not immune

Geraldine Ferraro is angry because when she said Barack Obama is lucky to be where he is, and that he wouldn't have been there hadn't he been black, Barack Obama's supporters got angry with her.

So, in an unexpected twist, now she says they are racist for claiming her remarks were racist.

For class I use episodes of Black White, a reality show where a white family and a black family lived together and learned about the other race by wearing makeup that turned them black if they were white, and white if they were black.

The wife of the white family introduces herself as having grown up in a liberal family in the 1960s and 1970s. Her parents were active in the civil rights movement, she says.

In one of the episodes she calls the black woman a bitch, and she cannot understand that is an offensive term. In her mind, that is how black women address each other. And: she doesn't see herself as racist, therefore nothing she says can be racist. There is a whole lot of reality TV drama around that statement.

Geraldine Ferraro uses the same logic. She says that she has fought against oppression her whole life, so nothing she says can be racist.

Peggy McIntosh reminds us that racism doesn't have to come in the shape of outright meanness. The difficult part, now, is for us to realize that as we live in a racist society, racism seeps into us. Even if we try to make ourselves aware of it, racist thought is everywhere. It enters our minds through stories we hear, and images we see.

Because of our radically different life circumstances, when white people use their own experience to determine what is racist and not, very likely people of color will not agree.

Does that mean white people are always wrong? No, it doesn't. But white people should try to be quiet and listen when others want to explain to them what their comments might mean.