I guess you’ve never worked in a law firm. Because there is always food refuse on conference room tables, often on the floors, and sometimes on the chairs.
As I said, in my office, bananas are a hot commodity. People walk from floor to floor to get them, and there are even banana hoarders.
I can definitely understand why bananas hanging from a noose are grotesque, as well as bananas with specific symbols written on them, but a single banana peel - empty of banana left in a random tree unrelated to any black students? I still think that’s quite a stretch.
“As I said, in my office, bananas are a hot commodity. People walk from floor to floor to get them, and there are even banana hoarders.”
Ditto here. The reason is simple: they are tasty, soft, and easy to eat without needing a napkin or making crunching sounds. Plus, we’ve been taught that they are full of valuable potassium!
Considering the OP article already cited recent events and others pointed out the long history which made that banaa peel symbolic of racism, even if unintended by the one who left it on a branch of a tree, it’s sad and yet, unsurprising some are trying to minimize and dismiss it by citing examples which ignore that critical context…
It also ignores that if one’s actions result in serious negative outcomes, even if that outcome was unintentional, one can and will be penalized for it whether though social censure or worse, loss of one’s job or even criminal penalties.
This ranges from criminal law(i.e. some Manslaughter counts due to unintentional negligence) to performance on the job(i.e. The wall street trader who may have acted with the intention of making a high performing investment for his/her firm, but whose result ended up causing the firm a severe enough loss that s/he was fired for bad performance reasons. )
The sad thing for me is that this incident could have resulted in a productive, civil conversation in which a lot of people learned something about someone else’s perspective but it sounds like that didn’t happen and that people were too upset and perhaps feeling attacked to be able to absorb what people with different experiences from themselves had to say.
In a safe place it’s possible to make small changes. I’m reminded of a thread here after an incident between AA youth and the police. The conversation eventually turned to the use of the word “thug.” I’d never thought of the word as racially charged and wouldn’t have hesitated to use it for a person of any race. At first I was resistant to the notion of it as carrying a racial connotation but when a number of posters chimed in with evidence I was convinced and it changed the way I thought about and used the word. Not a major epiphany but the kind of minor adjustment we can help each other to make. For all I know someone else walked away with a new tolerance of middle aged white women who use the word thug not understanding its subtext.
On the other hand, if the conversation had turned into a lot of yelling and accusations of racism I’m not sure I would have hung around long enough to do any learning.
I think that’s exactly right. UCB’s explanation of the context here was enormously helpful.
Maybe at a church camp in rural Pennsylvania, a banana peel in a tree would have received a totally different response. I’ve been to church camp in rural Pennsylvania, never to an event in Mississippi, so . . .
Yeah, when we’re driving next to a heavily wooded area my kids will often throw their apple core or banana peel into the woods for the animals so I can see one of them blithely throwing a peel into a tree if they were goofing around.
Probably has more to do with the organizations involved (fraternities and sororities at University of Mississippi versus your church group) and whether they have any kind of baggage that could cause conflict within their ranks, rather than the locations of the events…
"Probably has more to do with the organizations involved "
Or the history of the locations involved, or a complicated combination of all of those things.
And sometimes you might try to understand why what was obviously just a cigar to you, was more than that after a lifetime of those “microaggressions” to the recipient of them. Is that really so hard to understand?
It’s one of those things where the person can plausibly say that it was an innocent thing even if it wasn’t. Like a verbal abuser who says his victim is too sensitive or that it was just a joke. And if you persist in the abuse/denial cycle, it escalates and escalates. Because he gets away with it. Because it works. Personally, I don’t believe for a minute that it was an accident.
Since when does making a comment, or participating in a discussion, mean a person doesn’t understand the issues or the feelings? That’s rather narrow minded.
@sylvan8798 I’m not sure if it was an accident or not. It certainly could be. But I agree that it’s so easy to deny any harmful intent when the action seems so silly. "Banana peel in a tree racist? " “You must be crazy.” Are young people overly sensitive, or just on to you (racists). Probably both depending on the facts of each situation.
Because saying that it’s “just a cigar” is tantamount to saying to saying “it’s not really how YOU see it…it’s JUST this”–that implies a dismissiveness of how someone else sees it. I can’t possibly know if a person understands issues or feelings. I can only go by how he or she chooses to react.
