Race, Fandom, and the Shoes of Other People--Part 2 (With the Imus Addendum)
But fandom is a community. And it’s a community dedicated to certain utopian values. And if we’re actually dedicated to them, it means that we have to do in real life what we purport to do in our fic. We have to try to get inside the minds of people who are different from us and try to see the world from their eyes. Yes, some of the time, that’s going to result in us having to face up to unpleasant stuff. But from where I sit, that’s an ethical responsibility that all of us need to take if we’re grown ups and we’re really committed to the values that we profess to be committed to. I personally don’t buy the argument that fandom is a happy place of sunshine and light and anyone who rains on that parade is mean. Because much as the world might be easier on all of us, it isn’t a place of sunshine and light. It’s a part of our world, which means that we’ve brought with us all the same cultural baggage that the larger society has-the good and the bad.
Look back over this entry. Malveaux and Rivers are both names that should have particular significance. Do you already know who Langston Hughes and Booker T. Washington are? Do you know about the trial in Long Beach? Did you recognize the name of James Byrd? Did you get the references to blankets infested with disease (smallpox) and the syphilis study?
If you’re not from the United States, I don’t expect you to. But if you are from the US and you don’t get the Washington and Hughes references, that probably says something about aspects of your education that your schools neglected. That’s a pretty clear instance of institutional racism. Malveaux is a name that made the news this past month; if you follow politics regularly, you should have seen the person who made that news on a television program; if you’re an educator, you might recognize the name from someone who recently got a job in that field. Rivers is a not so subtle reference to one of the most egregious experiments in the history of medicine, an experiment that took place in this century and in this country. Do you recognize the name? If you don’t, you have a pretty clear case of proof that institutional racism exists. I’d put money that the African American fen on my friendslist get almost every reference there without having to google.
And, yeah, I’m far more educated about African American issues than the issues of other communities of color. That’s a part of where I grew up. I’m working on my other cultural knowledge. I’m getting better at not massacering Spanish every time I try to speak simple words. I now know the significance of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. I’ve made an effort to learn more about Asian American culture, beyond Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston, including a rather amusing moment of seeing Alec Mapa make fun of the Asian driver stereotype in a performance at East-West Players at which George Takei was in attendance (the funny part of this is that Mapa’s proof that the stereotype couldn’t be true, at least in the comic piece he performed, was that they let Mr. Sulu drive the Enterprise.) I can tell you a few of the differences between Filipino culture and Japanese culture. I know why 1965 is an important year when you’re talking about Asian American history. Do you, gentle reader, know why? I know that it’s polite to put an extra apostrophe in Hawai’ian, but until I said in a comment that I couldn’t remember why, I didn’t remember why. Obviously, even knowing what I do, I still have a lot to learn, so I don’t have as diverse as set of references to make as I should.
Despite the fact that I’m still working and I’m far from perfect, I believe that I have an obligation to try.
I did promise, many pages ago, that my wacky stories about my second and third grade teachers would come back in the end. Here’s how. I chose the names for the pseuds that I gave my second and third grade teachers carefully. Both of those teachers were African American women.
How many of you presumed that my teachers were white just because I didn’t put a racial descriptor in front of them? And what exactly does that tell you about the very subtle-insidiously subtle-ways that racism still operates in our society?
I daily feel grateful that I met Mrs. Malveaux before I met Mrs. Rivers. My Mrs. Rivers was not put in nearly as untenable a position as Nurse Rivers was, but she was still stuck in a bind. She was a black professional woman in a position of authority over white children in a part of the country where even polite people didn’t always feel obligated to hide their racism. I seriously doubt that my dislike for her was engendered entirely based on her attempts to fit in in a society that would have devalued her ethnicity, but I’m sure some of it was.
Mrs. Malveaux, though, I suspect saved me from a very different life in two important ways. Because of her insistence that I be tested, I got marked as gifted, which gave my working class parents (or more precisely my highly motivated mother) the tools she needed to see that a completely classist educational system could not entirely keep me down. Mrs. Malveaux, however, did more than that. My Mrs. Malveaux, not to be confused with the Dr. Malveaux in the news, cared about me as a person. She actually called us after we moved away from the city and our new city got hit with a natural disaster; she just wanted to be sure we were all all right. She came to my first communion; I still have the little cross she gave me, even though I’m not a practicing Christian, because it signifies to me how much that teacher cared that I succeeded. She took a personal interest in me. To this day, I don’t know why.
If she gave in to bitterness and cynicism, she wouldn’t have had any reason to put herself out there to help one white kid in her class. But she didn’t let the bastards grind her down.
If I had only ever been in Mrs. Rivers’s class, it would have been all too easy for me to buy into the stereotypes of African Americans as uneducated, angry, or any of a host of other negative stereotypes. After all, Mrs. Rivers couldn’t pronounce competency correctly, right? Didn’t that prove that she wasn’t smart enough to be a teacher? Well, that all depends. As a grown up, I understand a bit more about linguistics and dialect, and I can understand that perhaps her decision not to speak standard (white) formal English was a form of resistance to a devaluing of her culture in the larger society. Maybe she couldn’t codeswitch, but maybe she made a political choice not to. It was too long ago now, I’ll never know. But I do see her responses in a very different light. Perhaps her frustration that I didn’t show her respect the way that other children did was her attempt to carve out respect in a society that often disrespected her on the basis of her race. Perhaps she worried that my misreading of cultural norms (Dude, I was a Yankee. How on earth was I supposed to know she wanted me to say ma’am after my answers? Nobody I’d known before did that!) was evidence that as a white kid I thought I didn’t have to listen to her. When race gets involved in a dynamic, it usually works in more complex ways than white folks who haven’t thought this through in depth think that it does. What she and I had was a failure to communicate. That failure to communicate, however, was the direct result of racism. That’s what people mean when they say that racism oppresses POC but hurts everyone. Had it not been for Mrs. Malveaux, I could have been hurt by internalizing those racial stereotypes from Mrs. Rivers’s behavior and never gotten past it to see what else might have been going on.
Instead, Mrs. Malveaux also saved my ass by planting the seeds in my little second grade mind that gave me the model of an African American woman who was smart, compassionate, professional, in a position of authority over me, and who cared about me and my family. In short, she was a one woman stereotype buster. How many more of the stereotypes about African Americans that my childhood was saturated with would have taken root if Mrs. Malveaux hadn’t gotten to me so early and disproved them?
Mrs. Malveaux made an effort to care about me even though the people whom I represented had almost assuredly not treated her consistently with the same respect. If you’ve never been in the position to do that, I’m not sure you can completely understand the emotional toll it takes to keep doing it even though the world sends you message after message that you will only be punished for doing so. Some days, I don’t know where any of us find the strength to keep fighting that fight.
That’s not to say that I have all my shit together. Like most white, able-bodied, middle- class (now) folks, I have a long way to go. It was only last spring that I was sitting in a panel on race and fandom and I heard a woman (whose name I can’t remember, I’m sorry!) point out that it wasn’t just race that fandom got wrong. People were talking about the very special episode phenomenon (when someone who is Latino only seems to be Latino in the episode that’s all about the coyotes whom the team needs to stop, for example), and how much it hurt her to see her identity get trotted out as a plot point. I turned around, and looking down, saw the cane that some visually impaired people use, and thwack, right in the mental forehead I got a good smackdown. I should have known better. I really, really should have been more aware of that.
And as soon as she said it, I thought back on all the fics in which characters go blind. (There’s actually a particularly steamy SGA one called Blindsided by Resonant). And my brain immediately reacted with “But I don’t want to feel guilty about reading that fic! And I know the author didn’t mean it or think about it!”)
So, yes, I have the exact same reactions as a lot of other white folks. And able-bodied folks. And upper-middle class folks. And folks who are sexual as opposed to asexual. And lots of other categories.
The difference is that I’ve learned to keep my mouth shut until the defensive, reactive moment passes and hang out for a while and think about what that reaction means.
I’m pretty invested by this point in having processed this stuff (Dude, I’m a lesbian. I process. It’s what we do. Second best way to spot one of us, after the fingernail thing.). I don’t like reminders that I still have blind spots(is it inappropriate to use that phrase? Does it reinforce stereotypes and perceptions about people who are visually impaired?) any more than the next person.
But I didn’t go whining or defending it. I didn’t wander off into a corner and confess to some poor, unsuspecting visually impaired person about my past sins, because probably, he or she does not want to deal with that. I didn’t crow about it on livejournal to prove how enlightened I am now, hallelujah and pass the bread. I didn’t ceremoniously exorcise the fic from my list of favorite rereads. I’ve come to understand that unpleasant realizations are just part of the process. There’s never going to be a fic that comes entirely guilt free. I mean, hey, I liked POTC. I disliked POTC 2 partly because the race stuff got in the way. Doesn’t mean I didn’t still watch the movie. I got into fandom through The Phantom Menace, which had racial stereotypes out the wazoo. Part of how I found fandom was that my expectations for Star Wars Ep 1 were so high and the movie itself so flawed that I was ripe for recruitment into a place that critiqued what it loved even as it tried to make it better. Ambivalence about the source text is why we’re here, and why we want to see it rewritten into new incarnations in fic, art, and vids.
I can’t stop reading a fandom because the source text is flawed, like our society. No representation is ever perfect because it comes from an imperfect society. If we excluded texts that were imperfect from the running, we’d be left with nothing. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t feel an ethical obligation to push to make things better.
When it comes to fandom and discussions of privilege, whatever the marginalized group, I think we’d all do better if we all tried a little harder to work on those issues. I have a funny feeling that if we did, queer folks like me would be less likely to be nursing sharpened axes over dead lesbian characters under that crusted-over surface. I bet that folks of color would be far more able to handle an occasional fic without Teyla if there weren’t such a persistent pattern of fics with her missing and have all that festering irritation drying up like so many raisins in the sun.
I mean, okay, it’s not a panacea. It’s not going to stop the fics about sunny San Francisco with the leaves changing each fall. Or the ones about cold, foggy LA with people following the blue signs to hospitals on the freeways rather than getting directions. Or the fics with people on firing ranges without hearing protection. Or the fics where gun oil gets used as lube. Or the fics where men with really big hands are written as having three fingers that are smaller than their dicks. Or fics that can’t tell lose from loose.
However, much as those are personal pet peeves of mine, none of them reproduce a pattern of discrimination and privilege from the larger society.
