Why race conversations never succeed in anything.

Lets face it, its next to impossible to talk about race in America. God forbid you say racism against blacks is still prevalent...just saying that will cause some racist white person to call you racist for admitting the truth rather than hiding it. I have seen it so much.

Recently my English 1100 class talked about black culture. Mostly about hair and the light vs dark issue. We watched a video called A Girl Like Me which talked about black girls in a world that idolizes white.

After the video, the white kids in my class (its overwhelmingly white in this class), pretty much said it was a sad video (that also invoked anger in some), and they all said that these girls should be proud and love the skin they are in.

Never do they connect the dots to figure out exactly why they aren't happy about it in the first place. Its not just a problem they deal with from the black community, but mainstream (white) standards, also make it harder for them to love who they are.

It was strongly apparent how indifferent many of the white kids were to the whole issue. But one white kid made it his goal to turn this into a "why can't white girls be upset about curly hair if black girls can?" problem, when the class started talking about hair and whats acceptable and not.

I thin had to explain exactly why by comparing my hair and our teacher's hair. While my hair was in its natural state at the time, it was also curly (but thick and kinky too). I was wearing it down.

I explained that the teacher's hair could be easily fixed should a problem arise, it wouldn't take long. She could even go into the pool with it. Mine on the other hand takes hours to fix, and I can't go into the water. I have to be careful with it. He even started putting words in the teacher's mouth. It looked like he was trying to find reasons to oppose from the very beginning.

He proved why race conversations are dreaded and are hard to have...because people go into it wanting to oppose rather than listen. The other white kids refused to accept that white culture played a role in why those girls felt the way they did. One white guy asked me if black girls want to be white, and I said, "its not that they want to be white, they just don't want to be treated like second class citizens anymore".

In the end, the only thing this conversation did was teach white kids some of the process to maintaining black hair...

But I realized something, and its something I realized happens in all conversations about race. Not only is the person you talking to always trying to oppose and be the victim (such as my roommate, who doesn't hide her "I am better than you" attitude at all), but also, people never talk about a solution.

Some are bent on telling the world there is a problem, and others are bent on saying there isn't one. But neither bother to accept there is a problem and to just find the solution, so neither have to keep debating if there is a problem or not.

I mean, talking about race often does not succeed in anything other than causing anger or disappointment. Even if you are successful in finding someone you can talk about race to, who won't get defensive (or to the extreme someone who derails the conversation about race), what good is talking about it, without finding ways to fix it?

One thing we established in class, as our unit pertains to images and identity (mostly its all about females, to the boys annoyances), is that media isn't strictly to blame. That society does nothing to fight the stereotypes or negative images, that we allow it and follow them religiously...so society is more to blame than the media, as society knows what the media is doing is wrong, yet does nothing about it except bitch.