Despite being a privileged white male, I am not sexist, racist, or homophobic. I was raised in a color blind, gender blind, sexual preference blind house. When I was a child I made friends with white and black children without preference because I didn’t know there was supposed to be a difference. I was about as competent with girls as a child as I am with women as an adult, but I never thought of them as anything less than my equals. As a child I was brought up in a church with active and out gay members and talked to them like all the other adults because they were all just adults to me.
I never knew I was supposed to care.
As a result I grew up with the attitude of “I don’t care if you’re not white/a woman/gay” because I didn’t know that wasn’t a good thing. I thought it was. However, as learning is one of those things I just won’t stop doing, I’m coming to realize that my attitude isn’t the best one. It’s not that I don’t care that you’re different from me, it’s that it doesn’t bother me that you’re different from me.
As the best example I can think of off the top of my head, my Capoeira instructor Rasai is a dreadlocked Jamaican man with huge muscles and a larger than life personality. He was raised on a farm, really finds our concept of holidays annoying, and is a very dirty old man. None of this got in the way of me being his student or becoming his friend. Sure we bicker about how he should chill out about having his picture taken or maybe consider getting a goddamn cell phone, but we’re still friends. Do I not care that he’s black? Am I ignoring his heritage?
What I think I’m doing is outright accepting that he’s different in many ways and not letting those differences make me think less of him. I take these different experiences he’s had as just a fact of life because everyone is different. This is autopilot for me. Rather than being a point of contention, I find his very different outlook on life refreshing and interesting.
So from now on it's not, "I don't care if you're X." I don't have a simple one-liner to replace it, but maybe that's the point.
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