I can speak to another man about his sexist act in a variety of ways. i can try to interact with him in a “macho” way; I can try to bring the focus onto the personal experience of the woman he offended; I can do a mix or something entirely different. But in the end, what matters is the RESULT: are he, and I, made “better” with one option than the other? the process is relevant as it affects the result.

It seems clear that Rachel’s essay probably has some intrinsic cost–it references the boyfriend in a way that some find objectionable. But cost is only one side of the equation. We also need to look at the intrinsic benefit. Is the essay helpful? Would it be more, or less, helpful, if it included all the modifications that some here suggest (or if it wasn’t written at all, as I suspect some would prefer)? Would it still convince some (more, fewer) people to fight racism; to look at new ways to take on their racist family members?

Doesn’t that matter? A lot? Whites are the main perpetrators of racism; change in whites remains one of the very important ways to affect it. Doesn’t it?

And a discussion of how women are seen as property, and vessels. Here, ‘pure white womanhood’ isn’t really about the woman as a person. It’s about her value to white men.

I don’t see that race and gender issues cannot exist at the same time in any discussion.

Rachel and others are claiming she, a white woman, is a victim of oppression against interracial couples.

In terms of actual concrete historical and current context: Oppression against interracial couples is a part and product of systemic white supremacy, intersecting with white patriarchy and other systems. It is not some interpersonally-generated independent acontextual ahistorical apolitical different pattern that just happens in families and bounded interactions and blog discussions.

It has a historical context in things like miscegenation laws (as ONLY ONE EXAMPLE), it is linked strongly into the multi-mode gendered practice of racism against men and women of color, and whatever its mutations over time, it is a piece of white supremacy in intersection with other systems.

So the way I see it, real genuine honest discussion using the concept of “interracial oppression” would need to include the actual context. And in this case, when we are talking about a white woman claiming she is being oppressed here because she was in a relationship with a Black man, honest context about how the system operates might include realities of how white men have used white women (and how some white women participated in this pattern in various ways) to provide a pretext for lynching Black men on the basis of their claimed violation of pure white womanhood.

This is just one example, there are so so many other historical/contextual/current pieces that never ever would come up in how the white people here are talking about this thing they name/define as “oppression of interracial couples” because it doesn’t fit the twisted way they are trying to use this pattern to justify … protecting a white woman.

This is what I see:

In this discussion, the claim that Rachel is in victim status because she was in an interracial relationship has come only from white people.

In this discussion, the claim that Rachel is in victim status because she was in an interracial relationship has served specific functions:

1. It has flipped actual reality upside down and meshed with the white supremacist construction of white womanhood — making Rachel the white woman the “oppressed one” within white supremacy, and an individual who was speaking from the subject position of the Black man in her story a racist oppressor who must be banned.

2. It has provided justification and rationale for Rachel to be defensive, thus rhetorically turning a pretty typical case of Wounded White Woman Syndrome into a virtuous fight against racism.

3. It has given another white person, Mandolin, who is a moderator here at this blindingly-white-owned site, the opportunity to use another woman of color’s words about interactions *between people of color* to refer to how someone who is probably a person of color was racist against Rachel, who is white.

4. It has done a whole whole lot of other things that I don’t have the time or energy to lay out.

Like I said, the level of active deceit in this whole thing is appalling to me.

In my view, there is no way to have a real discussion about anything when the active deceit level is so high, when the flow of bullshit is so constant, so relentless, that it is impossible to even name all of it.

And while my girlfriend tells me that this kind of thing is just normal operating procedure in this shithole of a white/European cultural system, and while I know this cognitively and experientially, it seems I will never ever EVER get less shocked, less disgusted, less outraged by the shamelessness and relentlessness of the deceit.

I wish there were some kind of accountability to the actual truth, actual reality, independent of what anyone wants to believe. I wish that you white liars who are saying whatever the fuck you can say to protect the poor white woman victim — just because you CAN say it — would be zapped by some truth deity each and every time you engaged in this deceit, each and every time you twist reality to conform to what you want things to be.

Maybe that would at least tire you out a little and ease the flow of the bullshit. And I would welcome being zapped myself when I am not accountable to the truth.

But it is not going to happen. Not going to happen, and you all with your rhetoric in this twisted funhouse mirrorworld space have apparently endless energy to keep up this practice of bullshit, and there are a whole lot of you who have been going on and on about this. This is not a real discussion where people are trying to understand something together, it is an energy-sucking pit of white-people-running-lies bullshit. Which I know isn’t rare on the internet — or in this society — but I am an idiot and can’t seem to stop getting shocked and outraged about it.

I will not be coming back again to this discussion or this site.

This — the relentless perpetrator POV, the way it is there and subtly persistent and continued to persist in the defensive responses to the criticism — this is a big part of what got to me about the story and the responses. Like, in the gut got me.

I think there is a difference between having white people at the center of the room under serious critical scrutiny, and supporting white people’s POV at the center of the assumed reality of what is going on.