I do know that as a white fan, I am so not going to be the one who insists that fen of color be polite when FOC call other people on perpetuating a larger dynamic of racism. Because I’m aware that we white folks have an obligation to educate ourselves. I mean, sure, maybe honey catches more flies. Maybe talking rationally and calmly about race will convince more people and convince them more thoroughly. Maybe the Conversation Project is right and we need to sit down in a room and hash this out with moderators and agree to disagree on certain points.
But I suspect that most white fen will say that they don’t have the time or the energy for that, that this is supposed to be about fun, and that kind of hard work isn’t fun, so we’ll just be over here now, thanks. I know that I’m not the one who should be trying to set the terms of the debate, because I’m coming at the debate for a place of privilege, and that means that I bear the greater burden in the question of who does the work to make the conversation happen.
And, honestly, I’m not sure that a polite comment delivered in email would have either encouraged this broad a conversation about the issues in fandom or even actually caused so many of the people in the discussion to rethink issues or privilege and stereotype as so many have. I mean, yes, in public all us white folks will say, “Oh no, it totally would! I totally would have listened to that.” But I’ve been around fandom long enough to suspect that, in fact, what a lot of us would do if we got called on that shit would be to bitch privately to friends in locked posts, private emails, and/or individual IM sessions and dismissed the criticism as somebody being mean or having an axe to grind. And maybe we’d think about it three years from now when it happened again, but maybe not. That is, after all, the nature of privilege. The option to say, nah, not today.
I’m not saying it’s a given that we’d ignore it. But I do think that in our conversations about tone and anger, particularly those of us speaking from positions of privilege need to think long and hard about whether a polite, rational post on the subject would have attracted as much attention and been as effective in forcing people to look at unpleasant, painful possibilities as this round of discussion has, in the end, encouraged people to do.
I mean, look, as a fellow fan, I feel kind of bad for onmygodlawdork. The rules of etiquette in fandom basically say that you shouldn’t go beat up on someone, especially a newbie. And if that was her first story, wow, that’s kind of a violation of a community norm.
And if your priority in fandom is following the rules of the particular subculture that demand politeness in all conversation, sure, you might look at what played out in her journal and feel badly for her. As an author, I know how nervewracking it is to post a story, particular a first story in a fandom.
But that kind of dynamic is in a whole other galaxy than oppression. Historically, first time story posters haven’t been forced to sit at the back of the bus. Colleges and universities have not had quotas (I’m talking about official and unofficial caps on how many white ethnics a particular school would let in, not the results of Affirmative Action) for admission of first time posters, and the United States government did not put a yearly cap on how many first time posters could emigrate here in a particular year. First time posters were not forcibly removed from their country and imported on slave ships.
One is an instance of rudeness. The other is an instance of oppression. You cannot equate the two, no matter how much you might find being rude abhorrent. Someone being rude does not negate the charge of racism. The fact that an argument is delivered in anger doesn’t mean that we get a free pass to discount it. It also does not hold that rudeness has as profound an impact as racism, because rudeness is not a historical trend that has structurally disenfranchised a whole group. This is what, in my limited, layperson’s understanding, is meant in legal terms as a “suspect class.” Suspect class, is to the best of my knowledge, the legal shorthand for a group that has experienced historical, structural, institutional, oppression-whether that has been based in immigration law, land stealing, inequitable and unjust laws, exclusion from some institutions, or what have you. Equating an instance of a reinforcement of a pattern in a larger trend with an individual being rude to a member of the group with privilege isn’t going to earn you a lot of credibility. I have learned that if, or rather, when I are accused of oppression, my first instinctual response may be to try to dismiss the criticism as being rude and therefore invalid, but that if that’s the case, it’s less about the criticism and more generally because I don’t want to look at how much of that criticism might be spot on. To avoid pissing off my friends who are members of that group, I need to sit down, shut my mouth, calm down, and figure out what’s really going on before I respond.
While I generally try to avoid being rude in conversations about oppression, I understand why, as Hughes wrote, sometimes all those years of being polite and rational and still having to deal with oppression cause the dream deferred to explode.
White privilege also means that I have an extra obligation to speak out about racism in fandom before it graduates to the level of an incident, a kerfuffle, and/or a wank. If I really, sincerely believe that conversations about race and privilege will go further if they are conducted in erudite, rational, calm tones, it means that as a white woman, I have to be proactive about this and have the conversations before issues are allowed to go unchallenged for too long. If it’s really unfair for folks of color to unload on white folks about the racism in a particular story, I will absolutely buy that argument. But here’s the trade off. If more of us white folks called ourselves on our racist shit, people of color wouldn’t have to do it for us and they’d probably be a bit more “polite” about tone.
So, if you think it’s not okay for a person of color to get angry about a larger pattern of racism, complain in your own journal proactively, rather than reactively, about how Teyla, Teal’c, and Ronan are written. Some people have done this. As witchqueen pointed out, that’s how ryda_wrong got her ghetto pass. Call out the stories that you think replicate that pattern in fic. We all have to take responsibility for ourselves and all think about these issues before they reach a boiling point. In other words, FOC need more white allies in fandom so that a smaller percentage of fandom isn’t having to do the work. Because we’re all less likely to be polite and coherent when we’re tired.
Lord knows, as a queer person who wishes her straight friends would step up to the plate so that I didn’t have to, I’m never going to turn down the concerted effort of an ally.
If there’s anything I’ve learned from my fen friends of color, it’s that I’m more likely to get listened to when I say something about race than they are. (This, incidentally, is also a completely frakked up dynamic. But given that it seems unlikely to go away soon, the best I can hope for is to make it work to the advantage of marginalized folks whenever possible. So I’ll restate what they said and watch people fawn all over how articulate and calm I am, while my FOC friends sit in the corner and nurse that festering resentment. Which you know, sucks for us all in different ways.) It also gives FOC a chance to rest from having to do the education 24/7, and if you’re white and you haven’t tried it before, you might be surprised how appreciative people are of the attempt. Trust me, if my mother or my aunt stepped in and told my cousins that calling something gay to call it bad or stupid was unacceptable, I’d be a lot happier, because I don’t have to put myself out there while I’m in an emotionally hurt place to do it.
I think for a lot of us who’ve been having these conversations about race and fandom, it would be a lot easier to take the discussion about tone seriously if we’d seen a more concerted effort in fandom as a whole to deal with the race issue and if some fans had not been so quick to be defensive and further demonstrate that the critiques about the tone of the discussion didn’t feel an awful lot like an attempt to deflect attention from the issues of race that had been raised. Because we’ve seen that reaction before. A lot.
Let me give you another example. Let’s say that I have some friends who are straight. And I’ve pointed out, politely and quietly, I have some issues with weddings and showers and such.
And even having heard me say that, I am invited, without any qualification, to a wedding shower. And then, at the wedding shower, I try to duck out of playing a shower game.
And then I get grief for being a bad sport.
If I were straight, perhaps you could say that I was being a bad sport, because it’s polite to play along at an event that you’re at. But nobody at the shower stopped to think about the fact that, hey, since I don’t have a legal right to marry the woman I’m dating, maybe a gratuitous celebration of social approval that’s accorded to straight peoples’ relationships might affect me differently. That perhaps I would find a shower to be nothing more than a capitalist orgy of consumption showered upon someone who is being granted social approval for their properly, heterosexual, monogamous, often religiously inflected/inflicted object choice, and that maybe, given my exile from that institution, participating in games that presume that this should be a goal for me too might set off a few tiny issues I have. Just maybe. Or, you know, maybe I’m just being oversensitive. After all, they’re just games. It’s all in good fun, right?
::headdesk::
Was I rude to try to duck out of the game? Perhaps. But can you really say that my rudeness is the exact same thing on the exact same level as the oppression embodied in me having to participate in the first place? Can you equate those two things? One is an individual disobeying cultural norms because of her own conscicence in order to draw attention to an oppression that is not being enacted consciously by anyone at the party but is being enacted nonetheless. The fact that nobody at the shower meant it that way doesn’t change the fact that it was heterosexist and that it hurt. The other is an reads as people basically saying “Hey, we’re having fun, and rather than look at why our fun might be reiterating an oppression from the larger society, we want you to shut up and follow our norms.”
If you were me, which “side” do you think carries more weight? Which one should an ethical person give priority to? Can you dismiss the former position just because I broke a norm of social behavior? Do you really want to say that breaking etiquette which is likely outdated is comparable to perpetuating an oppression from the larger society? Okay, maybe you do, but you really can’t expect people from the marginalized group to lend much credence to your point of view.
What struck me most vividly in this whole series of debates about race in fandom are the following points:
It is an observable fact that the experiences of fen of color are going to be different from the experiences of white fen because of issues of race in the larger society.
In particular, white fen, because we are in a position of privilege, are inevitably going to have the option of not examining race and ethnicity in fic precisely because of privilege (at least without having to further internalize an oppression against us). Fen of color do not have that option, and it is our responsibility as white fen to recognize this and respond appropriately.
I believe, and others are free to disagree with me even though I believe that they are profoundly wrong, that it is the responsibility of white fen to think through the ways in which our fannish playground may replicate racist dynamics from the larger society, often unintentionally, and work on stopping that because it makes fandom not only not fun for FOC but also goes against the ideal of fannish society. And, as an added bonus, in the long run it hurts white fen too.
As a white person in my society, it is my obligation as an ethical and compassionate adult to try to listen to people who have had very different lived experiences than mine, even when my gut instinct is to react defensively, because there are certain things I will never experience on a personal level even though if I’m observant and educated and have close friends from that group I should still notice that such acts are happening to the people around me whom I care about.
As a white person, I have to acknowledge my privilege in any discussion of race, including one in which I am trying to address instances of racism. Even though I know I run the risk of being listened to when my friends of color aren’t, I still have a responsibility to try, but I also have the responsibility of acknowledging that I am speaking from a position of privilege.
I should also add that I have purposefully confined this creed to race. Ethnicity, its relation to race, and the question of whether race is socially constructed are important discussions to have, but this is already over twenty pages long and there’s only so much time. The short version is that yes, whites from some ethnic groups have historically had more privilege than other ethnic groups in United States history. In fact, some groups of people now considered white were not always considered as white as others.
Yes, we should deal with questions of anti-Semitism and anti-Islam in fandom. We also need to talk about ethnicity in general, and in particular in the context of the United States, the issues of white ethnics. As people have pointed out about, say, Due South fandom, Ray K’s Polish ethnicity, for example, clearly plays into the source text and some writing that results from it.
