My friend Elise Bryant wrote a play called The Zoo-zoo Chronicles about her life on the University of Michigan campus in the 1970s.  In the first scene, Elise’s stand-in moves into a four-bedroom dorm suite with three white women.  As an ice-breaker, one of the white women asks their new Black (we capitalized it back then) roomie, “Who’s your favorite Beatle?”

Silence.  For three full seconds.

Elise’s stand-in rises in righteous anger.  How dare these strangers assume she likes a Beatle, any Beatle, Beatles qua Beatles?  Corporate rippers-off of Black culture, lily-white wannabe Blues singers, what would any self-respecting Black woman see in them?  After making it clear the answer is “None of the above,” Elise’s stand-in goes on to become fast friends with at least a couple of these women, bonding in sisterhood with them over sit-ins; student strikes; love ventured, gained, and lost; all the standard 1970s joys and perils of life.  What sticks with me, though, is that initial moment of hegemonic attitude and challenge, that culture clash right at the beginning, that careful mapping out of common ground and unacknowledged gaps in the “favorite Beatle” call and response.

Because I did have a favorite Beatle.  Still do.

When I was six I saw the Beatles’ debut on Ed Sullivan and knew this was gonna be something big.  Drew them with my Crayolas playing Gibson guitars when teacher told us to illustrate Kalamazoo’s industrial base in action (Gibson had a factory there).  After college, singing with my rock band, I studied the chord progressions for Beatles’ songs like “Yes It Is,” then stole them and wrote my own.

Why?  Was it because I wanted to be white?  No.

Because they were good.

It’s not inconceivable that whites sometimes admire and emulate the cultures of people of color.  And sometimes it works  the other way.  Sometimes it’s not a matter of being forced to accept the dominant paradigm but rather of identifying with certain of its elements….

John Lennon was my favorite Beatle, right from the start, though it took me till after his assassination to articulate the appeal.  Basically, I loved Lennon for his unabashed idiocy.  The man was never afraid to make a fool of himself.  Audacity wins me over every time.

Is it audacious to take the stance of a cultural tourist towards territories supposed to be well inside the boundaries of the dominant paradigm?  To treat as fodder for my own dreams the harmonies and psychedelic insights of white men given license to rebel?  To tune myself to the excellencies they discovered within themselves almost by accident?

Maybe it would make as much or more sense to expand the meaning of the word.  Say my favorite Beatle is Michael Jackson.   Or Prince.  Or Sly Stone, or George Clinton, or Jimi Hendrix, or any of the other small-b-black rockers trampling down marketing categories with gorgeous unconcern.  Ya think?

Who’s your favorite Beatle?

And now a word from our sponsor...

Your ad could be here, right now.

At the start of the month, Megan McArdle — who is, I think, pro-choice — wrote:

But in this case, I think the analogy to slavery is important, for two reasons. First of all, it was the last time we had an extended, society-wide debate about personhood. [...]

Listening to the debates about abortion, it seems to me that really broad swathes of the pro-choice movement seem to genuinely not understand that this is a debate about personhood, which is why you get moronic statements like “If you think abortions are wrong, don’t have one!” If you think a fetus is a person, it is not useful to be told that you, personally, are not required to commit murder, as long as you leave the neighbors alone while they do it.

Conversely, if Africans are not people, then slavery is not wrong.

Although Megan is (I think) pro-choice, I’ve certainly heard this argument made by pro-lifers any number of times. But “lack of personhood” was not, in fact, a major pro-slavery argument. I’d recommend listening to (or reading the transcript of) this lecture by Yale historian David Blight, in which he outlines the pre-civil-war pro-slavery arguments.

The entire lecture is worth your time, but here — heavily edited for space — is Blight’s outline of the important pro-slavery arguments.

Now, there are many ways to look at pro-slavery. Deep, deep in the pro-slavery argument–I’m going to give you categories here to hang your hats on–deep in the pro-slavery argument is a biblical argument. Almost all pro-slavery writers at one point or another will dip into the Old Testament, or dip into the New Testament–they especially would dip to the Old–to show how slavery is an ancient and venerable institution. [...] You can therefore assume it was divinely sanctioned. [...]

A second kind of set of arguments, I’ve already referred to, are the historical ones. Here it is not just the venerability of slavery, how old it is, but it’s the idea that it has been crucial to the development of all great civilizations. That slavery may have its bad aspects but it has been the engine of good, it has been the engine of empires, the engine of wealth, the engine of greatness. How would you have had Cicero? How would you have had the great Roman philosophers and thinkers? [...]

Pro-slavery ideology is also part of–at the same time it’s resistant to–the greatest product arguably of the Enlightenment, and that is the idea of natural rights; natural law, natural rights, rights by birth, rights from God, being born with certain capacities. Now pro-slavery writers were inspired by this to some extent, but many of them will simply convert it. They will convert it–they’ll take portions of John Locke that they like, and not the others–and they’ll say the real rule of the world is not natural equality, but it is natural inequality. Humans are not all born the same, with the same capacities, abilities.

Now, then there’s a whole array of economic arguments, and the cynic, the economic determinist, simply goes to the economic conclusions of pro-slavery and nowhere else. [...] “You will say that man cannot hold property in man. The answer is that he can, and actually does, hold property in his fellow, all over the world, in a variety of forms, and has always done so.” [...]