And if there is some feeling out there that white people under scrutiny (as perpetrators and people who should take responsibility) is or requires the same thing as white people’s POV at the center, then … well, yuck.

That is ugly nasty stuff, the white cultural POV — endlessly self-referential, aggressively centered on the concerns of the white self like no one else matters, hierarchical and exclusive (ignoring and/or trivializing the existence of other people’s humanity and experiential realities), defensive, and objectifying.

I have a gut-level experientially based thing about the subtle relentless ways that the white cultural self operates to claim and maintain the center — the most-human, the most-real.

Again, I think michelle and others make some thoughtful and difficult-to-express points. I can’t help but think of others who have wrestled with the challenge of how to describe the challenges created by a world view to people who share that world view. “[Men's world view] is metaphysically nearly perfect. Its point of view is the standard for point-of-viewlessness, its particularity the meaning of universality, its force is exercised as consent, its authority as participation, its supremacy as the paradigm of order, its control as the definition of legitimacy.” Catharine MacKinnon, “Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State: Toward Feminist Jurisprudence,” 8 Signs 635, 638-39 (1983).

And again, notwithstanding the merits of these points, I don’t share michelle’s dismay. I sense I’m hearing insights about the dearth of stories from a black viewpoint combined with insights about the limits of story-telling in general.

The fact that stories from a black person’s point of view don’t get enough attention leads me to conclude that black people’s stories should get more attention. It does not lead me to find fault with stories told from other people’s points of view, however flawed and partial their points of view may be. After all, are there any stories that don’t ignore or marginalize someone else’s experience? I’d be interested to hear a few titles. God may mark the fall of every sparrow, but oddly she didn’t include a list of these accounts in any of her published works.

One white guy’s perspective: To know anything, you must it is necessary to know everything; to say anything, it is necessary to leave most things unsaid. The choice about what to omit is somewhat arbitrary. The need to make a choice is not. I don’t doubt that Rachel S.’s boyfriend would have told a different story than Rachel S. did. And I don’t doubt that his story would have been partial, too, albeit partial in a different way. I appreciate how commentors here can identify a list of subjects that went unsaid and unexplored in Rachel S.’s story. I don’t share the view that there was therefore something “wrong” with the story.

I said “relevant” not “important”.

And precisely how does this not make michelle’s and jolly’s point?

I said “relevant” not “important”. The story mostly was about a racist’s person’s reaction, and, shock-and-surprise, racist people don’t care if the black guy has any other characteristics besides race. So, other attributes weren’t relevant. [Needless snark deleted by Amp.]

We also didn’t hear much about the grandfather’s wife, who was also described as racist. Does this mean that Rachel is sexist? No. It means that her reaction wasn’t as relevant to the story as her grandfather, who is a blood relation and thus it is more destructive to her family if she has a feud with him, so his opinion is more relevant.

And if there is some feeling out there that white people under scrutiny (as perpetrators and people who should take responsibility) is or requires the same thing as white people’s POV at the center, then … well, yuck.

There’s a big difference between thinking that putting white people under scrutiny will occasionally include autobiographical pieces by white people talking about their own experiences of being white in a racist society, and thinking that it requires it in all instances.

The idea that white people should never talk about whiteness in an autobiographical fashion, which is where your critique leads, is not useful and merely encourages white people not to talk seriously about racism. I think racism is about white people, just as rape is about men, in the sense that racism is mostly perpetrated by whites. I’ve talked about rape from the male POV for that reason (for example in this post), and I think it’s valid and necessary for whites to talk about racism from a white POV, too.

To say otherwise — to say that only blacks may talk about racism in autobiography (which by definition centers the author’s POV) — is to unfairly take the burden of opposing racism off of white people, in my opinion.

Nannette, just for the record, I had kind of thought Jolly was white, but then I thought Nanette was a POC, so clearly my guesswork on this thread is pretty lousy.

See? This conversation gets more confusing by the minute! People are having their colors changed with alarming frequency. I am a Black woman, so poc for sure.

I meant to write “but then I thought Michelle was a POC,” but I wrote “Nanette” instead, presumably because my brain had decided that this conversation needed to be even more confusing. Oy.

As for the rest of your comment, what you say about the use of “lawn jockey” in that context makes sense.

But I also think the reading that this was an extremely insensitive use of bigoted language to bring up common prejudices against interracial couples, also makes sense.

That’s the point. This was an anecdote about what racism looks like from the POV of someone who is close to a racist person.

This — the relentless perpetrator POV, the way it is there and subtley persistent and continued to persist in the defensive responses to the criticism — this is a big part of what got to me about the story and the responses. Like, in the gut got me.

I think there is a difference between having white people at the center of the room under serious critical scrutiny, and supporting white people’s POV at the center of the assumed reality of what is going on.

And if there is some feeling out there that white people under scrutiny (as perpetrators and people who should take responsibility) is or requires the same thing as white people’s POV at the center, then … well, yuck.

That is ugly nasty stuff, the white cultural POV — endlessly self-referential, aggressively centered on the concerns of the white self like no one else matters, hierarchical and exclusive (ignoring and/or trivializing the existance of other people’s humanity and experiential realities), defensive, and objectifying.