But no, the fact that your grandparents or great-grandparents faced “Irish need not apply” signs does not exempt you from the prospect of being a racist, nor does it suggest that you had the same historical experience as POC. (I can tell you exactly which of my great grandparents faced those signs, and what counties in Ireland they emigrated from. I can even point you to political cartoons from the late 19th century that depict people from the countries my great-grandparents immigrated from as racially other. That does not in any way excuse me from having to own up to being the owner of my own honking pile of white privilege or free me from needing to work on this shit. Note that I am not simply trotting the topic of ethnicity out as an excuse for me to avoid looking at the ways in which I benefit from white privilege. And yes, questions of colonization are also important. Another post from someone who’s more up to speed on the issues would be lovely. I’m already well over twenty pages, though, so you’ll, I hope, forgive me for not addressing that here.)
I should further note that any of the previous statements could easily be replaced with other categories of groups that have historically been oppressed. I am just as responsible for learning about each of those groups as any of the others.
I mean, look, I could say lots more about cultural etiquette (although Amoja Three Rivers covers an awful lot of it pretty well.) . But I think what I really want to end with is this.
I have learned a lot in fandom. I’ve met a lot of great people. And everyone who knows me from fandom knows, even if my livejournal doesn’t always make it look that way, that I am here for the squee. I flail with glee when Joey wanders onto Dancing With the Stars with a padawan braid. I have almost as much fun watching people watch Supernatural so I can watch them squee over Dean’s line about pea soup in the episode with Linda Blair. I will be one of those geeks in line for the midnight release of the last Harry Potter book. I am a geek. Fandom is my tribe, my people. A place where I felt comfortable tipping my hand to reveal all of my completely nerdy tendencies without having to apologize for them or closet them, and I adore fandom for giving me that space.
But for me, no matter how much of an escape from the aspects of mundane life with muggles in meatspace can sometimes be, I know that we all arrived here with baggage. I’ve always liked the golden rule of neopaganism: anything you do returns to you threefold. Regardless of your religious beliefs, or lack thereof, I think that rule is an important reminder to all of us that our actions have consequences. If I wander into a fannish community and fail to listen to my fellow fen-if I dismiss their objections simply based on how they are phrased or what tone is taken because this is proof that they have broken the rules of the society-am I not simply replicating the behaviors of the people who sent me looking for a refuge from muggles in the first place? Isn’t what got me labeled as a geek that I didn’t dress the way that the popular kids dressed (largely because my parents couldn’t afford those clothes)? Isn’t what got me labeled as a weirdo the fact that normal people are supposed to let dragons go by the time they are grown ups but I wanted to read about Temeraire anyway? Aren’t we trying to create a community that values that which is devalued by the larger society?
Because if we are, that means that in order to make a functional community, sometimes we’ve got to roll up our sleeves and do the hard work. Sometimes, we’re going to be wrong.
If we’re lucky, we’ll have gentle teachers-friends whom we trust who can pull us aside and say calmly, hey, that made me uncomfortable and here’s why.
But we also have to understand that people aren’t going to react that way if the community as a whole doesn’t respond to the gentle reminders with a thoughtful, deliberative, genuine hard look at ourselves.
If we don’t get the gentle teachers, we need to think about *why* that is instead of blaming the messenger first. An amazing thing happens when we take that step. Amazingly, at that point, we hear more often from gentle ones than angry ones.
Notes on References:
Dr. Julianne Malveaux was recently named as the next president of Bennett College. Her PhD in economics is from MIT. I first encountered her when she was on To The Contrary on PBS.
Nurse Eunice Rivers worked for the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. Initially, most historical accounts of the study painted her as a traitor. Interestingly, more people know Rivers’s names than know the names of the docs. More recent research has suggested that Nurse Rivers was able to get some men out of the study. Clearly, Nurse Rivers is a complex historical figure.
The Tuskegee Syphilis Study has become for social and scientific researchers even more of a cautionary tale than the infamous experiments by Milgram and Zimbardo. Follow the link above if you’re not familiar with it. The most egregious aspect of the study was that penicillin became the preferred treatment for syphilis in 1947, but the men in the study were not only not given treatment, but actively prohibited from receiving treatment, until as late as 1972, twenty-five years after an effective cure was discovered. This flies in the face of all rules about ethics in human subjects research.
James Byrd Jr. was an African American man who was dragged to death behind a pick up truck in East Texas in 1999. This was after he was beaten by at least three white men who had offered him as ride while he was walking home.
Lord Jeffery Amherst was the commander of British forces in North America during the conflict known to most residents of the United States as the French and Indian War. There have long been stories that suggest that he “donated” blankets which were believed to have been infected with smallpox to Native Americans as a way to reduce their population. Examination of his letters on the subject suggests that this was a malevolent act and not an accidental consequence.
Booker T. Washington was born a slave in Virginia in 1856. He is known to students of literature as the author of Up From Slavery an account of his life as a slave and a plea to white Americans to see African Americans as human beings not property. He was also the founder of Tuskegee Institute, one of the HBCUs in Alabama. Although many later writers criticized what they saw as the conciliatory tone in his work, Washington’s writing remains a staple for American literature classes.
Langston Hughes was one of the major writers of the Harlem Renaissance. Along with writers like Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, Countee Cullen, James Weldon Johnson, and Claude McKay, Hughes was instrumental in the creation of a lively community of artists, writers, and musicians in the early 20the century who were focused on creating a distinctly African-American (Modernist) writing tradition. You can hear him speak in his own voice about the creation of one of his most famous poems “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” at poets.org which provides an audio file of Hughes reading that work. He gives a succinct explanation about the full meaning of the phrase “sold down the river” that plenty of people don’t much know.
The case from Long Beach California is a complicated one that has happened so recently that I haven’t been able to find anything really great on it. Here’s a link to an article in the LA Weekly to get you started, but I should add that I live in LA County and haven’t been able to find any one good or a collection of good articles that really explain the whole situation.
If you’re looking for a good place to start boning up on how to avoid sticking your very white foot into your mouth, there are online copies of Amoja Three Rivers’s “Cultural Etiquette” which provide a a good place to start. One of my favorite parts of her piece is an eloquent explanation of why white folks looking at non-white religious traditions can be problematic. "Do not simply take and consume. If you are white and you find yourself drawn to Native American spirituality, Middle Eastern religion, African drumming, Asian philosophies, or Latin rhythms, make an effort to maintain some kind of balance. Don't just learn the fun and exciting things about us and then go home to your safe, isolated, white, privileged life. Learn about the history of the people whose culture you're dabbling in. Learn how our history relates to your own, how your privilege connects and contributes to our oppression and exploitation. And most importantly, make it a fair exchange--give something back.
If you want to pick the fruit, then carry some manure and plow some fields. Give your land back to the Indians and the Mexicans. Make reparations to the Africans. Work for Native peoples' autonomy and Puerto Rican independence. Send relief money to Middle Eastern and Asian disaster victims. Lobby Congress for fair immigration laws. Provide rides for Elders of color or single mothers who need to get to the market. Quietly contribute money to the African National Congress, Akwe sasne Notes, and LaRaza. Then take your drum lesson and your dance class. Then burn your sage and cedar."
If you’re straight, and looking for the equivalent on sexual orientation or preference, I cannot recommend strongly enough The Plaid Adder’s tome entitled A Straight Person’s Guide To Being Come Out To. Many a time I’ve been tempted to quote section numbers to clueless people. I can’t promise that I won’t email relevant chunks of it to the next person who invites me to a bridal/baby shower.
William Faulkner was a white man from Mississippi. He also happens to be one of the best known American Modernist writers around whose most famous works include Absalom, Absalom and The Sound and the Fury. Dorothy Allison, a much more recent (and still alive) southerner said that no Southerner is ever unaware of race and class. I suspect she’s right, but most importantly, Faulkner and his complete body of work seems to demonstrate a profound understanding of the ways in which our past (including aspects of the past that have to do with race and class) haunts us on a daily basis. I think people who understand that are more likely to get the ways in which racism (or classism, or sexism, or fill-in-the-other-ism here) are not the acts of individuals but the accumulation of a whole host of acts, some individual, some structural, that came before.
Coyotes are not just cute animals that recently crashed a cooler at a Quiznos in Chicago. Coyote is also a term commonly used to refer to the people who make their living smuggling undocumented workers across the border into the United States. Given that it’s a Spanish word, and pronounced accordingly a lot of the time, you can guess that most often it is used to describe people who smuggle the undocumented across the border from Mexico. Not all the folks coyotes smuggle in come from Mexico; many come from other countries in central America.
East-West Players is a very well known theater in Los Angeles. Not sure what the difference between a Hawai’ian or Pacific Islander and an Asian-American is and you live in LA? Looks like I Land might have dealt with some of those issues.
Alec Mapa is a Filipino actor who created I Remember Mapa in 1998, a one-person performance piece that drew on his experiences as an understudy for B.D. Wong in M. Butterfly and his comedic talent as he critiqued the stereotypes about Asian men in entertainment in general. Aside from the George Takei bit, what I remember most is the humor implied when he talked about only getting the understudy for Song Liling in M. Butterfly which I cannot recall verbatim but was something along the lines of “C’mon. How many parts are there on Broadway for gay Asian American men?”
If you want more information about the 1965 Immigration Act, you can get more information here.
So, seriously, not even a week after the SGA race and fandom debates, Don Imus, the original shock jock, called the Rutgers women’s basketball team a bunch of “nappy-headed hos,” language that many people (rightly) pointed out was offensive in the extreme.
Immediately, a number of people pointed out that this was not okay. Why was it not okay?
Well, it depends on who you ask. Some people thought it was okay to use offensive language to take pot shots at public figures, but that college-age women on a nationally ranked basketball team weren’t public enough, so it was unfair. Others thought that the language itself was the problem.
Here’s the important part.
I watched the media response to this pretty closely. I sat and watched Hardball despite the fact that for the safety of my television set and my blood pressure, I don’t watch news on my television. I listened to the protests from Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. I noted that the BBC article on the event pointed out that Barack Obama made a pledge never to appear on Imus’s program, but none of the news outlets I follow here did. I heard that Oprah had the team on, but not being a regular Oprah watcher, I missed it. I did happen to be home to catch the press conference with the team and their coach.
What really sickened me wasn’t what Don Imus said. I mean, dude, there are racist, sexist folks. I’m 35 years old. I figured that shit out a long time ago.
