After reading/viewing MM’s comment re. my previous post, I’ve been thinking that perhaps noticing and responding to the many differences in humanity is not necessarily demeaning.
I am presently visiting in a place where everyone — I mean everyone — calls me “ma’am.” And everyone steps back and patiently holds doors as Mother negotiates her walker. It isn’t intended as ageism but as courtesy.
I’m not sure why I, an elderly white woman, am often delighted by the unique beauty of an African-American child. I suppose that’s wrong. I want to say to the parents, “What a beautiful child,” but I don’t just in case it might be racist.
Recently, in a class at St. P’s, when we were discussing Mary of Magdala, my sensitivity was raised. The Rev. Shelly, who was guiding our talk, asked what some of the things we know about this Mary are. I mentioned that we now know there are no scriptural references to her having been a harlot. Shelly agreed but changed the word “harlot” to “sexworker.” The connotations of those two words are significant and I am happy to add the new word to my vocab.
If a police officer asked me to describe the perp of a crime I had witnessed, the things I would have noticed first would be the sex, race, and age of that person. I’m sure, on some level, that makes me a bigot — sexist, racist, ageist.
I know this post needs a concluding sentence, but, at this point, I just don’t have one. I’m still trying to figure all this out.
I think this is sweet, and perfectly honest. Which makes it holy.
I use “sex worker” language because it is the language that many sex workers themselves have asked that the rest of us use. One, because it provides a unifying umbrella word for those who work in the sex trades (everyone from exotic dancers to street workers to camgirls) and because it highlights that it is a job – sex work is work! Like other jobs, some people hate it and want to leave. Some people choose it and love it. Most people are somewhere in the middle – working out of economic necessity. Some parts they like, some parts they dislike, but they need to make money. A lot of the other words (whore, harlot, prostitute) have negative associations with them, connotations of moral judgments. Those are words that have been used against women, in particular, and are still used as insults. (Imagine insulting someone by calling them an “engineer”! It’s silly to insult someone by using a job title.) It’s nice to have a word that just acknowledges people in the sex trades as workers.
Noticing sex, and race, and age are natural to us. Little kids notice. Everyone notices! I think that’s completely OK. I think the problem comes when we start telling a story about those characteristics, when we make a judgment or assessment based on them. But I think we must notice. I know that for myself, I want to be seen as a woman, and as a gay woman. Because that is a critical part of my experience. I am treated differently because I am those things. I had to learn different ways to be, and I understand different things about God because of them. To be known, my experience must be taken seriously. I don’t want someone to say, “I don’t see you as a lesbian!” Because to me, that means, “I don’t want to see you.” I *am* a lesbian. My life is profoundly shaped in many ways by being a lesbian. To be unwilling to see that means being unwilling to see me. The glory of God is in the wonderful, diverse, gorgeous, overflowing, different ways we are made – I want to celebrate those things! Not pretend that they don’t exist.
I understand that when people say “I don’t see you as a lesbian” what they are often trying to communicate is “I will not treat you with any less respect than I would treat a straight person.” And I truly appreciate that. However, it is possible to treat me with equivalent respect *and* recognize that I am not straight. Believe me, I will notice in their actions if they mean that they will truly treat me with respect. I would much rather be asked, “What does being a lesbian in this culture and this church mean to you? What are your daily experiences like? What could I do to make your life and this culture less difficult and hostile for you and people like you?”
We went through an era of thinking that “isms” could be erased by “colorblindness” or “treating everyone the same” – but people are different. Here is a good article from the Washington Post about how “colorblindness” ends up perpetuating the problem it was created to solve: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2013/08/26/the-problem-with-colorblindness/
Finally, I think if you see a beautiful child, you should say, “What a beautiful child,” no matter what.