e-dialogue

The text below is a response to an email from a good friend in Maine. She was emailing me about my entry "Odds and Ends" in which I discussed my reaction to an interaction with a man in the street. My friend question whether the response was truly racist, or was it not more classist?

"To answer your question, re: "odds and ends", I tend to think of racism as being another term for discrimination, which can take place in many contexts (class, skin color, gender, etc.) so you are right to recognize a classist element to situation (what are you, a Marxist or something!! ;)). There is a huge financial gulf between myself and the Roma communities of the world and my prejudice towards this man is a general discrimination. I think I tended to focus on the ethnicity issue simply because it was the most obvious signifier for my response to this man.

I also know that as I was growing up in Paris, which has a significant Roma population, I was feed the stereotype of Roma as "Gypsies and thieves". Of course, this is just as much a classist mentality as a racist one.

What it ultimately boils down to is a fear of what is different from yourself, because in so many aspects of our childhood socialization process we are taught to discriminate against difference, against otherness (what ever form it takes). This was, in some way, the point I tried to make in my thesis, that by introducing team mentality and segregation through team colors, soccer (or any team sport) is encouraging a rigid, discriminatory ideology, and the physical (violent) element only enhances this type of hierarchy.

Certainly, the situation I found myself in vis-a-vis the Roma man could have happened anywhere, and it was not entirely his skin color that triggered my response. It was a combination of signifiers that made my mind assign him with the label of 'other'."