What sickened me was watching how people responded to those remarks.
A number of people called in/commented/protested that Don Imus was being (unfairly, they implied) critiqued for using language that is prevalent in “rap music.”
For starters, I think perhaps it would be more accurate to say in some rap and hip hop music, but I digress, no?
My point is, that sometimes when people make that argument, it’s a legit argument coming from a sincere place.
But a lot of time when (white) people (without ghetto passes) make that argument it is motivated by defensiveness and an unwillingness to look at their own complicity in racism.
Look, in the study of rhetoric, there’s this thing called ethos. It’s a Greek word, and I don’t speak Greek, so I can’t give you a literal translation. But what it means figuratively is how credible the person making the argument is.
What I think witchqueen was getting at with her term “ghetto pass,” (which I like a lot. Do some of us get to make ghetto pass icons? It would save a lot of time positioning ourselves at the start of every debate, no? And who gets to award them? Can somebody gift them to you like pressies from the lj fairy?), was that some people regardless of personal identify have participated in conversations around this issue long enough that they have established a certain amount of credibility.
I mean, look, I still stick my foot in my mouth on a regular basis. But I’d like to think that part of the reason that my FOC friends don’t throw things at me when these debates start is that I talk about and think about this issue more often than just when Imus’s shit hits the fan.
I think there is a point to be made that the problem with Imus’s language is not just a problem with Imus. Certainly, we should also be critical of any entertainer who uses offensive demeaning language.
But when the first words out of a non-ghetto-passed white person’s mouth in response to Imus are “But he didn’t say anything even half as bad as what rappers say,” do you know what a lot of us hear? “Hey, he didn’t mean to be racist, and hey, he talks to POC, and really, POC say the same thing, so why is he getting punished for it and rappers aren’t. That’s not fair!”
This comes with an even deeper level of subtext, something I would have thought that slashers of all people with their proficiency in reading subtext would have noticed which says “It’s not fair to pick on a white guy for something a black guy can get away with. I don’t want to give up my white privilege that I don’t even acknowledge having! Whine, whine, whine! ::proceed to throw two-year-old-esque temper-tantrum at prospect that there is something that my entitled self isn’t allowed to do because it is a totally new sensation for me::”
For what I would hope are obvious reasons, many people of color tend to react less than enthusiastically to this response. The most polite rendition of what likely goes through the heads of people tuned into this dynamic, regardless of their race is, “Of course you don’t want to give up your privilege. How fascinating that you have an option to do so, whereas the of color/queer/differently abled/working class person in this equation does not have that same option.”
In short, ethos means that if, perhaps, white folks didn’t react defensively and only critique the sexism and racism in (some) rap in response to white folks getting called on their racism, perhaps we would have more credibility (i.e. ghetto passes) with communities of color.
Reaction #2 that pissed me the frak off. “Well, he’s got the right to say whatever he wants. We have freedom of speech here.”
Yes, Virginia, we do have freedom of speech. I’m terribly grateful for it.
However, the framers of the Constitution did not say that we have the right to freedom of speech without having to accept the consequences of those actions. The Constitution did not just grant us rights, it also bequeathed to us responsibilities. Somehow, that part of the equation always seems to drop out of the discussion.
Don Imus absolutely has a Constutitional right to call a bunch of young women whatever racist and sexist crap he wants to.
However, he also has a responsibility to society to accept the consequences of those actions.
And nobody ought to be too surprised that one response to those actions is to take heat for being a racist, sexist pig.
The consequences of using federal airwaves to do so should involve a punishment, not because we’re not capable of hearing those sorts of insults without crumbling into piles of quivering fear, but because rights come with responsibilities. If it’s that important to your self-expression to call someone an insult, you have the right to do that. But with that right comes the responsibility to accept the consequences for those actions.
If all of us thought a bit more about how our actions-our expression of our rights and liberties-affected others, the world would be a significantly better place. But we also need to understand that it’s a lot harder to do this when the language in question taps into a society-wide well of racism (or sexism, or homophobia), and it’s harder still if we’ve had the conversation a lot before and believe deep down that justice is dependent on everyone getting to the same page on that issue.
So, yes, Imus had the right to say that. But he also had a responsibility, which he seemed to try to shirk, in his comments immediately following the reaction to those words. Which leads me to point #3.
Point #3 that pissed me off. It’s 2007. We really ought to be at a place as a society that we can all acknowledge that everybody is racist. We really ought to be beyond Race Awareness 101. And we’re not. We’re really, really not. We’re still stuck taking remedial, pre-baccalaureate classes on this topic.
Don Imus, when he reacted by saying that he wasn’t a bad/mean guy, and that he had friends who were of color made me want to throw things.
Why was I so angered by this? Why was my television set yet again in jeopardy from thrown missiles (glasses, decks of cards, books, pens, throw pillows, whatever else might have been handy. . .) when I heard the guy they had on Hadrball basically say that we shouldn’t be so hard on Imus because, after all, it’s not like he burned crosses or anything, or some such equally inane thing?
See, in that definition of racism, what FOC and White Folks With Ghetto Passes hear is that a little mild racism is okay when it’s unconscious. The only unacceptable racism is the overt kind of malicious bigotry. And that message tends to make some of us a little angry.
Because it is 2007. I’ve known since at least 1990 that we’re all racist. I’m a white girl, who grew up in the South, who got that memo over 15 years ago. I had hoped that as a society, we were on the same page. Clearly, I was wrong, but that doesn’t mean that I have to be happy about it.
I am tired of white folks like me defining racism in such a way that allows us to opt out of acknowledging the privilege that we have and scapegoating straw people to make ourselves feel better. “Well, okay, so maybe deep down I think that Mexicans really are lower-class-otherwise why would they live five families in a house. And seeing those day laborers at my Lowe’s makes me feel uncomfortable, but it’s not like I call them ‘Spics, so I’m not really racist.”
What? Are you kidding me?
I think a lot more of us would have ghetto passes if we were willing to look hard at those thoughts that all too many of us have but won’t acknowledge and spend some time thinking about where those messages come from and what we need to do about them.
I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m thrilled that Imus got fired. He deserved to be fired. If you talk to people who monitored the show regularly, this wasn’t the first time he did something like this.
And I’m thrilled that those of us who cried “Foul!” got our opinions taken seriously.
But in listening to the debates about the incident in the first place, I heard people trotting out the same racist, ignorant drek that I had hoped we’d moved past. Because in the circle of people I surround myself with, people who are way further along on these issues predominate over people who are still in the less processed zone. Watching the debates over what to do play out-both in fandom and in the mainstream media-I am reminded that we are not collectively in the same place on these issues. There are apparently a huge number of Americans who don’t agree that someone who has friends of color can still be a racist, and that makes me sad. It makes me sad because it doesn’t square with the reality I live in. It seems to me that some people are trying to turn into a matter of opinion something that isn’t debatable.
There was this one time at work that I came across a piece of writing that had been blatantly plagiarized. I wrote a note to the writer telling her that this was plagiarism and that per the policy of our workplace, we needed to meet to talk about this. The piece of writing had wholesale sentences without quotation marks around verbatim quotes from other sources. Ignoring my request for a meeting, which was mandated by workplace policy, the writer handed a “revised” version of the piece back to me with a note which said, in a rather snide tone, that clearly she and I had different definitions of plagiarism.
It’s entirely possible that upon reading this, I sat in my office with my mouth hanging open in shock.
Because, yes, Virginia, we did have different definitions of plagiarism. She was exactly right. However, the thing is? Mine was right. Anybody who knows anything about plagiarism would know that I was right. Plagiarism isn’t, in an instance like this, a matter for debate. There’s a policy in the workplace that is clearly stated, and this particular piece was a completely egregious example of defying that policy.
Not everything in the world is a matter of opinion. Sometimes there is a factual answer to a question that can help us determine right from wrong. ::points incredulously to workplace policy on plagiarism:: As a society, there may be some aspects of intellectual property appropriation that are in gray areas, but reproducing word for word someone else’s work for multiple sentences without any attribution to the original author is plagiarism. We all agree on that.
Sometimes facts or consensus mean that you can’t debate something. Other times there is an ethical imperative that means that although we can debate something, we shouldn’t. Sure, there are people in the U.S. who think it’s okay to dismiss Imus’s comments as not intentionally racist and therefore acceptable. That is a fact. Sure, there are people who feel bad for those writers who’ve been accused of unconsciously perpetuating racist tendencies in fic within particular fandoms. That is also a fact.
It seems to me that facts are not debatable. What is debatable is what our response these situations are. From where I sit, the ethical response must be to think about why we react defensively when called on something. From where I sit, the last person I want to react like would be Don Imus. He made a complete fool of himself, and I sure don’t want to make a fool of myself.
It seems to me that the most productive use of white guilt is to stop whinging about what we can’t do and start talking about what we should do. We should take the words of people who say that they’ve been hurt by something more seriously. After all, what’s the worst that’s going to happen if we do? Might we learn something? Might we give a little more credit to someone’s opinion besides our own? Those don’t sound like terrible things to me.
I do think that the real reason that so many of us are reticent to do so is that on some level we’re afraid of what will happen if we did. We’re afraid that we might see something that we don’t like-either about ourselves or our society.
I started this post by reprinting Imus’s original words. I thought about whether that was a good idea or not. Part of me worries that reprinting them could be perceived as reiterating language that isn’t acceptable. In the end, I chose to reprint them because I felt it was important that people remember how unacceptable the language itself was. That’s because I think that we really do have to look at the ugliness in the world straight on if we’re going to do anything about it. I think when it comes to how we respond to calls of racism (or sexism, or homophobia/heterosexism, or discrimination against people on the basis of age, size, ethnicity, religion, ability, mental health status, and any other category I’ve left out in these posts), we have to be willing to look the unpleasant places dead on if we’re going to be honest about them and have a conversation that moves us forward.
But it seems to me to be a waste of time to debate whether we must dismiss someone’s accusation because he or she worded it rudely. It seems to me the conversation we’ve just a much higher ethical obligation to have is about what fandom can do to minimize the impact of the racist norms from the larger culture on this utopian experiment we’re running. We need to have that conversation right alongside those same conversations about all the other categories of oppression. But we also need to stop thinking that one of these conversations is more important than the other. And we need to be sure that if talking about race in fandom makes us think about gender in fandom, we write about it in a way that doesn’t make it sound like we’re saying, “Hey, I’m a woman, so I’m oppressed, so I can’t be oppressing other people, so your argument about ability doesn’t hold water.”