Some would get worried and they would discuss slavery as a necessary evil–this system entailed upon them. [...] “But the question is, in my present circumstances, with evil on my hands, entailed from my father, would the general interest of the slaves and community at large, with reference to the slaves, be promoted best by emancipation? Could I do more for the ultimate good of the slave population by holding or emancipating what I own?” [...] he develops a highly intricate theory of how he’s going to use slavery to save black people. He’s going to ameliorate their conditions, he’s going to make their slavery on his plantations so effective, so good, such a even joyous form of labor, that he will be doing God’s work by improving slavery.[...]

There are many pro-slavery writers who developed, like James Henry Hammond, what I would call the cynical or amoral form of pro-slavery argument; and this is a potent form of argument when you think about it. [...] “The only problem with slavery in America,” said James Henry Hammond, is that too damn many northerners didn’t understand it is the way of the world as it is, and they ought to stop talking about the world as it ought to be.” [...] “Is it not palpably nearer the truth to say that no man was ever born free and that no two men were ever born equal? Man is born in a state of the most helpless dependence on other people.”

And then there’s the whole vast category of racial defense and justification of slavery. [...] Probably the most prominent pro-slavery writer to make the racial case–and they all did–but probably the most prominent was George Fitzhugh. [...] “The Negro,” he said, “is but a grownup child and must be governed as a child. The master occupies toward him the place of parent or guardian. Like a wild horse he must be caught, tamed and domesticated.” [...]

And lastly, there was a kind of utopian pro-slavery. [...] In Hughes’s vision and Hughes’s worldview slavery was not only a positive good–it was the possibility of man finding a perfected society, with the perfect landowners fulfilling their obligations, supported by a government that taxed the hell out of them to do it, and perfect workers, would make the South into the agricultural utopian civilization of history.

It’s politically useful for pro-lifers to pretend that abortion and slavery were similar debates, and that the major argument for slavery was the claim that Africans were not people. But that’s simply not true.

(Note that in the lecture I’m quoting, Blight’s intent wasn’t making a case about abortion in either direction — Blight isn’t shading his arguments towards a pro-choice or pro-life outcome, he’s simply explaining the history of pro-slavery arguments. Can pro-lifers cite similarly non-biased sources to support their argument?)

See also: Ta-Nehisi.

* * *

P.S. I can’t resist pointing out that the first few arguments Blight lists — the institution goes back forever, it’s in the Bible, and it’s the foundation of civilization — are also the major arguments used in the present day to argue for banning same-sex couples from marriage.

I live in New Zealand, and like so many other countries it gives me a strange view of the USA. I’m familiar with so many things that are alien to my life. As a child I read of twinkies and home room. As a political blogger I read of primaries and supreme court appointments. But there’s much I don’t really understand. Sometimes that ignorance is a hinderence. There are things I’d genuinely like to know¹ But sometimes this difference means I see things that people more immersed may miss.

On Womanist Musings Renee began a post: “The original sin of the United States is undoubtedly slavery.”² It’s not true, the original sin, the origin sin, of the United States is colonisation. I’m not making an argument of primacy, or importance. Just of chronology. Statements such as this render colonialism, and native Americans, invisible. It invokes the idea of the colonial idea of Terra Nullis, where there were no people before colonisation, and no sin before slavery.

I read a lot of American feminist blogs, and I’m always surprised by the silence around colonialism (and I know Renee is Canadian, which makes this even stranger to me). On an intellectual level I understand the factors that tend to mean that American progressives spend less time thinking and talking about colonialism than New Zealand progressives do. But I don’t grok it - I can’t imagine it - I’ve no idea how it changes your political worldview. ³

So I thought I’d ask left-wing commenters from America and Canada, what role colonialism plays in their political analysis and understanding of their country and it’s history and racism.

Edited to Add: Just in case there was any doubt, I fully agree with Renee’s point about reparations for slavery in the post that I linked to. The line I quoted is the only line that I take issue with.

1. like why aren’t the left doing a nut about the law and order-ness of the latest supreme court judge. It seems to me that the right threw a tantram about that female judge who didn’t get nominated and they got someone they liked more. Whereas the left says “Yay she’s a centrist.” Amp has tried to explain this to me, but I don’t understand (back)
2. Personally I’m not sure about the use of ‘original sin’ as a metaphor, not just for theological reasons (I don’t know enough about the theology of original sin), but that I think the personification of nations naturalises them in a way that is unhelpful. (back)
3. I say this not to say I’m a great example on Maori sovereignty, but just that it’s a thread that I can’t imagine politics without. (back)

This is genocide:

CROW AGENCY, Mont. – Ta’Shon Rain Little Light, a happy little girl who loved to dance and dress up in traditional American Indian clothes, had stopped eating and walking. She complained constantly to her mother that her stomach hurt.

When Stephanie Little Light took her daughter to the Indian Health Service clinic in this wind-swept and remote corner of Montana, they told her the 5-year-old was depressed.

Ta’Shon’s pain rapidly worsened and she visited the clinic about 10 more times over several months before her lung collapsed and she was airlifted to a children’s hospital in Denver. There she was diagnosed with terminal cancer, confirming the suspicions of family members.

A few weeks later, a charity sent the whole family to Disney World so Ta’Shon could see Cinderella’s Castle, her biggest dream. She never got to see the castle, though. She died in her hotel bed soon after the family arrived in Florida.

