What I Hear When You Say

Whenever someone says, Hey, dont play the race card. Its kind of like, excuse me?

Like, what?

But I would love a race card if it worked.

So I can just pull out my race card and, you know, its this automatic privilege and advantage I have where people will magically listen to me and I will get what I want because it is this free little pass, the race card.

But for real, do you know anyone who is giving out race cards because I could use one.

Like it would be helpful to me in my life.

Everyday.

[MUSIC] Okay So fortunately for some people they live a life where they dont have to think about racism.

Maybe they were raised in a place where it was just one race of people.

So the idea of police brutality, or, you know, that there are bad police is just crazy talk, because every experience they had has been great.

So anybody that has a problem with police obviously is a criminal.

I think when people say youre playing a race card, theyre treating you as if you need an escape, when in fact its them who need this escape; from the conversation, from the issues, from being accountable to whats going on, or even sensitive to whats happening.

So its easy to say, Oh, youre playing the race card, and basically, Suck it up.

Its not that bad.

Get over it. What youre doing is missing a great opportunity.

Not only to have an honest exchange with someone else, but a chance to expand yourself as a person to see someone elses perspective.

And in doing that, you grow.

Right?

Race card is just a microaggression.

Its one of those little racist comments that really adds up overtime.

When I hear someone tell me that Im playing the race card, or dont play the race card, I hear an individual who is trying to mask or cover up their potential biased attitudes and beliefs.

Our research indicates that race-based and gender-based microaggressions are very harmful.

When a white person experiences a rude clerk, its over in no time.

For people of color, they experience microaggressions from the moment of birth.

It is a constant and continual experience that they have.

Any one microaggression when seen in isolation can appear insignificant or trivial but that individual has not seen that the person of color might have had that experience the third time during the day and maybe seven times over the entire week.

Because people experience themselves as well meaning to suddenly acknowledge the fact that they harbor biases, assails their image of themselves as a good moral decent person.

And the immediate reaction that comes from them is defensiveness.

To deny, to deflect, to put down what is confronting them.

But the positive thing is that because they are good well-intentioned individuals, if you are able to reach that aspect of their being, they can become powerful allies in the stand against bias and discrimination.

Microaggressions kind of immediately made sense to a lot of us.

I remember I had a professor a couple of years ago, but I said as a woman of color and he said, you are going to pull the race card. And I couldnt believe that was happening in my classroom but it was kind of like I was making his job more difficult by trying to engage in issues that everyone around me didnt feel comfortable talking about.

I wish that there were more creative ways to make people understand what a microaggression is.

Cuz it would be great if everybody had that vocabulary and everybody, even if they havent had that experience, they could, like, see it.

You know what I mean?

So what inspired me to do this project was, well, this was for a final for this class called visual thinking.

We got three prompts and one of the prompts was, Make something honest. And I thought racism was honest.

When someone says, Dont pull the race card, its a microaggression because it kind of invalidates the experience as a person of color facing racism all the time.

People really connected with it, especially people of color whove heard the exact same things that my friends wrote down.

But I do think it helped white people kind of get the sense of why microaggressions hurt because there is just so many all the time.

I define microaggressions as kind of passive subtle racist comments that people like to brush it off as no big deal.

And thats what the micro part is, but the aggression is still there; the racism is still there.

I do think it helped white people kind of get the sense of why microaggressions hurt.

So when the subject looks directly into the camera, its really personal with the audience, the viewer.

And the subject speaking because its hard to talk about, or think about, especially when you have perpetuated it.

So its good to really confront the audience.

Theyre looking at you as if thats your escape.

That you cant face the reality of whats going on, instead of acknowledging that there are in fact systems and things set in place that do hold people bl--- Hold me black!

Hold it now!