We’re smart people, as a whole. I have faith that we can do it. The question has never been whether we have the ability to do it, it’s whether we have the will.
EDIT: I solemnly promise I'll reply to everyone's comments, but I'm honestly too upset by the violence at Virginia Tech to be of much use today.
Look back over this entry. Malveaux and Rivers are both names that should have particular significance. Do you already know who Langston Hughes and Booker T. Washington are? Do you know about the trial in Long Beach? Did you recognize the name of James Byrd? Did you get the references to blankets infested with disease (smallpox) and the syphilis study?
If you’re not from the United States, I don’t expect you to. But if you are from the US and you don’t get the Washington and Hughes references, that probably says something about aspects of your education that your schools neglected. That’s a pretty clear instance of institutional racism. Malveaux is a name that made the news this past month; if you follow politics regularly, you should have seen the person who made that news on a television program; if you’re an educator, you might recognize the name from someone who recently got a job in that field. Rivers is a not so subtle reference to one of the most egregious experiments in the history of medicine, an experiment that took place in this century and in this country. Do you recognize the name? If you don’t, you have a pretty clear case of proof that institutional racism exists. I’d put money that the African American fen on my friendslist get almost every reference there without having to google.
And, yeah, I’m far more educated about African American issues than the issues of other communities of color. That’s a part of where I grew up. I’m working on my other cultural knowledge. I’m getting better at not massacering Spanish every time I try to speak simple words. I now know the significance of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. I’ve made an effort to learn more about Asian American culture, beyond Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston, including a rather amusing moment of seeing Alec Mapa make fun of the Asian driver stereotype in a performance at East-West Players at which George Takei was in attendance (the funny part of this is that Mapa’s proof that the stereotype couldn’t be true, at least in the comic piece he performed, was that they let Mr. Sulu drive the Enterprise.) I can tell you a few of the differences between Filipino culture and Japanese culture. I know why 1965 is an important year when you’re talking about Asian American history. Do you, gentle reader, know why? I know that it’s polite to put an extra apostrophe in Hawai’ian, but until I said in a comment that I couldn’t remember why, I didn’t remember why. Obviously, even knowing what I do, I still have a lot to learn, so I don’t have as diverse as set of references to make as I should.
Despite the fact that I’m still working and I’m far from perfect, I believe that I have an obligation to try.
I did promise, many pages ago, that my wacky stories about my second and third grade teachers would come back in the end. Here’s how. I chose the names for the pseuds that I gave my second and third grade teachers carefully. Both of those teachers were African American women.
How many of you presumed that my teachers were white just because I didn’t put a racial descriptor in front of them? And what exactly does that tell you about the very subtle-insidiously subtle-ways that racism still operates in our society?
I daily feel grateful that I met Mrs. Malveaux before I met Mrs. Rivers. My Mrs. Rivers was not put in nearly as untenable a position as Nurse Rivers was, but she was still stuck in a bind. She was a black professional woman in a position of authority over white children in a part of the country where even polite people didn’t always feel obligated to hide their racism. I seriously doubt that my dislike for her was engendered entirely based on her attempts to fit in in a society that would have devalued her ethnicity, but I’m sure some of it was.
Mrs. Malveaux, though, I suspect saved me from a very different life in two important ways. Because of her insistence that I be tested, I got marked as gifted, which gave my working class parents (or more precisely my highly motivated mother) the tools she needed to see that a completely classist educational system could not entirely keep me down. Mrs. Malveaux, however, did more than that. My Mrs. Malveaux, not to be confused with the Dr. Malveaux in the news, cared about me as a person. She actually called us after we moved away from the city and our new city got hit with a natural disaster; she just wanted to be sure we were all all right. She came to my first communion; I still have the little cross she gave me, even though I’m not a practicing Christian, because it signifies to me how much that teacher cared that I succeeded. She took a personal interest in me. To this day, I don’t know why.
If she gave in to bitterness and cynicism, she wouldn’t have had any reason to put herself out there to help one white kid in her class. But she didn’t let the bastards grind her down.
If I had only ever been in Mrs. Rivers’s class, it would have been all too easy for me to buy into the stereotypes of African Americans as uneducated, angry, or any of a host of other negative stereotypes. After all, Mrs. Rivers couldn’t pronounce competency correctly, right? Didn’t that prove that she wasn’t smart enough to be a teacher? Well, that all depends. As a grown up, I understand a bit more about linguistics and dialect, and I can understand that perhaps her decision not to speak standard (white) formal English was a form of resistance to a devaluing of her culture in the larger society. Maybe she couldn’t codeswitch, but maybe she made a political choice not to. It was too long ago now, I’ll never know. But I do see her responses in a very different light. Perhaps her frustration that I didn’t show her respect the way that other children did was her attempt to carve out respect in a society that often disrespected her on the basis of her race. Perhaps she worried that my misreading of cultural norms (Dude, I was a Yankee. How on earth was I supposed to know she wanted me to say ma’am after my answers? Nobody I’d known before did that!) was evidence that as a white kid I thought I didn’t have to listen to her. When race gets involved in a dynamic, it usually works in more complex ways than white folks who haven’t thought this through in depth think that it does. What she and I had was a failure to communicate. That failure to communicate, however, was the direct result of racism. That’s what people mean when they say that racism oppresses POC but hurts everyone. Had it not been for Mrs. Malveaux, I could have been hurt by internalizing those racial stereotypes from Mrs. Rivers’s behavior and never gotten past it to see what else might have been going on.
Instead, Mrs. Malveaux also saved my ass by planting the seeds in my little second grade mind that gave me the model of an African American woman who was smart, compassionate, professional, in a position of authority over me, and who cared about me and my family. In short, she was a one woman stereotype buster. How many more of the stereotypes about African Americans that my childhood was saturated with would have taken root if Mrs. Malveaux hadn’t gotten to me so early and disproved them?
Mrs. Malveaux made an effort to care about me even though the people whom I represented had almost assuredly not treated her consistently with the same respect. If you’ve never been in the position to do that, I’m not sure you can completely understand the emotional toll it takes to keep doing it even though the world sends you message after message that you will only be punished for doing so. Some days, I don’t know where any of us find the strength to keep fighting that fight.
That’s not to say that I have all my shit together. Like most white, able-bodied, middle- class (now) folks, I have a long way to go. It was only last spring that I was sitting in a panel on race and fandom and I heard a woman (whose name I can’t remember, I’m sorry!) point out that it wasn’t just race that fandom got wrong. People were talking about the very special episode phenomenon (when someone who is Latino only seems to be Latino in the episode that’s all about the coyotes whom the team needs to stop, for example), and how much it hurt her to see her identity get trotted out as a plot point. I turned around, and looking down, saw the cane that some visually impaired people use, and thwack, right in the mental forehead I got a good smackdown. I should have known better. I really, really should have been more aware of that.
And as soon as she said it, I thought back on all the fics in which characters go blind. (There’s actually a particularly steamy SGA one called Blindsided by Resonant). And my brain immediately reacted with “But I don’t want to feel guilty about reading that fic! And I know the author didn’t mean it or think about it!”)
So, yes, I have the exact same reactions as a lot of other white folks. And able-bodied folks. And upper-middle class folks. And folks who are sexual as opposed to asexual. And lots of other categories.
The difference is that I’ve learned to keep my mouth shut until the defensive, reactive moment passes and hang out for a while and think about what that reaction means.
I’m pretty invested by this point in having processed this stuff (Dude, I’m a lesbian. I process. It’s what we do. Second best way to spot one of us, after the fingernail thing.). I don’t like reminders that I still have blind spots(is it inappropriate to use that phrase? Does it reinforce stereotypes and perceptions about people who are visually impaired?) any more than the next person.
But I didn’t go whining or defending it. I didn’t wander off into a corner and confess to some poor, unsuspecting visually impaired person about my past sins, because probably, he or she does not want to deal with that. I didn’t crow about it on livejournal to prove how enlightened I am now, hallelujah and pass the bread. I didn’t ceremoniously exorcise the fic from my list of favorite rereads. I’ve come to understand that unpleasant realizations are just part of the process. There’s never going to be a fic that comes entirely guilt free. I mean, hey, I liked POTC. I disliked POTC 2 partly because the race stuff got in the way. Doesn’t mean I didn’t still watch the movie. I got into fandom through The Phantom Menace, which had racial stereotypes out the wazoo. Part of how I found fandom was that my expectations for Star Wars Ep 1 were so high and the movie itself so flawed that I was ripe for recruitment into a place that critiqued what it loved even as it tried to make it better. Ambivalence about the source text is why we’re here, and why we want to see it rewritten into new incarnations in fic, art, and vids.
I can’t stop reading a fandom because the source text is flawed, like our society. No representation is ever perfect because it comes from an imperfect society. If we excluded texts that were imperfect from the running, we’d be left with nothing. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t feel an ethical obligation to push to make things better.
When it comes to fandom and discussions of privilege, whatever the marginalized group, I think we’d all do better if we all tried a little harder to work on those issues. I have a funny feeling that if we did, queer folks like me would be less likely to be nursing sharpened axes over dead lesbian characters under that crusted-over surface. I bet that folks of color would be far more able to handle an occasional fic without Teyla if there weren’t such a persistent pattern of fics with her missing and have all that festering irritation drying up like so many raisins in the sun.
I mean, okay, it’s not a panacea. It’s not going to stop the fics about sunny San Francisco with the leaves changing each fall. Or the ones about cold, foggy LA with people following the blue signs to hospitals on the freeways rather than getting directions. Or the fics with people on firing ranges without hearing protection. Or the fics where gun oil gets used as lube. Or the fics where men with really big hands are written as having three fingers that are smaller than their dicks. Or fics that can’t tell lose from loose.
However, much as those are personal pet peeves of mine, none of them reproduce a pattern of discrimination and privilege from the larger society.
I do know that as a white fan, I am so not going to be the one who insists that fen of color be polite when FOC call other people on perpetuating a larger dynamic of racism. Because I’m aware that we white folks have an obligation to educate ourselves. I mean, sure, maybe honey catches more flies. Maybe talking rationally and calmly about race will convince more people and convince them more thoroughly. Maybe the Conversation Project is right and we need to sit down in a room and hash this out with moderators and agree to disagree on certain points.