“Maybe it would have been treatable,” says her great-aunt, Ada White, as she stoically recounts the last few months of Ta’Shon’s short life. Stephanie Little Light cries as she recalls how she once forced her daughter to walk when she was in pain because the doctors told her it was all in the little girl’s head.

…

American Indians have an infant death rate that is 40 percent higher than the rate for whites. They are twice as likely to die from diabetes, 60 percent more likely to have a stroke, 30 percent more likely to have high blood pressure and 20 percent more likely to have heart disease.

American Indians have disproportionately high death rates from unintentional injuries and suicide, and a high prevalence of risk factors for obesity, substance abuse, sudden infant death syndrome, teenage pregnancy, liver disease and hepatitis.

While campaigning on Indian reservations, presidential candidate Barack Obama cited this statistic: After Haiti, men on the impoverished Pine Ridge and Rosebud Reservations in South Dakota have the lowest life expectancy in the Western Hemisphere.

This leads to genocide:

Four Muslim men also pleaded their innocence before a judge in a White Plains, N.Y., courthouse after being accused of plotting to blow up a pair of synagogues and down military aircraft with a shoulder-fired missile. The feds had been keeping tabs on the men for a year and sold them the missile and explosives, which had been deactivated. The four were reportedly angered over the deaths of Muslims in Afghanistan at the hands of U.S. forces.

A note on the second one - this is not an example of Muslims being evil. This is an example of oppressed groups being encouraged to scapegoat Jews for what those who are actually in power are doing. In other words, this is how anti-Semitism works.

(Cross-posted at Alas, A Blog.)

I really don’t understand why the GOP has so much trouble attracting nonwhite voters. I mean, sure, a Republican activist said an escaped ape was “one of Michelle [Obama]’s ancestors,” then blamed the whole thing on a statement by Michelle Obama that did not actually exist. And sure, a GOP operative posted a tweet that said, “JUST HEARD OBAMA IS GOING TO IMPOSE A 40% TAX ON ASPIRIN BECAUSE IT’S WHITE AND IT WORKS.” And sure, a staffer for a Republican Tennessee State Senator sent out this image of the 44 presidents:

And then when given a chance to apologize, said staffer said “she only felt bad about sending it to the wrong list of people.”

But I just can’t understand why people think the GOP is a party that coddles racists. It’s so confusing.

A while back I saw this comic strip.  Can’t remember the name.  The setting was white suburbia, a family, which as my friend Sara points out “really narrows it down.”

The female lead of the comic strip (let’s call her Wilma) has a black friend of, shall we say, “a certain size.”  Wilma spends three panels hinting around about an exercise class to her black friend (let’s call her Joyce).   Telling Joyce the time, the location, the cost, how much fun Wilma’s having taking it.  “How very nice for you,” Joyce responds, walking away with wobble lines emanating from her large rear-end.

In case you missed it, that’s the punchline.  The joke is, see, Joyce is fat, but she doesn’t realize that about herself.  Poor Wilma is trying to help Joyce help herself, but Joyce is so deep in denial, so far up that river in Egypt, that she simply can’t be helped.

And as I read this I’m thinking, okay, what’s wrong with wobble lines?  This woman looks good to me.  Maybe she looks good to herself.  Maybe she already has an exercise program that she likes just fine.  I do.

I look a lot like Joyce.  Larger breasts, though.  I weigh more than 200 pounds.  I’m pretty sure.  I haven’t weighed myself in three weeks, but that sounds about how I feel.  I’m maybe 5 feet, 8 inches tall. 

At the Y in April, I was on the treadmill, doing my 40 minutes, all of it uphill.  The man next to me asked how much I weighed, and seemed deeply shocked at my answer.  “But you are fat!” he exclaimed.  “And you are always here, working out so hard!”  Well, yes.  I am.  I do.  And I would say I’m in shape.  Round is a shape.

I’ve subscribed for a few years to an online dating service.  I read the ads for entertainment, even when I’m not interested in meeting the men that posted them.   In the singular they’re funny; “Satisfaction guaranteed EVERY TIME,” says Marv’s headline.  There’s a man with the user name “Tumbleweed Heart,” and another whose user name is “Asslicker.”   En masse, the profiles I read are pathetic and provoking.  There are canned phrases one can use to describe both one’s physical type and the physical type one desires: “Slender, Average, Athletic, A Little Extra Padding, Rubenesque.”  I have chosen to describe myself using the ALEP option.  By far the most widely sought qualities, though, are “Slender” and “Athletic.”

Very few subscribers advertise for a specific ethnicity, but there are some of those, too.

Then there’s the men who are asking for skinny black women to email them.  I raise my voice and wave my arms at the computer screen in exasperation.  Skinny!  Black!  They exist, of course, but statistically speaking?  So do microscopically small black holes.

I think black women in the US are far more likely to be fat than women of other races.  Women are more likely to be fat than men; we’re built to store it up, cause we might need it to support a pregnancy.  And in the US blacks are often the descendants of survivors of slavery, which tilts the genetic pinball machine in favor of holding on to that fat for dear life.  Dear, dear, sweet, sweet life.

There are some who want me, right now, the way I am, so round, so firm, so fully packed.   So brimming with dear life.

And now a word from our sponsor...

Your ad could be here, right now.

While at WisCon 33 I was on one panel that wasn’t going to be a panel.  Cultural Appropriation 101 was supposed to be a workshop.  At least, that’s what Programming asked us to do.  But then we only had your normal panel-length time slot of 75 minutes to do it in.

