I Used to Think This Was Racist

Amala Ekpunobi

Education

4.2 • 2.7K Ratings

🗓️ 25 July 2023

⏱️ 10 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A video recently went viral on TikTok of a black woman who shielded her niece from a elderly white woman who was attempting to greet–and evidently touch–the child. Was this an example of a racist “micro-aggression,” as I once would have thought, or a completely innocent interaction? Let’s get into it.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Excuse me. Never? And I mean never touch a black woman's hair. That it is an invasive and microaggressive behavior.
0:17.3	Anyways guys. Let's talk about touching black people's hair, why don't we?
0:22.6	Young Apollo with the best!
0:27.6	Guys, before we get into this very heated topic, please like and subscribe.
0:31.4	I want as many people to find this channel as possible so you know what to do.
0:35.1	Now let's talk about it, right? You know me in the past when I was a little radical leftist,
0:40.6	I used to be so upset when people would ask to touch my hair and white people in particular.
0:46.1	I considered it to be a microaggression. You were pointing out the other, you were pointing out what was different.
0:52.0	And instead of taking your space and allowing people to simply live, you had to get into my personal space as a black woman and touch my hair.
1:01.0	Of course now I view it very differently, but we're gonna get into that in just a moment.
1:05.0	The video that sparked this for me is a recent TikTok that's gone viral.
1:10.5	And the title on this says POV protecting my niece from random white people touching her.
1:17.5	Now I want to put a disclaimer in here, you should never go and try to touch somebody without asking.
1:22.5	So let's make that very clear from the jump.
1:25.0	But let's watch this video and see what goes down.
1:47.0	Okay, so that's the video. I would say this is a pretty calm, you know, reserved interaction, right?
2:03.5	This older white woman comes up, tries to touch the hair again without asking.
2:08.5	So that's rule number one. Always ask, you run the risk of hearing it yes or no.
2:13.5	Okay, and you should be happy with either result that you get and don't enter the conversation expecting to get a yes and already reaching for somebody's hair.
2:22.0	We'll get that out of the way. Now, these people handle this very well. They just said don't touch her. They blocked her off.
2:29.0	Okay, fine, everything's good. Nobody's harmed in this whole situation. Everybody seems relatively nice.
2:35.0	But I got into the comments on this TikTok and it was really interesting to see what people were commenting.
	...

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