But I suspect that most white fen will say that they don’t have the time or the energy for that, that this is supposed to be about fun, and that kind of hard work isn’t fun, so we’ll just be over here now, thanks. I know that I’m not the one who should be trying to set the terms of the debate, because I’m coming at the debate for a place of privilege, and that means that I bear the greater burden in the question of who does the work to make the conversation happen.
And, honestly, I’m not sure that a polite comment delivered in email would have either encouraged this broad a conversation about the issues in fandom or even actually caused so many of the people in the discussion to rethink issues or privilege and stereotype as so many have. I mean, yes, in public all us white folks will say, “Oh no, it totally would! I totally would have listened to that.” But I’ve been around fandom long enough to suspect that, in fact, what a lot of us would do if we got called on that shit would be to bitch privately to friends in locked posts, private emails, and/or individual IM sessions and dismissed the criticism as somebody being mean or having an axe to grind. And maybe we’d think about it three years from now when it happened again, but maybe not. That is, after all, the nature of privilege. The option to say, nah, not today.
I’m not saying it’s a given that we’d ignore it. But I do think that in our conversations about tone and anger, particularly those of us speaking from positions of privilege need to think long and hard about whether a polite, rational post on the subject would have attracted as much attention and been as effective in forcing people to look at unpleasant, painful possibilities as this round of discussion has, in the end, encouraged people to do.
I mean, look, as a fellow fan, I feel kind of bad for onmygodlawdork. The rules of etiquette in fandom basically say that you shouldn’t go beat up on someone, especially a newbie. And if that was her first story, wow, that’s kind of a violation of a community norm.
And if your priority in fandom is following the rules of the particular subculture that demand politeness in all conversation, sure, you might look at what played out in her journal and feel badly for her. As an author, I know how nervewracking it is to post a story, particular a first story in a fandom.
But that kind of dynamic is in a whole other galaxy than oppression. Historically, first time story posters haven’t been forced to sit at the back of the bus. Colleges and universities have not had quotas (I’m talking about official and unofficial caps on how many white ethnics a particular school would let in, not the results of Affirmative Action) for admission of first time posters, and the United States government did not put a yearly cap on how many first time posters could emigrate here in a particular year. First time posters were not forcibly removed from their country and imported on slave ships.
One is an instance of rudeness. The other is an instance of oppression. You cannot equate the two, no matter how much you might find being rude abhorrent. Someone being rude does not negate the charge of racism. The fact that an argument is delivered in anger doesn’t mean that we get a free pass to discount it. It also does not hold that rudeness has as profound an impact as racism, because rudeness is not a historical trend that has structurally disenfranchised a whole group. This is what, in my limited, layperson’s understanding, is meant in legal terms as a “suspect class.” Suspect class, is to the best of my knowledge, the legal shorthand for a group that has experienced historical, structural, institutional, oppression-whether that has been based in immigration law, land stealing, inequitable and unjust laws, exclusion from some institutions, or what have you. Equating an instance of a reinforcement of a pattern in a larger trend with an individual being rude to a member of the group with privilege isn’t going to earn you a lot of credibility. I have learned that if, or rather, when I are accused of oppression, my first instinctual response may be to try to dismiss the criticism as being rude and therefore invalid, but that if that’s the case, it’s less about the criticism and more generally because I don’t want to look at how much of that criticism might be spot on. To avoid pissing off my friends who are members of that group, I need to sit down, shut my mouth, calm down, and figure out what’s really going on before I respond.
While I generally try to avoid being rude in conversations about oppression, I understand why, as Hughes wrote, sometimes all those years of being polite and rational and still having to deal with oppression cause the dream deferred to explode.
White privilege also means that I have an extra obligation to speak out about racism in fandom before it graduates to the level of an incident, a kerfuffle, and/or a wank. If I really, sincerely believe that conversations about race and privilege will go further if they are conducted in erudite, rational, calm tones, it means that as a white woman, I have to be proactive about this and have the conversations before issues are allowed to go unchallenged for too long. If it’s really unfair for folks of color to unload on white folks about the racism in a particular story, I will absolutely buy that argument. But here’s the trade off. If more of us white folks called ourselves on our racist shit, people of color wouldn’t have to do it for us and they’d probably be a bit more “polite” about tone.
So, if you think it’s not okay for a person of color to get angry about a larger pattern of racism, complain in your own journal proactively, rather than reactively, about how Teyla, Teal’c, and Ronan are written. Some people have done this. As witchqueen pointed out, that’s how ryda_wrong got her ghetto pass. Call out the stories that you think replicate that pattern in fic. We all have to take responsibility for ourselves and all think about these issues before they reach a boiling point. In other words, FOC need more white allies in fandom so that a smaller percentage of fandom isn’t having to do the work. Because we’re all less likely to be polite and coherent when we’re tired.
Lord knows, as a queer person who wishes her straight friends would step up to the plate so that I didn’t have to, I’m never going to turn down the concerted effort of an ally.
If there’s anything I’ve learned from my fen friends of color, it’s that I’m more likely to get listened to when I say something about race than they are. (This, incidentally, is also a completely frakked up dynamic. But given that it seems unlikely to go away soon, the best I can hope for is to make it work to the advantage of marginalized folks whenever possible. So I’ll restate what they said and watch people fawn all over how articulate and calm I am, while my FOC friends sit in the corner and nurse that festering resentment. Which you know, sucks for us all in different ways.) It also gives FOC a chance to rest from having to do the education 24/7, and if you’re white and you haven’t tried it before, you might be surprised how appreciative people are of the attempt. Trust me, if my mother or my aunt stepped in and told my cousins that calling something gay to call it bad or stupid was unacceptable, I’d be a lot happier, because I don’t have to put myself out there while I’m in an emotionally hurt place to do it.
I think for a lot of us who’ve been having these conversations about race and fandom, it would be a lot easier to take the discussion about tone seriously if we’d seen a more concerted effort in fandom as a whole to deal with the race issue and if some fans had not been so quick to be defensive and further demonstrate that the critiques about the tone of the discussion didn’t feel an awful lot like an attempt to deflect attention from the issues of race that had been raised. Because we’ve seen that reaction before. A lot.
Let me give you another example. Let’s say that I have some friends who are straight. And I’ve pointed out, politely and quietly, I have some issues with weddings and showers and such.
And even having heard me say that, I am invited, without any qualification, to a wedding shower. And then, at the wedding shower, I try to duck out of playing a shower game.
And then I get grief for being a bad sport.
If I were straight, perhaps you could say that I was being a bad sport, because it’s polite to play along at an event that you’re at. But nobody at the shower stopped to think about the fact that, hey, since I don’t have a legal right to marry the woman I’m dating, maybe a gratuitous celebration of social approval that’s accorded to straight peoples’ relationships might affect me differently. That perhaps I would find a shower to be nothing more than a capitalist orgy of consumption showered upon someone who is being granted social approval for their properly, heterosexual, monogamous, often religiously inflected/inflicted object choice, and that maybe, given my exile from that institution, participating in games that presume that this should be a goal for me too might set off a few tiny issues I have. Just maybe. Or, you know, maybe I’m just being oversensitive. After all, they’re just games. It’s all in good fun, right?
::headdesk::
Was I rude to try to duck out of the game? Perhaps. But can you really say that my rudeness is the exact same thing on the exact same level as the oppression embodied in me having to participate in the first place? Can you equate those two things? One is an individual disobeying cultural norms because of her own conscicence in order to draw attention to an oppression that is not being enacted consciously by anyone at the party but is being enacted nonetheless. The fact that nobody at the shower meant it that way doesn’t change the fact that it was heterosexist and that it hurt. The other is an reads as people basically saying “Hey, we’re having fun, and rather than look at why our fun might be reiterating an oppression from the larger society, we want you to shut up and follow our norms.”
If you were me, which “side” do you think carries more weight? Which one should an ethical person give priority to? Can you dismiss the former position just because I broke a norm of social behavior? Do you really want to say that breaking etiquette which is likely outdated is comparable to perpetuating an oppression from the larger society? Okay, maybe you do, but you really can’t expect people from the marginalized group to lend much credence to your point of view.
What struck me most vividly in this whole series of debates about race in fandom are the following points:
It is an observable fact that the experiences of fen of color are going to be different from the experiences of white fen because of issues of race in the larger society.
In particular, white fen, because we are in a position of privilege, are inevitably going to have the option of not examining race and ethnicity in fic precisely because of privilege (at least without having to further internalize an oppression against us). Fen of color do not have that option, and it is our responsibility as white fen to recognize this and respond appropriately.
I believe, and others are free to disagree with me even though I believe that they are profoundly wrong, that it is the responsibility of white fen to think through the ways in which our fannish playground may replicate racist dynamics from the larger society, often unintentionally, and work on stopping that because it makes fandom not only not fun for FOC but also goes against the ideal of fannish society. And, as an added bonus, in the long run it hurts white fen too.
As a white person in my society, it is my obligation as an ethical and compassionate adult to try to listen to people who have had very different lived experiences than mine, even when my gut instinct is to react defensively, because there are certain things I will never experience on a personal level even though if I’m observant and educated and have close friends from that group I should still notice that such acts are happening to the people around me whom I care about.
As a white person, I have to acknowledge my privilege in any discussion of race, including one in which I am trying to address instances of racism. Even though I know I run the risk of being listened to when my friends of color aren’t, I still have a responsibility to try, but I also have the responsibility of acknowledging that I am speaking from a position of privilege.
I should also add that I have purposefully confined this creed to race. Ethnicity, its relation to race, and the question of whether race is socially constructed are important discussions to have, but this is already over twenty pages long and there’s only so much time. The short version is that yes, whites from some ethnic groups have historically had more privilege than other ethnic groups in United States history. In fact, some groups of people now considered white were not always considered as white as others.
Yes, we should deal with questions of anti-Semitism and anti-Islam in fandom. We also need to talk about ethnicity in general, and in particular in the context of the United States, the issues of white ethnics. As people have pointed out about, say, Due South fandom, Ray K’s Polish ethnicity, for example, clearly plays into the source text and some writing that results from it.