(”We” being myself and Victor J. Raymond of the Carl Brandon Society’s Steering Committee, plus Cabell Gathman of the University of Wisconsin.)

So we talked some, we took questions from the audience some, we did a couple of exercises from the Writing the Other book I co-wrote with Cynthia Ward.  Also, we made a stab at putting together a glossary.  It’s that last thing I’d like to work on a little more now with you.

Here are some of the defnitions we used during the workshop:

RACISM - A system of advantage based on race.  Unfortunately, racism is not dead.

HONORARY WHITENESS: -I first heard of this term from linguistic anthropologist and Carl Brandon Society co-founder MJ Hardman.  If a white person likes a person of color and thinks that person of color is righteous and good, and therefor like themselves, they may accord that person of color honorary whiteness.  This is usually done unconsciously.

PAWS: -As in the paws given out in the course of the children’s show “Blue’s Clues.”  Somebody who’s extraordinarily clueful about cultural and racial issues has four paws.  Four is the max.

COOKIE - A very public reward for behaving commendably in regards to racial or cultural issues.  Often, seeking said cookie is the secret motivation for such behavior.  (Note: cookies are the imaginary and parodic equivalent of paws; paws are often awarded without the recipient ever knowing they have received them.)

CLUEFULNESS - Of a certain level of empathy and understanding when it comes to the situations of those of a nondominant cultural background, race, etc.  Applied to those of the correspondingly dominant background.  Many of my white friends exhibit a high degree of cluefulness.

P.O.S.E.E. - An acronym of my invention, standing for Person of Southern European Extraction.  Some P.O.S.E.E.s argue that they are not white.

P.O.N.E.E. - My companion acronym, standing for Person of Northern European Extraction.  The whitest of the white; John Aegard is my little P.O.N.E.E.

THE UNMARKED STATE - Posessing characteristics which are seen as “normal,” and thus not worth being mentioned.  In this society, at this time, this includes being white, male, heterosexual, affluent, and with certain physical abilities.  Just about everyone deviates from the unmarked state in one way or another, though some ways are deemed important and others are not.

Here are a few terms that could use definitions.  Try to be smart and nice.

PEOPLE OF COLOR

MAGICAL NEGRO

EXOTICIZING

ESSENTIALISM

And I’m sure there must be others.

And now a word from our sponsor...

Your ad could be here, right now.

From WPIX:

PASSAIC, N.J. (WPIX) - A police officer in New Jersey, captured on surveillance tape viciously beating a mentally ill man, has been reassigned while an investigation into the incident is underway.

Passaic cop Joseph J. Rios III, a seven-year veteran of the force, has not been charged in the May 29 attack but instead has been assigned to desk duty. [...]

Holloway, who has filed an Internal Affairs report, claims he was taking his routine walk when he was suddenly approached by Rios and another officer in a police cruiser. Holloway said he was zipping up his sweatshirt, as requested by the female officer, when Rios launched the attack. Holloway said Rios jumped out of his cruiser and threw him against a car hood for no reason.

Holloway, who reportedly suffers from schizophrenia, was arrested after the incident and charged with resisting arrest, disorderly conduct and wandering with the intent to purchase drugs.

This video from WPIX includes footage of protesters, including an interview with a protester who claims that she was also beaten by Officer Rios a year ago.

Although the assaulted man — like nearly all of the protesters — was Black, none of the news reports I’ve seen have pointed out that these assaults have a racist and sexist aspect. But although all kinds of people are assaulted by cops, the victims in these stories seem to be disproportionately brown-skinned men (both African-American and Latino).

Here’s the footage from the security camera. It really looks like the only thing that stopped the beating from going on much longer was the arrival of more cops.

It’s extraordinary that a surveillance camera happened to be aimed at just the right spot. Without that, everyone would dismiss Holloway as a liar (after all, he’s both black and mentally disabled, plus he now has an arrest record — so that’s three strikes), and this story would never have made the news. How many of the people of color who are arrested for things like “resisting arrest” are innocent victims of police assault, who just didn’t have the luck to have a video camera capture the incident?

I also wondered, was he targeted because he is disabled? From the footage, it doesn’t seem so; there’s nothing to indicate that the cop who beat him knew he was disabled. But maybe he was targeted for his disability, and I’m just not knowledgeable enough to spot it. I certainly can’t dismiss the possibility.

(Via Radley Balko).

Okay, so let’s say that National Review decided to do a racist caricature of Judge Sonia Sotomayor, but they decided to do a racist caricature that changed her race? Would that be better?

That may seem like an insane question to ask, but you haven’t met insane until you’ve met the National Review:

You see, it’s funny because…um…all those brown people look alike? Yeah, maybe that’s it.

On occasion I’ve said, sardonically, “Gee, and the GOP wonders why they have trouble attracting non-white voters.” But they don’t wonder that, really. They’ve embraced racism in a big bear hug, and they’re not going to let go of it, even as it pulls them into the electoral abyss.

See also Cara, Ann, and Jesse.

Riffing off a point by Matt Yglesias (who notes that the opposition to Sotomayor has been almost cartoonishly racist), Ta-Nehisi Coates says the GOP can’t help itself:

One problem with the GOP is that when you build your brand on Willie Horton, “white hands” and the Minutemen, you end up with a party that, well, believes in those things. People keep saying that the GOP is playing into Obama’s hands. I’ve said similar. But as I think about this, that takes chess-match thinking to a rather silly extreme.

