Post Number Eleven

A couple weeks ago, my friends and I celebrated my birthday. One of my friends, Ben, brought his girlfriend, as well as his other friend, Mike. On the phone, he said, "Is it cool if I bring Big Black Mike?" I didn't ask, but from the way he said it, I guessed that Mike was in the room with him. Mike is a freshman on the football team, but he's a little dorky and doesn't seem like he has too many friends. Anyways, I like Mike, so I told Ben to bring him.

We all went and saw Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Strangely, Mike didn't laugh once during the entire movie, even when everyone else in our row was doubled over and howling with laughter. About two thirds of the way through he took out his phone and started texting.

After the movie, Ben told me and my roommate, Stephanie, that he was going to go back to his girlfriend's house. I wanted to invite Mike to come over and hang out, since some of my other friends were going to come over and have cake that night, but I didn't.

A couple hours later, my Korean friend, Hannah, came over and asked Stephanie and me how the movie was. We said it was good, but that we felt bad for Mike, who was probably either hanging out alone, or stuck watching Ben and his girlfriend make out. Hannah asked us why we didn't invite Mike over.

"Because he's black," I said.

"Seriously?" Hannah narrowed her eyes at me.

"Probably. If he were white, we probably would've invited him over." Hannah suddenly seemed annoyed, and she stood up, marched into the kitchen, and began to do the dishes, angrily.

"Why do you always talk about race?" she shouted from the kitchen.

Stephanie shouted back, "We only do it when you're here." This was a joke, since we talk about race pretty much constantly. Unfortunately, Stephanie had over-estimated Hannah's sense of humor.

Hannah shouted, "I know!" A few minutes later, she left. She probably spent a total of fifteen minutes at our house.

Spiller said that things are placed into visual categories, and that it's only skin color and other visual characteristics that are associated with people by those in power. The histories of oppression go unmentioned. Although I am a Jew, and most of my relatives on my father's side died in the Holocaust, I've never found it necessary to invoke my own family's history--probably because my grandparents were luckier than most children of immigrants. But it is something I am sensitive to.

I thought it was interesting that Hannah was so opposed to the idea of talking about what's underneath the surface--that she would rather I didn't question whether I didn't invite Mike over because I don't know him very well, or because I was shying away from the burden of trying to make a dorky black freshman feel comfortable hanging out with a bunch of white people in my house.

Spiller is suggesting, I think, that mostly white people with the power to define situations are the ones keeping the oppressive undertones in the background. That probably used to be true. But at this point, especially at CU, where most racism is covert and easy to ignore, maybe we're all doing it.