From my Yelp review of 5/20/2011 of the downtown YMCA:
Lifeguard: "Did you take a shower?"
Member: (Stunned silence) "Yes, I did."
Lifeguard: (Quickly) "Well, we have members that don't, so we have to ask."
*** Three weeks later ***
Lifeguard: "Did you make sure to wash your W-H-O-L-E body (spoken slowly, making washing motions in air with hands)? That way we don't have to use so many chemicals [understand?]."
Member: "O.K. [anything you say]."
What's next ?
(1) "But, I mean, did you really wash your W-H-O-L-E body?"
or
(2) "Did you wash your [@ssF3{crack} and scrub {c&&ties}/a##orifices]?"
or
(3) "Did you use PLENTY of soap? That way we won't have to fumigate."
I aired my concerns about this "conversation" but, unfortunately, received no reply.
Gotta get on the hotline right away to the NAACP!
Except that I'm not the right color for them, either.
Or the times when I was still swimming in the pool when the the lap session had just ended or was about to. A few lifeguards became apoplectic and blow repeatedly their whistle (or shout), making me stop mid-length and turn around to swim back.
But when it was a Caucasian swimmer, they patiently waited until that swimmer had finished a full lap and then told the person it was time.
* * * * *
The suggestion that a 19-year-old lifeguard named Chris, at the downtown YMCA 3-4 years, almost forty years my junior, was inflicting humiliation and distress on me by whenever I took the elevator running into the elevator after me and standing right next to me gazing straight into my face the whole time until he got out of the elevator, likewise fell on deaf ears. I said nothing.
I wonder what reaction he might have or would have gotten from an African-American from such provocation. When you don't stand up for your rights, other people don't. In fact, some will trod on them.
This was after one memorable incident where a new swimmer had gotten very angry at him and where he, in turn, took it out on me, leading me by the nose, as if I were livestock, to the far side of the swimming pool, to instruct me on where that swimmer had entered the pool, even though Bobby, the head lifeguard at the time, had admitted that he had not been aware of her getting in the pool either.
"Race had nothing to do with it."
No, he didn't use a racial epithet, but his actions showed clearly a lack of respect that remains a psychological wound to this day for me. Oh, yes, they can't tell a 60-year-old * * * from a 16-year-old * * *. Honestly, they all look the same, short, skinny, fat, dark, light, young, old, male, female...
No repsonse from the downtown YMCA to this request for intervention, either.
* * * * *
I wonder how often people, white or black, unload their sense of frustration and unhappiness (with their jobs or lives) on minorities and immigrants unlikely to protest. This, I believe, happened to me at the downtown YMCA with young lifeguards 1/3 my age, who decided that they all had an issue with me (something as innocuous as being the last person out of the swimming and swimming a very long time--that made me a weirdo.
Being myopic, I would have to ask the lifeguard the time. Several lifeguards would not even roll their eyes. They would refused to answer. I would have to wait several minutes before they decided to tell me the time. Ostensibly, they were so put out by having to glance at the clock and tell me the time ("That's not my job!").
Eventually, I found this treatment to be humiliating, so I swam until the very end of the lap session rather than have this experience.
One of the measures of racism in the United States is one which is rarely ever mentioned or referred to in the mainstream media.
African-Americans, of course, get pride of place in any mention or racism. You just have to pick up a copy of The New York Times, Time magazine, etc., or look online at the Huffington Post, Atlantic, and so forth to see the national mania for reporting on racism as it relates to African-Americans as victims.
I find much of the coverage and analysis over-the-top: shrill and exaggerated, with the slightest suspicion of unfair treatment or prejudice amplified and trumpeted into proof of widespread daily occurence of intentional and/or unintentional racism or a reflection of slavery and historical discrimination.
On the other hand, the other racial minorities in this country--Latinos, Asians, Native Americans, Muslims, etc. are in for short thrift.
Asian-Americans, for cultural reasons primarily I am supposing, are, in my opinion, the most likely to be racially discriminated against and the least likely to speak about it. For so long they have kept their mouths shut and been confined to "a model minority" scenario that when they do complain of racism, they are, no wonder, received with mockery, disbelief, if not outright hostility.