More likely, when you have a party, in which people feel comfortable coming to rallies and saying on camera that they won’t vote for a black guy, then that party will have people asserting the right to mispronounce Sotomayor’s name. That party will have people arguing that Sotomayer’s food choices are evil.  It’s highly unlikely that that party will have some sort of sophisticated tolerence game at the ready. They are who they are.

That’s exactly right. The GOP is reaping the seeds sown when Nixon launched the Southern Strategy — the Republican Party has become the party of racism in America. I’m not saying all Republicans are racist — they aren’t. But most racists are Republican, for the simple reason that the Republican party has shown itself to be welcoming to the intolerant, the bigoted, and the hateful. That’s the reason that despite strong business support, and despite the clear long-term interest of the GOP in attracting Latino and Latina voters, and despite the strong support of both the the then-President and the party’s future presidential nominee, that immigration reform went nowhere. That’s the reason why opposition to Obama so often takes the where’s the birth certificate/scary black man/socialist!!1!!11! approach, when a sane approach would certainly work better.

Like the scorpion on the back of the frog, the GOP can’t help but sting anymore — it’s in its nature. Fortunately for America — and unfortunately for the GOP — the sting isn’t hurting the frog anymore. And unless the Republican Party can find a way to transcend the racism that is at the very core of its existence, the Republican Party alone is going to find itself drowning.

In 2001, Sonia Sotomayor gave the keynote speech at “a symposium commemorating the 40th anniversary of the first judicial appointment of a Latino to a federal district court.” The text of the speech was later published in the La Raza Law Journal.

I’m posting the full speech (even though it may be a copyright violation) because I think it’s important, since Sotomayor’s views on being a Latina Judge will probably be much discussed over the next couple of weeks, that people have the opportunity to read her own words in full.

Here’s an excerpt; the full speech is after the jump.

Whether born from experience or inherent physiological or cultural differences, a possibility I abhor less or discount less than my colleague Judge Cedarbaum, our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging. Justice O’Connor has often been cited as saying that a wise old man and wise old woman will reach the same conclusion in deciding cases. I am not so sure Justice O’Connor is the author of that line since Professor Resnik attributes that line to Supreme Court Justice Coyle. I am also not so sure that I agree with the statement. First, as Professor Martha Minnow has noted, there can never be a universal definition of wise. Second, I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.

Let us not forget that wise men like Oliver Wendell Holmes and Justice Cardozo voted on cases which upheld both sex and race discrimination in our society. Until 1972, no Supreme Court case ever upheld the claim of a woman in a gender discrimination case. I, like Professor Carter, believe that we should not be so myopic as to believe that others of different experiences or backgrounds are incapable of understanding the values and needs of people from a different group. Many are so capable. As Judge Cedarbaum pointed out to me, nine white men on the Supreme Court in the past have done so on many occasions and on many issues including Brown.

However, to understand takes time and effort, something that not all people are willing to give. For others, their experiences limit their ability to understand the experiences of others. Other simply do not care. Hence, one must accept the proposition that a difference there will be by the presence of women and people of color on the bench. Personal experiences affect the facts that judges choose to see. My hope is that I will take the good from my experiences and extrapolate them further into areas with which I am unfamiliar. I simply do not know exactly what that difference will be in my judging. But I accept there will be some based on my gender and my Latina heritage.

The full speech can be read under the fold. Read the rest of this entry »

PhysioProf, guest blogging at Isis the Scientist has a post up called the Handy-Dandy Guide for D00dly Commenters which struck both me and Ampersand as being similar to his How Not to Be Insane When Accused of Racism: A Guide for White People (Amp notes that he would use different wording were he writing the post today).

Here’s an excerpt:

(1) If you are leaving the first comment to a post, you are almost certainly fucking up.

(2) If you are using the words “men”, “boys”, “fathers”, or “sons”, you are almost certainly fucking up.

(3) If you are using the words “should” or “useful”, you are almost certainly fucking up.

(4) If you are telling people that talking about this, that, or the other issue is fine, but also asking them what they are doing about this issue, you are almost certainly fucking up.

(5) If you are complaining that by being “mean”, people that might be allies are being turned off, you are almost certainly fucking up.

Seems worth reading through.

I Blame the Patriarchy has a discussion of the piece (with worthwhile comment thread, I thought). Twisty wrote:

While it is always hi-larious to read what expert dudely readers of heartwarming nature crap blogs have to tell their less-enlightened brethren, it’s also maddening and, if you like, ironical, since such a post can only be written from the patronizing position of male privilege. It’s a kind of double-privilege, too: “Unlike you, Grasshoppah, the feminists have accepted me, for I have been to their savage death island and live to tell the tale.”

These guys are veteran ethnographers doing a field study, warning the new grad students: “The natives have curious, unpredictable ways. Approach them with caution or they will prong you sure as shit with curare-dipped spears. Oh, and we’re meeting for beers later at Chip’s tent.”

Hardy har, because implicit in these man-to-man, how-to-walk-on-eggshells-around-a-feminist tracts is an ingrained sense of the inconsequential status of women in the feminist heartwarming nature crappism blog community. It’s comical somehow, that feminist women — women who are widely considered to be the hairy minority, the kill-joy joke-butts of the internet whose blogs are often described by dudes as “lame” or “parodies” — are so aggressively protective of their trivial little sectarian colonies on the web that men need special training and travel visas to avoid blogular deportation.