I have a gut-level experientially based thing about the subtle relentless ways that the white cultural self operates to claim and maintain the center — the most-human, the most-real. The white cultural self-defense tactics that can seem (to some) good and polite and smiley and friendly but are actually none of those things, are actually ugly erasures and … I still don’t have the words. Anyway, I feel this as a form of quiet but real violence — right or wrong I feel it like that.

I’m sorry I misread you.

As to using the quote from Nora, I hear your objections. I felt that her words have helped to inform my theories about what I see as JW’s racist responses here. I did not feel I was misrepresenting Nora on the basis of what I’ve read of her considerations of racism, but it wasn’t necessary to embed the quote, and I apologize for doing so.

Want to get banned so fast your head will spin? Go say something controversial at Pandagon.

Au contraire.

I myself have engaged in controversial, extremely heated, and also vitriolic exchanges at Pandagon. Not banned yet.

The decision to ban, either here or there, is multi-faceted.

Would anyone be claiming that her essay itself was antisemitic?

Wow. I’ve said lots controversial at Pandagon, up to and including really vitriolic arguments with Amanda, and I’ve never been banned.

Maybe I should try trolling? Is that what worked for you?

In that case, then the answer would be to put him in completely.

[added] That would have taken care of at least one part of things, anyway.

Just as an aside, I wanted to answer one of the questions above, on what she should have done or what people should do when they have relationships with people of color, and also have racist relatives (or something like that).

Hope is not a plan, as someone once said. In my opinion, if you are going to invite a poc into a known hostile environment, no matter how much you might hope that good manners or something among the racist faction will win out, I wouldn’t plan on it.

I (being an old woman and wiser now) will not enter into any similar situation without a few things happening first… The relatives (friends, coworkers, etc) are informed that I will be there, know I am Black, and are informed that either they can be decent or (we will leave, so and so will disown you, whatever).

This not only lets me know that I am important enough in the scheme of things to be afforded this courtesy, with complete backup, if I am willing to endure the hostile family for a time, but also puts the onus for the success of whatever event on the racist family members (friends, etc).

(this may come thru twice… I am trying the editing thing for the first time)

Just for clarity, do you mean to say that Rachel could have avoided this if she’d explained why her relationship with her now-ex-boyfriend did not objectify him, and that it makes sense to demand this?

Rachel could have avoided all this in a couple ways, in my opinion.

1)Not put the boyfriend in there at all. He’s not central or even necessary to her main theme, which is the relationship between non racist white people and their racist families.

2) Put the boyfriend in there completely. This does not mean center the story around him or write oodles of words describing him or his feelings or whatever…. it could have been something as simple as:

“I had brought my boyfriend, a black man, who I had been dating for 4 years, to a family picnic. Over the years we’d discussed my racist family but we still weren’t prepared for what happened. (The picnic event). ”

Actually, I don’t know how she could have handled, in the telling, the aftermath, as that is one of the things I have issues with even with the context - she doesn’t know what, exactly, it was that was the worst thing that happened to him, or how he dealt with it in the long term.

It’s a personal story and the essay is not about the relationship or why this seemingly wasn’t talked about afterwards, plus she wishes to protect his privacy and not speak for him, so it’s not an easy situation. I would have opted for leaving him out completely, I think.

The only relevant piece of information on the boyfriend is that he’s black.

I don’t know that I will have the time to continue to be part of this conversation, but I have to say that you have just made michelle’s and jolly’s point for them much more powerfully than I think Rachel’s original post did.

See? This conversation gets more confusing by the minute! People are having their colors changed with alarming frequency. I am a Black woman, so poc for sure. I don’t know Jolly in any other way other than this thread, but here I got the impression that he was a person of color. I could be wrong. I knew Michelle was white from the beginning. And have mostly just assumed that everyone else was too, although as it’s a long thread I may have forgotten someone.

With all due respect, do you disagree that for someone (I think white, but I could be wrong) to refer to an interracial couple with terms like “polishing the lawn jockey” is offensive and bigoted?

It can be, for sure. I don’t know if he is white or not, I would find it more offensive if he was, in one of those odd race quirks. I don’t use terms like that and I think they are unproductive but there are definitely Black people who do if maybe not in the same way. I tend to think that when he did use that term he was reacting, again, to the original text where things were a tad murky. My first thought was that he was reacting strongly out of personal experience but again, I could be wrong.

Here is what he said:

Had I been him I would have been appalled by your casual disregard for my dignity, your childish need for affirmation from your racist family, and then, while walking out the door, told you to go polish some other lawn jockey.

Had the situation been as it appeared in the original text, I may have done the same thing (in so many words). So, while I winced a bit, I did not consider the use bigoted or offensive (well, actually, I think it was meant to be strong and offensive), as I assumed he was speaking of himself and what his reaction would have been (or maybe had been) to a similar situation to how Rachel’s situation (with no context but the original text) seemed.