But no, the fact that your grandparents or great-grandparents faced “Irish need not apply” signs does not exempt you from the prospect of being a racist, nor does it suggest that you had the same historical experience as POC. (I can tell you exactly which of my great grandparents faced those signs, and what counties in Ireland they emigrated from. I can even point you to political cartoons from the late 19th century that depict people from the countries my great-grandparents immigrated from as racially other. That does not in any way excuse me from having to own up to being the owner of my own honking pile of white privilege or free me from needing to work on this shit. Note that I am not simply trotting the topic of ethnicity out as an excuse for me to avoid looking at the ways in which I benefit from white privilege. And yes, questions of colonization are also important. Another post from someone who’s more up to speed on the issues would be lovely. I’m already well over twenty pages, though, so you’ll, I hope, forgive me for not addressing that here.)
I should further note that any of the previous statements could easily be replaced with other categories of groups that have historically been oppressed. I am just as responsible for learning about each of those groups as any of the others.
I mean, look, I could say lots more about cultural etiquette (although Amoja Three Rivers covers an awful lot of it pretty well.) . But I think what I really want to end with is this.
I have learned a lot in fandom. I’ve met a lot of great people. And everyone who knows me from fandom knows, even if my livejournal doesn’t always make it look that way, that I am here for the squee. I flail with glee when Joey wanders onto Dancing With the Stars with a padawan braid. I have almost as much fun watching people watch Supernatural so I can watch them squee over Dean’s line about pea soup in the episode with Linda Blair. I will be one of those geeks in line for the midnight release of the last Harry Potter book. I am a geek. Fandom is my tribe, my people. A place where I felt comfortable tipping my hand to reveal all of my completely nerdy tendencies without having to apologize for them or closet them, and I adore fandom for giving me that space.
But for me, no matter how much of an escape from the aspects of mundane life with muggles in meatspace can sometimes be, I know that we all arrived here with baggage. I’ve always liked the golden rule of neopaganism: anything you do returns to you threefold. Regardless of your religious beliefs, or lack thereof, I think that rule is an important reminder to all of us that our actions have consequences. If I wander into a fannish community and fail to listen to my fellow fen-if I dismiss their objections simply based on how they are phrased or what tone is taken because this is proof that they have broken the rules of the society-am I not simply replicating the behaviors of the people who sent me looking for a refuge from muggles in the first place? Isn’t what got me labeled as a geek that I didn’t dress the way that the popular kids dressed (largely because my parents couldn’t afford those clothes)? Isn’t what got me labeled as a weirdo the fact that normal people are supposed to let dragons go by the time they are grown ups but I wanted to read about Temeraire anyway? Aren’t we trying to create a community that values that which is devalued by the larger society?
Because if we are, that means that in order to make a functional community, sometimes we’ve got to roll up our sleeves and do the hard work. Sometimes, we’re going to be wrong.
If we’re lucky, we’ll have gentle teachers-friends whom we trust who can pull us aside and say calmly, hey, that made me uncomfortable and here’s why.
But we also have to understand that people aren’t going to react that way if the community as a whole doesn’t respond to the gentle reminders with a thoughtful, deliberative, genuine hard look at ourselves.
If we don’t get the gentle teachers, we need to think about *why* that is instead of blaming the messenger first. An amazing thing happens when we take that step. Amazingly, at that point, we hear more often from gentle ones than angry ones.
Notes on References:
Dr. Julianne Malveaux was recently named as the next president of Bennett College. Her PhD in economics is from MIT. I first encountered her when she was on To The Contrary on PBS.
Nurse Eunice Rivers worked for the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. Initially, most historical accounts of the study painted her as a traitor. Interestingly, more people know Rivers’s names than know the names of the docs. More recent research has suggested that Nurse Rivers was able to get some men out of the study. Clearly, Nurse Rivers is a complex historical figure.
The Tuskegee Syphilis Study has become for social and scientific researchers even more of a cautionary tale than the infamous experiments by Milgram and Zimbardo. Follow the link above if you’re not familiar with it. The most egregious aspect of the study was that penicillin became the preferred treatment for syphilis in 1947, but the men in the study were not only not given treatment, but actively prohibited from receiving treatment, until as late as 1972, twenty-five years after an effective cure was discovered. This flies in the face of all rules about ethics in human subjects research.
James Byrd Jr. was an African American man who was dragged to death behind a pick up truck in East Texas in 1999. This was after he was beaten by at least three white men who had offered him as ride while he was walking home.
Lord Jeffery Amherst was the commander of British forces in North America during the conflict known to most residents of the United States as the French and Indian War. There have long been stories that suggest that he “donated” blankets which were believed to have been infected with smallpox to Native Americans as a way to reduce their population. Examination of his letters on the subject suggests that this was a malevolent act and not an accidental consequence.
Booker T. Washington was born a slave in Virginia in 1856. He is known to students of literature as the author of Up From Slavery an account of his life as a slave and a plea to white Americans to see African Americans as human beings not property. He was also the founder of Tuskegee Institute, one of the HBCUs in Alabama. Although many later writers criticized what they saw as the conciliatory tone in his work, Washington’s writing remains a staple for American literature classes.
Langston Hughes was one of the major writers of the Harlem Renaissance. Along with writers like Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, Countee Cullen, James Weldon Johnson, and Claude McKay, Hughes was instrumental in the creation of a lively community of artists, writers, and musicians in the early 20the century who were focused on creating a distinctly African-American (Modernist) writing tradition. You can hear him speak in his own voice about the creation of one of his most famous poems “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” at poets.org which provides an audio file of Hughes reading that work. He gives a succinct explanation about the full meaning of the phrase “sold down the river” that plenty of people don’t much know.
The case from Long Beach California is a complicated one that has happened so recently that I haven’t been able to find anything really great on it. Here’s a link to an article in the LA Weekly to get you started, but I should add that I live in LA County and haven’t been able to find any one good or a collection of good articles that really explain the whole situation.
If you’re looking for a good place to start boning up on how to avoid sticking your very white foot into your mouth, there are online copies of Amoja Three Rivers’s “Cultural Etiquette” which provide a a good place to start. One of my favorite parts of her piece is an eloquent explanation of why white folks looking at non-white religious traditions can be problematic. "Do not simply take and consume. If you are white and you find yourself drawn to Native American spirituality, Middle Eastern religion, African drumming, Asian philosophies, or Latin rhythms, make an effort to maintain some kind of balance. Don't just learn the fun and exciting things about us and then go home to your safe, isolated, white, privileged life. Learn about the history of the people whose culture you're dabbling in. Learn how our history relates to your own, how your privilege connects and contributes to our oppression and exploitation. And most importantly, make it a fair exchange--give something back.
If you want to pick the fruit, then carry some manure and plow some fields. Give your land back to the Indians and the Mexicans. Make reparations to the Africans. Work for Native peoples' autonomy and Puerto Rican independence. Send relief money to Middle Eastern and Asian disaster victims. Lobby Congress for fair immigration laws. Provide rides for Elders of color or single mothers who need to get to the market. Quietly contribute money to the African National Congress, Akwe sasne Notes, and LaRaza. Then take your drum lesson and your dance class. Then burn your sage and cedar."
If you’re straight, and looking for the equivalent on sexual orientation or preference, I cannot recommend strongly enough The Plaid Adder’s tome entitled A Straight Person’s Guide To Being Come Out To. Many a time I’ve been tempted to quote section numbers to clueless people. I can’t promise that I won’t email relevant chunks of it to the next person who invites me to a bridal/baby shower.
William Faulkner was a white man from Mississippi. He also happens to be one of the best known American Modernist writers around whose most famous works include Absalom, Absalom and The Sound and the Fury. Dorothy Allison, a much more recent (and still alive) southerner said that no Southerner is ever unaware of race and class. I suspect she’s right, but most importantly, Faulkner and his complete body of work seems to demonstrate a profound understanding of the ways in which our past (including aspects of the past that have to do with race and class) haunts us on a daily basis. I think people who understand that are more likely to get the ways in which racism (or classism, or sexism, or fill-in-the-other-ism here) are not the acts of individuals but the accumulation of a whole host of acts, some individual, some structural, that came before.
Coyotes are not just cute animals that recently crashed a cooler at a Quiznos in Chicago. Coyote is also a term commonly used to refer to the people who make their living smuggling undocumented workers across the border into the United States. Given that it’s a Spanish word, and pronounced accordingly a lot of the time, you can guess that most often it is used to describe people who smuggle the undocumented across the border from Mexico. Not all the folks coyotes smuggle in come from Mexico; many come from other countries in central America.
East-West Players is a very well known theater in Los Angeles. Not sure what the difference between a Hawai’ian or Pacific Islander and an Asian-American is and you live in LA? Looks like I Land might have dealt with some of those issues.
Alec Mapa is a Filipino actor who created I Remember Mapa in 1998, a one-person performance piece that drew on his experiences as an understudy for B.D. Wong in M. Butterfly and his comedic talent as he critiqued the stereotypes about Asian men in entertainment in general. Aside from the George Takei bit, what I remember most is the humor implied when he talked about only getting the understudy for Song Liling in M. Butterfly which I cannot recall verbatim but was something along the lines of “C’mon. How many parts are there on Broadway for gay Asian American men?”
If you want more information about the 1965 Immigration Act, you can get more information here.
So, seriously, not even a week after the SGA race and fandom debates, Don Imus, the original shock jock, called the Rutgers women’s basketball team a bunch of “nappy-headed hos,” language that many people (rightly) pointed out was offensive in the extreme.
Immediately, a number of people pointed out that this was not okay. Why was it not okay?
Well, it depends on who you ask. Some people thought it was okay to use offensive language to take pot shots at public figures, but that college-age women on a nationally ranked basketball team weren’t public enough, so it was unfair. Others thought that the language itself was the problem.
Here’s the important part.
I watched the media response to this pretty closely. I sat and watched Hardball despite the fact that for the safety of my television set and my blood pressure, I don’t watch news on my television. I listened to the protests from Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. I noted that the BBC article on the event pointed out that Barack Obama made a pledge never to appear on Imus’s program, but none of the news outlets I follow here did. I heard that Oprah had the team on, but not being a regular Oprah watcher, I missed it. I did happen to be home to catch the press conference with the team and their coach.
What really sickened me wasn’t what Don Imus said. I mean, dude, there are racist, sexist folks. I’m 35 years old. I figured that shit out a long time ago.
What sickened me was watching how people responded to those remarks.
A number of people called in/commented/protested that Don Imus was being (unfairly, they implied) critiqued for using language that is prevalent in “rap music.”
For starters, I think perhaps it would be more accurate to say in some rap and hip hop music, but I digress, no?
My point is, that sometimes when people make that argument, it’s a legit argument coming from a sincere place.