As well as other things.

Twisty, as far as I can tell, respects PhysioProf as a feminist. She’s just calling him out on this particular dynamic.

This is one of those many areas where I don’t agree with Twisty exactly, but I think she’s saying something interesting. I think that PhysioProf’s post is interesting, and has some potential to be practically useful (although I disagree with some of his points; for instance, here at Alas, a male commenter probably isn’t fucking up by commenting first on any given thread. We’re also a little bit more comfortable with personal life sharing, I think, than the blogular culture at IBTP. But nevertheless, there are a lot of good points, and I think the way PhysioProf is analyzing his own privilege could be usefully generalized to other areas — for instance, white commenters who are trying to be genuine allies to poc, or cis commenters trying to be genuine allies to trans people, etc.).

However, Twisty is correct — in order to make a post like that, written in the language of the privileged, you have to be *exercising* your privilege.

It’s a good thing for privilege to be exercised in this way, I think. Certainly, I think on the whole, Barry’s post about how not to be insane when accused of racism (a guide for white people) has on the whole been useful, and it seems to be useful to POC activists as well. I note that ABW links to it periodically when she wants white commenters to be able to go read something that they’ll understand, and stop bugging her.

I think that one of the more important things allies can do is to help express things in terms of their privilege, specifically so that they can help preserve the valuable time of people like ABW who do not need to be dealing with that 101 shit when they’ve got better things to do. Allies who are privileged can do this without committing the same emotional reserves (it hurts — in my experience — to have to defend your basic rights against privileged people, and is not so personally painful when you’re defending others), and to some extent without committing the same amount of time, because the privileged language will click with the other privileged language in a way that the privilege-poisoned party can hear and acknowledge.

But it’s still kind of icky that these things are necessary. And the use of privilege, even for good purpose, still involves othering, as Twisty points out with her savage island metaphor. Thus even though the privilege is being used to ease one problem, it adds wrinkles to another by reinforcing the voice of privilege as the voice of authority, in contrast to the othered voice of the oppressed group.

Now that I think about othering: interesting that Twisty’s metaphor for feminism as understood by the privileged dialogue was a “savage island.” Interesting that we get back to colonialism and to race. I wonder what that speaks to. (I don’t think it’s just white privilege, although that’s probably part any metaphor like this; there’s a long history of using “savage island” imagery to refer to feminist-only groups, such as amazons, and even the ways in which female only groups are described in old SF and fantasy, both female-positive and female-negative. Is it easiest for us to imagine women’s liberation in terms of geographic separation? And do we culturally have a tendency to map the ‘primitive’ nature of white women with the ‘primitive’ nature of all people of color, as Victorian scientists did, when postulating the white male brain as the only civilized one?)

[And finally, as someone else who likes to mix high-falutin' language with teh crassness, I offer this tribute to PhysioProf: Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuckity fuckpants.]

“He’s dead because he’s Mexican. This is jury nullification….”

Meanwhile, check out the reaction of the woman interviewed about one minute into this piece:

Ornicus writes:

Considering some of the details of the killing, it’s also inordinately clear this was a classic bias crime, with the incident instigated by racially charged taunts that made clear the victim was selected because of racial animus:

“Isn’t it a little late for you guys to be out?” the boys said, according to court documents. “Get your Mexican boyfriend out of here.”

… Burke recalled hearing one final, ominous threat as the teens ran. “They yelled, ‘You effin bitch, tell your effin Mexican friends get the eff out of Shenandoah or you’re gonna be laying effin next to him,’ ” she said.

That is, of course, the entire purpose of bias crimes: To hold the victim up as an example: “You’re next.” The purpose is to terrorize the target community, to drive them out, eliminate them.

Via: Racism Review. More on this case:

The Unapologetic Mexican
Stuff White People Do (source of the second video above)

Recently Al Robles, a figure prominent in the San Francisco Bay Area Filipino American community passed away.  Here is a short excerpt from a post I did on him:

Manong Al was a native San Franciscan and fought for the rights of the poor and the elderly all throughout his life.  During the 1970s he fought against the eviction of elderly Chinese and Pilipino American residents at the I-Hotel during which time the fight for the I-Hotel became a symbol of corporate greed and community solidarity across race and class.  While the elders were evicted from their homes and the I-Hotel was demolished, creating a crushing defeat and feelings of despair for the Chinese and Pilipino community in San Francisco Manong Al (like many others as well) did not give up.  He and the community continued to fight and kept the spot where the I-Hotel originally stood from being developed.  Finally, around four or so years ago the I-Hotel rose from the ashes and became a center of housing for low-income senior citizens and a space for community organizers and the Manilatown Heritage Foundation.

Throughout the years Manong Al continued to be an advocate for the elderly and especially for the manongs and manangs of the Pilipino American community; those folks who immigrated from the Philippines to work, hunched over with broken backs, in the fields of California.  As he would deliver meals to the manongs and manangs and provide other services for them he would collect their stories of joy and hardship, and he was ever the consummate oral historian, and in turn would put their experiences down in the form of poetry.  He also became something of a father figure for many community artists and activists at the Kearny Street Workshop and imparted his wisdom onto the many folks who walked through those doors as well.

Mark Halpern identifies the biggest concern about Souter’s replacement:

Aw, poor white guys! We only make up seven of the nine Supreme Court Justices. Why, one of them’s a woman! And there’s even a black guy! What more do you people want?