(The 2015 production of "The Mikado" at the Seattle Repertory Theater being one recent example).
So it would not surprise me if "Lily's Blog 3" in its heartfelt, protracted revelation and analysis of misconduct at the downtown Seattle YMCA were in for being dismissed as "obsessive" or "over the top," whereas if the author of the blog were black, I doubt if that would be the case. It would be taken seriously, very seriously, the allegations taken as near factual, the author praised for "gut-wrenching honesty," et. al.
The current director of the downtown Seattle YMCA is white and racist, in my opinion, as well as self-serving.
It's never good to call anyone "a pig," even if only as a shorthand for crass and self-serving.
My yelp reviews of the downtown Seattle YMCA speak to her being white and racist only in terms of tertiary importance. In fact, race is almost always at least a subliminal issue in inter-racial conflicts, at least according to the liberal media.
And Cynthia Klever had to have been subliminally conscious if not aware that by talking down to a person of color she was exacerbating a historically racial wound.
She also knew well that persons of my cultural and racial background do not have the collective experience or history of speaking up against injustice that African-Americans have. They feel uncomfortable about doing so.
That was part of the I feeling had of my being not only bullied but also pummeled by her and her assistant (both young white women).
You can have a graduate degree, be well-spoken, reasonable, friendly, and as all-American as you want, yet for people like them, you are still a coolie, a second-class person they can talk to down and apply the screws to, even if they are forty years younger than you are.
So without any premeditation on my part, I did tell her to her face that she is a racist.
Evidently, she could not handle it, and summarily terminated my membership on account of that. If it had been an African-American calling her a racist, she would have tried to mollify that person's anger rather than react as she did.
Rarely do blacks get punished for accusing whites of being (1) white and (2) racist. Indeed, it is always the accused, i.e., the presumed racist who is put on the defensive.
When people think of racism, they think first and foremost of African-Americans as victims, rarely perpetrators or persons with prejudices themselves.
If you open up the Seattle Times, or the New York Times, for that matter, on the other coast, anywhere between a quarter to a half of the stories or the photographs or columnists on an average day are [of] black people, even though the largest racial minority, numerically, in Seattle is Asian, not black.*
Who is as an "afterthought"? And this is not to mention all the racial stereotypes of Asians and Asian-Americans (many if not most Americans do not make a distinction), which hamper the former in their daily lives, though they rarely speak about these things, prefering to minimize the impact.
Unconscious, semi-conscious, and/or unacknowledged stereotypes do exist of America's second fastest growing racial minority.
I have to broken one by standing up to the relentless harassment of Cynthia Klever on July 9, 2015 at the downtown YMCA. I think she will think twice before she tries this sort of thing on someone with my physical characteristics.
She cannot afford not to. She may think she "won," but try it one more time--and if the victim turns out to be less naive than I was, she will not. I think she bungled it, if only in the long term.
Her assumption that she can bend a person of Asian ancestry to her liking and will, that her disrespect would be tolerated (chewing a huge wad of gum in the person's face, for example; playing the principal to someone twice her age; etc.) was challenged.
Asian-Americans need not apply to become members at this branch of the YMCA, the largest in the area, if I am not mistaken.
Being "invisible" is not necessarily an advantage: it means you are ignored, not that people don't know you are different or won't take advantage of you.
This is a measure of racism in our society: how racial minorities are treated unequally.
It is my sincere hope that the next time someone like Cynthia Klever decides "to teach someone a lesson" to the likes of someone like myself--in physical appearance and demeanor--that she will think at least twice about the wisdom of verbally assaulting that same person before actually embarking on such a course of action.
It is also my hope that someone like myself take heart in that I have, against all odds, taken a stand against prejudice and meannesss and continue the struggle for dignity and equality.
* I don't think most Americans can fathom that in California there are over double the number of Asians as there are blacks, something like 13.2% versus 5.9%. Most people presume that there blacks must be the largest minority throughout the country and that Asians must be a tiny fraction, a minority of a minority. Even Hispanics don't have the clout that blacks have in this country, even though they have "the numbers." America is rapidly changing, but not always in the way that mainstream media presents it.
They just don't know (or won't admit) how racist they are.
Aucun commentaire:
Enregistrer un commentaire