2001-03-27 - 03:56 p.m.

On the internal soundtrack: Genesis, "Tonight, Tonight, Tonight", I think.

A few quick laundry-list items from the weekend:

Fixing the POS ourselves didn't work out. The problem was that we couldn't get the bolt off -- it was rusted stuck. The bolt goes into a flange on another pipe, which jiggles, so there's no leverage. Oh well. At least we tried. It's just frustrating because my biggest problem in dealing with cars is diagnosis, not necessarily the actual repair (which bears a remarkable similarity to taking apart and putting together the toy truck that I confiscated from my brother 20 years ago), and in this case both were easy except for the damn bolt.

I washed the VW. It looks priiiiitty. Somehow I managed to pull some leg muscles while I was doing it. I'm so old.

I planted the HYDROPONIC! basil in some dirt in a pot. We'll see how it goes. It isn't dead yet.

I've been so busy looking at my bulbs and fretting over the as-yet-unmaterialized snow glories (they must have died from the cold winter) that I failed to notice that my little mini-rosebush has made the transformation from a collection of sticks to an actual bush. It grew bunches of leaves when I wasn't looking. I was astonished and delighted. I love spring.

The hairy-woman fans are out in full force this week. So far I've gotten Google searches on:

hirsute females (2)
bikini wax (2)
hairy armpits
hirsute legs

Possible mild TMI ahead.

In case y'all are wondering, and you know you are if you're still reading, I waxed the top half of my legs (with my home kit) and shaved the bottom half this weekend. I am smooth as a baby's behind. I had a fit of girliness and re-polished my toes, too, in deep red. Now if the weather would just warm up I could run around in skirts and shorts and show them off.

So, have you ever been hanging out with some people, not friends of yours exactly but acquaintances, seemingly nice enough, and suddenly they start up with the ethnic jokes, which you really, really don't like?

To be fair, some of the jokes are directed at their own subset of white American culture. Perhaps you could call it equal-opportunity denigration, or general misanthropy. Sometimes the joke almost seems to poke fun at or criticize racism, although I'm not certain that the joke-teller realizes that.

The thing is, sometimes these are genuinely nice people. They have a lot of positive qualities -- they may be good family people, responsible people, moral people in many ways -- yet here they are casually using words that make me cringe.

This happens every now and then. My reaction is generally to walk away from the joke-telling. Poindexter's reaction to people casually using unpleasant terms is to give them a what-the-fuck? sidelong glance and a sort of borderline-condescending "yeah, whatever" and refuse to take them up on the topic of discussion.

We had a big discussion once as to what the appropriate reaction should be in cases like this. I worried that maybe I should be more up-front and confrontational about things. Poindexter believes that being confrontational in a group situation only makes people defensive and defeats the purpose. He feels that a quieter refusal to accept the terms makes the user well aware of how we feel without being publicly humiliating, and exerts a weird kind of peer pressure not to do it anymore.

It sounds odd in theory, maybe, but I've seen him do it in practice and was surprised to see how it works.

If I'm one-on-one, though, I tend to be more confrontational and start in with the whys. Somebody makes a generalization about an ethnic group and I start asking, "Why do you say that? How do you know? Just because one person is like that, does it automatically extend to the rest of the group?" Stuff like that. Not to attack the person for their beliefs, but to get them to question them a little.

If there's anything I've learned as an adult, it's this: Making people defensive about a decision or belief does absolutely nothing to get them to reconsider it. It only makes their determination stronger, particularly when they are about to make a huge mistake. But I digress.

Now I'll do a little bit of a coin flip. In thinking about this, I pondered the knee-jerk reaction people have: If you have a single bigoted thought, you are a Racist, and therefore a Horrible Person, and I can no longer associate with you.

Is that true?