(Via Josh)

This is a guest post by Nezua, cross-posted from The Unapologetic Mexican.)

OVER AND OVER we hear about The Hispanic Vote™ and The Latino/a Vote® and it is a real thing we are talking about in all of this. Our people—nuestra gente—have long been a force in this land, be it under the golden sun harvesting the corn that has for thousands of years fed our antepasados (ancestors) or away from the sun and working hard in US places of business or doing so much to build strong familias together, as las mujeres—the women—among us are known for historically. We are a beautiful and long enduring people, and responsible for so much creation here that sustains us today: Art, Literature, Food, Clothing, Song.

And yet, our voices have yet to be utilized and enjoined in a way that can efficiently organize around the issues that affect our communities. Don’t mistake what I say: the Latina/o (or “Hispanic”) community is famous for its ability to organize on the local level, and we are proud of this. And that is why it is time to continue to tie this ability and history together and bring it to an even higher level.

It’s true that while so much joins us, we do come from many different backgrounds and hold varying views on the issues that affect us. We will not always agree, nor should we. What we can agree on, though, is that we should have a way to centralize and engage the politics that affect us on so many levels.

I am involved in launching a site called presente.org that is determined to achieve this very goal. Please stop over and check it out. If what I have written above interests you, please sign up.

Hasta luego!

• One note: On my own blog I do tend to speak more to Mexican@s and Latin Americans, because that’s the point at my place. But Presente.org has a much wider focus as “Latinos” and “Hispanics” can come from a wide range of origins. As far as some of my words above, not all of us have come from farming families, or the hot climates! Though many traditions and struggles do overlap. I just wanted to make clear that while I am involved in the organizing of this effort, there is a variance between my readership and presente.org’s intended audience.

Read the rest of this entry »

Racist cartoonist Donna Barstow, who is here seen being responsible for racist cartooning on the subject of swine flu, has unsurprisingly dabbled in racist cartoons before.

In the following cartoon, she shows herself as unsavvy about race politics affecting African Americans as she is about race politics affecting the relationship between the United States and Mexico:

As we all know, the only real, good hair is the hair possessed by white people — smooth, silky, shiny, straight, lushly falling whitey white hair. Hair possessed by black people is funny. It’s not like hair at all. It’s like plant growth!

Of course, it’s been well-documented by many bloggers of color that the politics of hair are used to suggest that black people cannot maintain a decent or professional appearance if they wear natural hair, that their hair is something abnormal that needs fixing, and that their appearance is deviant in comparison with the white default. Black people are sometimes charged more for styling their abnormal, so-not-white hair. Kinky, nappy hair is ugly and insulting. And of course, black-looking hair is “bad hair” and white-looking hair is “good hair.”

But I’m sure the observation that our first African American president “looks like a Chia pet” is totally race-neutral, and nothing to do with making fun of him for looking so blatantly non-white, just like all those other totally non-racist visual dog whistles.

I’m getting sick of the-popular-kids-are-better-at-geek-stuff-than-the-geeks trope, which stinks of noblesse oblige. And there are a zillion other things wrong here. But I’ll still be giving this show a try, because I’m that much of a sucker for anything resembling a musical.

But about that preview: Note the unwritten rule in TV that it’s okay to cast a fat actress if she’s black (and especially if she’s black and sings). On the one hand, of course it’s great that some talented fat black actresses are getting work. On the other hand, these actresses are often typecast as sassy, strong-willed types.

I’d rather see fat black women cast in the wide variety of roles white thin men are cast in — when, for example, will we see a fat black female captain of a starship, playing gravitas instead of sass?

ETA: And also, what’s with the kid in the wheelchair? Is it even a speaking role? If it is, you’d never know it from this preview.

It seems to me I’ve seen this a few times — the character of the high school loser in a wheelchair, whose primary narrative purpose — other than being an icon of loserness — is to establish the evilness of the people who reject the kid in the wheelchair, and/or to establish the openminded goodness of the thin, good-looking protagonists who befriend wheelchair loser. (Examples: Heathers, Adams Family Values, Wicked.)¹

Diversity consists of real parts, not just tokenism. Given how very rare characters in wheelchairs are, it’s a shame that a high proportion are done badly.

And why are the thin, ablebodied, pretty, white people always the leads? It’s like, it’s okay to have a bit of diversity in a friend group, so long as we remember who’s really important.

(Via Roz Kaveney — congrats on the agent, Roz! — and a hip tip-with-a-quip ripped from the lip of Kip.)

1. At least the part in Wicked is a speaking, and singing, part, and there’s a bit more to the character. But I want to vomit every time I hear the able-bodied guy blow the wheelchair girl’s mind by suggesting that she can dance — it’s played as if she’s spent her entire life waiting for some able-bodied guy to legitimize her by finding her attractive. As if no one in a wheelchair ever knew that she could dance before the ablebodied came along to let them know. (back)

Via Global Investment Watch, a letter from Color of Change, asking for folks to contact their congresscritters. 

This bill, if it passes, is a good example of how the marginal difference between Democrats and Republicans, marginal though it is, matters.  (But even if this bill passes, eliminating one devastating sentencing disparity, other, more subtle sentencing disparities will remain.)

The remainder of this post is the letter from Color of Change.

