Re: Principal of Smith’s Shuttered Scientology School Turns Whistleblower
So if you are white and demand a white auditor, you are racist. But if you are black and demand a black auditor, you are Will Smith.
Comments like this sort of piss me off. They seem hip and progressive and fair, but they aren't. (And on some level I feel that Scientology is completely full of shit, so what does it matter whether the auditor is black or white anyway).
Still, we still live in a world where there is a great deal of inequality to women, to blacks, to gays - and there is still traumas that go on every day based on being in those groups. You don't have to demand a white auditor if you're white, because in Scientology with it being 99.99999% white, demanding one would be redundant. This also makes me wonder, as an aside, with Shelley Miscavige missing in action - who is the most powerful woman in Scientology right now? Seems like L. Ron Hubbard didn't really come up with a futuristic idea about addressing inequality.
The fact that they had to comb the earth to find 1 black auditor at that level for Smith says a lot about Scientology in general. My thoughts are that they might have requested this to bring attention to the fact that there are so few black Scientologists, and if anyone has the power to challenge that it would be Smith.
There is also the issue that if you are going to talk about dealing with racism in your auditing sessions (just like a woman who has been sexually abused might prefer a female auditor - not because a man can't listen but because another woman may understand what that experience is like, or what it means to be "sexualized" in the culture in a way that men usually aren't) that might make someone want an auditor of color, someone who appreciates that experience.
Until things are equal or more balanced, or until those issues don't continue to haunt those of us in those groups, I don't think it is outrageous to make this request. If you are in the "dominant" culture, I think you'll be all right.