I don't think it's that simple. Racist ideas are often a function of upbringing and social isolation. My grandparents, for instance, never knew a black person personally in their entire lives. They grew up in an environment in which it was socially acceptable to see one's own ethnic group as better than, or at the very least, drastically different from, other ethnic groups. Yet my grandparents are some of the most wonderful, caring, moral people I've ever met. I can't suddenly paint them as evil because they had some beliefs I disagreed with. And I certainly did have some lively discussions with them about some of their misconceptions. They thought seriously about what we discussed, too.

Not only that, but many people who have weird ideas about groups as a whole will treat individual members of a group with the same respect they'd give anyone else. I've SEEN the people who make those grating ethnic jokes still treat individuals of other races with the same friendliness and courtesy they give their own. My grandfather was scared to death of black folks, and probably still is, but he adores his next-door neighbors (despite being scared when they first moved in) and was very sad to leave them when he had to move.

Human beings have a tendency to mobilize into us vs. them, but if you give two people of "opposing" groups some one-on-one time, they can get along. Incredibly well, really. And sometimes it's a catalyst to re-thinking the prejudices they grew up with.

Some people disagree, but I don't believe that ONLY whites can be called racist. If you're gonna get into labeling people "racist" for unfair presumptions they make of other ethnic groups, then there are definitely nonwhite racists. Perhaps a better term for what I'm talking about would be "prejudice", since "racism" seems to have evolved to mean "institutional prejudice" of a sort -- sanctioned by the group in power. I recall from college some student activists vehemently arguing that they themselves couldn't be "racist" since they were not part of the "power structure", in nearly the same breath that they told me that all white people are X and believe Y about blacks. Uh, yeah.

Anyway, these same people who presume they know how I think and why I think it, or assume the worst of me simply because I'm a white person, are also good people. Fiercely dedicated to what they believe is right, devoted to their families, would help a person in need, and probably even have some white friends.

So obviously, a few ethnic jokes or odd comments here and there are not necessarily an indication of how one treats people or even of one's moral character. In politics, I suppose, how you think of groups is important because it will affect the decisions you make in creating policy that will affect huge numbers of people. But in real life, day-to-day, is it the end of the world if someone turns out to be prejudiced? Do I have to start thinking of them as an evil person and avoid them?

Or is it better to continue to spend time with them for their good qualities, and when I get a chance, ask them why? Who knows; I might end up changing somebody's mind.

So, Poindexter laughs at me a lot. He smiles at me a lot, too. There's a difference. I'll be rambling or doing something and look up to see him smiling, and I'll yell, "What are you laughing at?!"

If he's just smiling because he thinks I'm doing something cute or whatever, he says, "I'm not laughing, I'm smiling."

If he's laughing, he says, "I'm laughing at YOU." He says this because he knows it irritates me. Not because he's laughing, but because I want to know what specific thing I said or did that caused the laughing, and why it's funny. Sometimes he tells me, sometimes he doesn't.

While Justin was here, we expanded our discussion on the topic of women wanting to know WHY you love them, or WHY you married them.

Justin, apparently, sees this kind of question as a "pop quiz". He ranted at some length about this. He doesn't know why women have to question this sort of thing. "If we love you, we're happy, things are good, why are you fussing about this?" Or as Poindexter put it, "It sounds to a man like you're questioning his decision to get married. Along the same lines as if he just fixed his car and you said, 'Why'd you repair it like that?'", attacking his decision in some way.

Poindexter, however, realizes that when women ask that, they're just looking for some mushiness. The verbal equivalent of moonlight and roses. So he feels less put-on-the-spot than Justin does.

He does think that women (that is to say, I) tend to time these things badly, such as bringing up the topic when he's cussing at the traffic.

Well, fer godsakes, if we're in the car, he's cussing at traffic! The whole damn time! But when we're in the car, I'm bored to death and there's nothing to do BUT talk, read, and listen to the radio, so that seems like a good time to me to have a mushy discussion.

Coming up next time: Love, and (if I have time) happiness.

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