babb's point in this new time. These boys had taken their closed-minded, ill-formed knowledge of a collection of people to help them define "rightness" of the conduct of musical artists like that mentioned in the status, "wrongness" being defined as homosexuality.

And so, I have to ask. . .how different are we? What are we all about now? Times have changed as have people, opinions, and norms. But, Babb's concept of this form of definition hasn't, and I'm seeing now that it's applicable to more serious issues than I would have expected. I mean, we've obviously come a long way from the views of early colonists, but it's incidents like this that remind me just how much further there is to go.