* * *

The so-called “war on drugs” has created a national disaster: 1 in 15 Black adults in America are behind bars. It’s not because we commit more crime but largely because of unfair sentencing rules that treat 5 grams of crack cocaine–the kind found in poor Black communities–the same as 500 grams of powder cocaine, which is the kind found in White and wealthier communities. These sentencing laws are destroying communities across the country and have done almost nothing to reduce the level of drug use and crime.

We now have an opportunity to end this disaster once and for all. A bill is moving through Congress right now that would end the sentencing disparity. It’s critical that members of Congress see support from everyday folks.  Join us in asking our representatives in the House and Senate to push for its passage, and please ask your friends and family to do the same. It only takes a moment:

http://colorofchange.org/crack/?id=2206-426821

Read the rest of this entry »

A few years ago I went to see “Avenue Q” on Broadway, mostly because I’d heard its funniest song used in a World of Warcraft machinima vid and thought any play that makes a song out of internet porn was a must-see.

(…Yes, I’m a geek. If you didn’t know, now you know.)

There was another song in the play, called “Everyone’s a little bit racist”. This one wasn’t funny — not to me, anyway, though lots of people in the audience laughed. A sample of the lyrics:

Everyone’s a little bit racist
It’s true.
But everyone is just about
As racist as you!
If we all could just admit
That we are racist a little bit,
And everyone stopped being
So PC
Maybe we could live in -
Harmony!

The core flaw of the song lies in its unquestioned flattening of the power structure of racism. It equates racist jokes with acts of historical discrimination; the attitudes of an oppressed group with the attitudes of its oppressors; and doesn’t address the continuing systemic aspects of racism at all. Racism, this song suggests, is just about people’s ordinary dislike for others who are different from them, and if we’d all just relax and let it all hang out, we’d get over it.

So yeah. ‘Bout as funny as a fart in a crowded room, or so it seemed to me. Needless to say, I was silent and uncomfortable during that song, while the theater full of white people laughed around me and had a grand old time.

I cite this admittedly old incident because I keep seeing the chorus of that song in the apparently-spontaneous mass-spewage of racist stupidity across multiple media formats that’s taken place over the past few months, and the debates that have resulted therefrom.

It’s probably not a new iteration; it’s probably just that I’m only now noticing this particular response pattern. But you can see several examples of it in this, one of the later conversations in the “RaceFail 2009″ debate that occurred on science fiction author John Scalzi’s blog. This particular convo was hosted by our very own ABW in her Srius Authar guise, with some peanut-gallery chiming in by Yours Truly in her Srius Authar guise. It was all terribly serious. Now, you should really take this conversation in context, if you can, though RaceFail was massive; here’s yet another summary and two preceding conversations that may help you understand what was going on. My own interpretation: for the previous two months, the speculative fictional blogosphere had been afire with conversations about race which incorporated some healthy helpings of racist behavior by noted authors, editors, and so on. An ongoing complaint in this debate had been that if it was only nicer, politer, less angry, then maybe some real conversation could take place. …Yeah. I know. So, the Scalzi conversations were an effort to generate this nice polite discussion. You’ll notice that in all three examples, the PoC in the conversation gradually just stopped talking.

Anyway, the thing that I kept seeing in these discussions was a refusal on the part of some white-identified folks to accept the “authority” that people of color have in discussions of racism. (Using scare quotes because I’m not sure authority is the right word. The earned wisdom of experience. Moral superiority, maybe. Agency? I dunno. I’ll go with authority for now.) PoC aren’t always right about what is racist, goes the refrain; sometimes they’re too angry to be reasonable, or too emotional to see the big picture, or too personally-involved to have the necessary detachment when they’re evaluating a situation. (Not like those always-rational white folks.) Some of them have hidden agendas which require them to make a racist mountain out of an innocuous molehill because their finances or their egos or whatever depend on holding a position of moral superiority. Or sometimes the problem is White Guilt, which leads white people to anxiously accept everything a brown person says as truth. We should all just talk as equals, these authority-resisters insist, rather than having PoC lecture whites about right and wrong in the case of race. Because after all, Everyone’s A Little Bit Racist ™.

There’s some truth in this. (No, really.) We’ve all seen the Al Sharptons of the world profit from others’ misfortune, and we’ve all seen white people who go overboard, seeking expiation of their sins rather than dialogue. The problem with this denial of PoC authority in matters of racism, however, is that like the Avenue Q song, it flattens the power structure of racism, again suggesting that everyone’s experiences are equal and therefore we all have important things to bring to the conversation.

This just isn’t true. Everyone’s experience of racism is not equal. And too often white people bring defensiveness, fetishization, exotification, implicit associations, and their own hidden agendas to the conversation, which just fraks things up on both sides. To be fair, some PoC bring these things to the table too; unfortunately we’ve all been hit with the racism stick. But one of the commonalities of the PoC experience in colonized/white-dominant countries is that eventually, most of us look around and notice the system, because its negative effects become impossible to deny. And in noticing the system, we do assume some moral authority. The system discourages acknowledgment, after all. It works best if it remains semi-visible, “silent but deadly”; even to notice it is a challenging act. The white experience has the opposite commonality — denial of the system’s existence, and of its beneficial effect on their lives. So even when whites begin to acknowledge the system, the habit of denial is hard to break. Denial of PoC authority is just another manifestation of it.

So the next time you encounter someone who cites the Avenue Q chorus in a discussion of racism, I suggest the following refrain:

Everyone’s a little bit racist
It’s true
But some are still more so than others
Like you!*

(Yeah, OK, I’m not a musician, shuddup.)