But a lot of time when (white) people (without ghetto passes) make that argument it is motivated by defensiveness and an unwillingness to look at their own complicity in racism.
Look, in the study of rhetoric, there’s this thing called ethos. It’s a Greek word, and I don’t speak Greek, so I can’t give you a literal translation. But what it means figuratively is how credible the person making the argument is.
What I think witchqueen was getting at with her term “ghetto pass,” (which I like a lot. Do some of us get to make ghetto pass icons? It would save a lot of time positioning ourselves at the start of every debate, no? And who gets to award them? Can somebody gift them to you like pressies from the lj fairy?), was that some people regardless of personal identify have participated in conversations around this issue long enough that they have established a certain amount of credibility.
I mean, look, I still stick my foot in my mouth on a regular basis. But I’d like to think that part of the reason that my FOC friends don’t throw things at me when these debates start is that I talk about and think about this issue more often than just when Imus’s shit hits the fan.
I think there is a point to be made that the problem with Imus’s language is not just a problem with Imus. Certainly, we should also be critical of any entertainer who uses offensive demeaning language.
But when the first words out of a non-ghetto-passed white person’s mouth in response to Imus are “But he didn’t say anything even half as bad as what rappers say,” do you know what a lot of us hear? “Hey, he didn’t mean to be racist, and hey, he talks to POC, and really, POC say the same thing, so why is he getting punished for it and rappers aren’t. That’s not fair!”
This comes with an even deeper level of subtext, something I would have thought that slashers of all people with their proficiency in reading subtext would have noticed which says “It’s not fair to pick on a white guy for something a black guy can get away with. I don’t want to give up my white privilege that I don’t even acknowledge having! Whine, whine, whine! ::proceed to throw two-year-old-esque temper-tantrum at prospect that there is something that my entitled self isn’t allowed to do because it is a totally new sensation for me::”
For what I would hope are obvious reasons, many people of color tend to react less than enthusiastically to this response. The most polite rendition of what likely goes through the heads of people tuned into this dynamic, regardless of their race is, “Of course you don’t want to give up your privilege. How fascinating that you have an option to do so, whereas the of color/queer/differently abled/working class person in this equation does not have that same option.”
In short, ethos means that if, perhaps, white folks didn’t react defensively and only critique the sexism and racism in (some) rap in response to white folks getting called on their racism, perhaps we would have more credibility (i.e. ghetto passes) with communities of color.
Reaction #2 that pissed me the frak off. “Well, he’s got the right to say whatever he wants. We have freedom of speech here.”
Yes, Virginia, we do have freedom of speech. I’m terribly grateful for it.
However, the framers of the Constitution did not say that we have the right to freedom of speech without having to accept the consequences of those actions. The Constitution did not just grant us rights, it also bequeathed to us responsibilities. Somehow, that part of the equation always seems to drop out of the discussion.
Don Imus absolutely has a Constutitional right to call a bunch of young women whatever racist and sexist crap he wants to.
However, he also has a responsibility to society to accept the consequences of those actions.
And nobody ought to be too surprised that one response to those actions is to take heat for being a racist, sexist pig.
The consequences of using federal airwaves to do so should involve a punishment, not because we’re not capable of hearing those sorts of insults without crumbling into piles of quivering fear, but because rights come with responsibilities. If it’s that important to your self-expression to call someone an insult, you have the right to do that. But with that right comes the responsibility to accept the consequences for those actions.
If all of us thought a bit more about how our actions-our expression of our rights and liberties-affected others, the world would be a significantly better place. But we also need to understand that it’s a lot harder to do this when the language in question taps into a society-wide well of racism (or sexism, or homophobia), and it’s harder still if we’ve had the conversation a lot before and believe deep down that justice is dependent on everyone getting to the same page on that issue.
So, yes, Imus had the right to say that. But he also had a responsibility, which he seemed to try to shirk, in his comments immediately following the reaction to those words. Which leads me to point #3.
Point #3 that pissed me off. It’s 2007. We really ought to be at a place as a society that we can all acknowledge that everybody is racist. We really ought to be beyond Race Awareness 101. And we’re not. We’re really, really not. We’re still stuck taking remedial, pre-baccalaureate classes on this topic.
Don Imus, when he reacted by saying that he wasn’t a bad/mean guy, and that he had friends who were of color made me want to throw things.
Why was I so angered by this? Why was my television set yet again in jeopardy from thrown missiles (glasses, decks of cards, books, pens, throw pillows, whatever else might have been handy. . .) when I heard the guy they had on Hadrball basically say that we shouldn’t be so hard on Imus because, after all, it’s not like he burned crosses or anything, or some such equally inane thing?
See, in that definition of racism, what FOC and White Folks With Ghetto Passes hear is that a little mild racism is okay when it’s unconscious. The only unacceptable racism is the overt kind of malicious bigotry. And that message tends to make some of us a little angry.
Because it is 2007. I’ve known since at least 1990 that we’re all racist. I’m a white girl, who grew up in the South, who got that memo over 15 years ago. I had hoped that as a society, we were on the same page. Clearly, I was wrong, but that doesn’t mean that I have to be happy about it.
I am tired of white folks like me defining racism in such a way that allows us to opt out of acknowledging the privilege that we have and scapegoating straw people to make ourselves feel better. “Well, okay, so maybe deep down I think that Mexicans really are lower-class-otherwise why would they live five families in a house. And seeing those day laborers at my Lowe’s makes me feel uncomfortable, but it’s not like I call them ‘Spics, so I’m not really racist.”
What? Are you kidding me?
I think a lot more of us would have ghetto passes if we were willing to look hard at those thoughts that all too many of us have but won’t acknowledge and spend some time thinking about where those messages come from and what we need to do about them.
I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m thrilled that Imus got fired. He deserved to be fired. If you talk to people who monitored the show regularly, this wasn’t the first time he did something like this.
And I’m thrilled that those of us who cried “Foul!” got our opinions taken seriously.
But in listening to the debates about the incident in the first place, I heard people trotting out the same racist, ignorant drek that I had hoped we’d moved past. Because in the circle of people I surround myself with, people who are way further along on these issues predominate over people who are still in the less processed zone. Watching the debates over what to do play out-both in fandom and in the mainstream media-I am reminded that we are not collectively in the same place on these issues. There are apparently a huge number of Americans who don’t agree that someone who has friends of color can still be a racist, and that makes me sad. It makes me sad because it doesn’t square with the reality I live in. It seems to me that some people are trying to turn into a matter of opinion something that isn’t debatable.
There was this one time at work that I came across a piece of writing that had been blatantly plagiarized. I wrote a note to the writer telling her that this was plagiarism and that per the policy of our workplace, we needed to meet to talk about this. The piece of writing had wholesale sentences without quotation marks around verbatim quotes from other sources. Ignoring my request for a meeting, which was mandated by workplace policy, the writer handed a “revised” version of the piece back to me with a note which said, in a rather snide tone, that clearly she and I had different definitions of plagiarism.
It’s entirely possible that upon reading this, I sat in my office with my mouth hanging open in shock.
Because, yes, Virginia, we did have different definitions of plagiarism. She was exactly right. However, the thing is? Mine was right. Anybody who knows anything about plagiarism would know that I was right. Plagiarism isn’t, in an instance like this, a matter for debate. There’s a policy in the workplace that is clearly stated, and this particular piece was a completely egregious example of defying that policy.
Not everything in the world is a matter of opinion. Sometimes there is a factual answer to a question that can help us determine right from wrong. ::points incredulously to workplace policy on plagiarism:: As a society, there may be some aspects of intellectual property appropriation that are in gray areas, but reproducing word for word someone else’s work for multiple sentences without any attribution to the original author is plagiarism. We all agree on that.
Sometimes facts or consensus mean that you can’t debate something. Other times there is an ethical imperative that means that although we can debate something, we shouldn’t. Sure, there are people in the U.S. who think it’s okay to dismiss Imus’s comments as not intentionally racist and therefore acceptable. That is a fact. Sure, there are people who feel bad for those writers who’ve been accused of unconsciously perpetuating racist tendencies in fic within particular fandoms. That is also a fact.
It seems to me that facts are not debatable. What is debatable is what our response these situations are. From where I sit, the ethical response must be to think about why we react defensively when called on something. From where I sit, the last person I want to react like would be Don Imus. He made a complete fool of himself, and I sure don’t want to make a fool of myself.
It seems to me that the most productive use of white guilt is to stop whinging about what we can’t do and start talking about what we should do. We should take the words of people who say that they’ve been hurt by something more seriously. After all, what’s the worst that’s going to happen if we do? Might we learn something? Might we give a little more credit to someone’s opinion besides our own? Those don’t sound like terrible things to me.
I do think that the real reason that so many of us are reticent to do so is that on some level we’re afraid of what will happen if we did. We’re afraid that we might see something that we don’t like-either about ourselves or our society.
I started this post by reprinting Imus’s original words. I thought about whether that was a good idea or not. Part of me worries that reprinting them could be perceived as reiterating language that isn’t acceptable. In the end, I chose to reprint them because I felt it was important that people remember how unacceptable the language itself was. That’s because I think that we really do have to look at the ugliness in the world straight on if we’re going to do anything about it. I think when it comes to how we respond to calls of racism (or sexism, or homophobia/heterosexism, or discrimination against people on the basis of age, size, ethnicity, religion, ability, mental health status, and any other category I’ve left out in these posts), we have to be willing to look the unpleasant places dead on if we’re going to be honest about them and have a conversation that moves us forward.
But it seems to me to be a waste of time to debate whether we must dismiss someone’s accusation because he or she worded it rudely. It seems to me the conversation we’ve just a much higher ethical obligation to have is about what fandom can do to minimize the impact of the racist norms from the larger culture on this utopian experiment we’re running. We need to have that conversation right alongside those same conversations about all the other categories of oppression. But we also need to stop thinking that one of these conversations is more important than the other. And we need to be sure that if talking about race in fandom makes us think about gender in fandom, we write about it in a way that doesn’t make it sound like we’re saying, “Hey, I’m a woman, so I’m oppressed, so I can’t be oppressing other people, so your argument about ability doesn’t hold water.”
We’re smart people, as a whole. I have faith that we can do it. The question has never been whether we have the ability to do it, it’s whether we have the will.
EDIT: I solemnly promise I'll reply to everyone's comments, but I'm honestly too upset by the violence at Virginia Tech to be of much use today.