Privilege, Appropriation, Amanda Marcotte, and Open Source Boobs
There have been a whole lot of things going on around and in my head for a couple of weeks which have been attempting to combine to form some sort of coherent whole, and I think they might be ready to come out. We'll see...
A couple of weeks ago, I attended the filming of Robin Di Angelo's workshop. It was the same workshop that had inspired this post and the ensuing discussion. I was attending because she had asked, looking for supportive folks to fill the audience while she had the workshop taped for distribution. If you missed that post, the highlights were: 1. The subtext running through all of our media make it clear that it's better to be white in our culture (she has a number of really effective visual images from many different media to emphasize this point, and everyone gasps at this), and the power in our society is very clearly held in majority by white men. 2. Prejudice is impossible to avoid in our socialization. Everyone is prejudiced, though the manifestation of prejudice falls on a spectrum (with, for example, discomfort in room full of people who don't look like you being on one end and active racism being on another). 3. Racism is the addition of institutional power to prejudice--which, if you accept this definition, means that racism is always institutional and always expressed by the more powerful against the less powerful. See #1. She goes on to make the, I think, very important point that we need to get away from the binary thinking of racist=individual, intentional and evil. What happens is that people get so bent out of shape when they're accused of making a racial mistake that they can't coherently talk about it. They're too busy proving that they "didn't mean it," and that they are "a good person" to acknowledge that they did anything wrong at all, and nothing is learned and nothing gets any better.
So I had just seen the workshop again and these issues were all floating around in my head when I happened upon this, which was a sort of in media res of Amanda Marcotte's trilogy of racial mistakes recently. Now, I've got Pandagon in my links here, and I read it fairly regularly. I enjoy Pandagon a great deal in general, and I've even used one of Amanda's posts in class (this one, together with the article it references as a lesson on perspective and bias in writing.) So my first reaction to the news that Amanda had been accused of appropriating the work of a woman of color blogger who had done a great deal of work on the issue of immigrant women, but had gotten no credit in a piece Amanda had written on the subject was shock and disappointment. I'm not going to address at all the issue of whether Amanda actively appropriated, passively appropriated, or came up with the ideas all on her own, because I can't know and it's not what interests me here. What was really striking to me was Amanda's behavior after the fact--her language in the comment thread at that Feministe post, and the language of all her supporters. It's the classic obsession with proving "I didn't mean it" and "I'm a good person," and denying anything racial went on at all, and therefore missing the opportunity to really understand the legitimate perspective of a group of people who are used to being ignored, and are really, really angry about it.
Amanda's angry at first too, really really angry at being accused of plagiarism. She immediately paints herself as someone who's "being made a scapegoat" and accuses her accusers of "trying to hurt [her] personally," and of doing it for "sport". Like any heated internet exchange, everyone's angry and the language is very strong. She is repeatedly told that it's not all about her--that the WOC bloggers are seeing her actions as part of a pattern of white privilege in action. BFP and other WOC write for years on an issue and this issue isn't really noticed until a white woman begins to write on it. Amanda doesn't see her role in institutional racism (and can't admit it, for that would make her a Bad Person), so she fights the accusations tooth and nail. She minimizes the effect of a blogger she claims to have read on her thinking, in order to argue that she was not wrong in choosing not to reference her at all in her own article. Her supporters claim she's a target because of her popularity, and question the very idea of her having privilege . They speak in terms of standing in solidarity, which gives a sense of us vs. them that's very disturbing.
There's a lot of interesting discussion in that comment thread, once people cool down a little bit. I found this one, from the perspective of an academic, particularly interesting. When you're working in an academic field and you find someone has been working on an idea similar to yours, even if they did not inform it originally, it is incumbent upon you to acknowledge them and address their points. If you do not, you have a weak contribution at best and you leave yourself open to accusations of plagiarism at worst.
Again, the issue of Amanda's guilt as far as plagiarism or even appropriation aren't as interesting to me as the subtext of privilege that I can't not recognize when I see it anymore. Amanda herself might not have set up the system that makes her work more widely read than Brownfemipower's, but she benefits from it, and it's incumbent on her not to deny it.
Last week, another brouhaha erupted concerning the images chosen for Amanda's forthcoming book. Apparently there was one around the first choice for cover, which I missed, in which Amanda (as well as Pandagon commenters, disappointingly) dismisses concerns that her kitchy Amazonian heroine beating back a large black gorilla has an unacceptable subtext. This time, the images inside the book are deeply problematic. And this time, Amanda apologizes. Pam Spaulding, a Pandagon contributor has a really good post about race and Amanda's trouble, as well as some good comments on the kinds of things that keep us from learning from each racial blowup.
Doing post-mortems on whatever the last color arousal f*ckup - no matter the cause, regardless of parties involved - is important, but not if we’re screaming at one another, all while trying to convince ourselves that we are more self-aware (or less racist) that the person sitting on the bomb, tied to it because of what they said or did. In the end, too much of the righteous anger ends up being the focus of the discussion, rather than the root causes of implicit bias, and that we need to own up to them to put any rational discussion into context.
There was a point, during my reading of the Feministe comment thread, that I considered stopping reading Pandagon. But that's not going to solve anything, and I would be falling prey to that urge to just separate oneself from someone who makes a racial mistake, as if they are pure evil and can't make any worthy contribution any longer because they failed to recognize their own privilege and prejudice. I can't do that, because it's just as likely to be me next time. Or you. It happens. What I can do is add more WOC bloggers to my blogroll, and I'm going to do that. As soon as I'm done writing this monster post.
What does this have to do with the Open Source Boob Project? Well, that went down last week when all this was still swimming in my brain, and as I read up on it, starting with Scalzi, where I heard about it first, and then reading the analysis of many LJers or Whatever commenters whose analyses of other interesting LJ goings-on I've read in the past, like cofax7, the-red-shoes here, or kate_nepveu here. There are also lots of great links to follow in all those posts. Again, I'm not interested in the actual event, or whether anyone there felt pressured to participate, but in the language used in the ensuing discussion. Because, again, a large group of people (women, in this case) were attempting to point out the patterns that can be seen from a feminist perspective in something like the OSBP, and how problematic they are, and the only responses they really get are, "We didn't mean it that way," "We're good guys!" and "Women participated, so it couldn't have been sexist!"
It happens in my own relationship now from time to time, and it's infuriating. No, I'm sorry, your intent does not weigh more in this discussion than my hurt feelings. And stop that, I'm not calling you a bad guy. You just need to listen to what I'm saying. Stop protesting that you're not racist or sexist for a damn minute so that you can hear what I'm saying!
Do you hear what I'm saying?
ETA: Screening all comments for the time being. I want to be able to go to sleep without worrying things will go downhill. Not that I think they will. Just in case.
ETA2: Comments unscreened for the time being. If I have to be away from the computer again for a long time, I'll do it again, and I won't apologize.
A couple of weeks ago, I attended the filming of Robin Di Angelo's workshop. It was the same workshop that had inspired this post and the ensuing discussion. I was attending because she had asked, looking for supportive folks to fill the audience while she had the workshop taped for distribution. If you missed that post, the highlights were: 1. The subtext running through all of our media make it clear that it's better to be white in our culture (she has a number of really effective visual images from many different media to emphasize this point, and everyone gasps at this), and the power in our society is very clearly held in majority by white men. 2. Prejudice is impossible to avoid in our socialization. Everyone is prejudiced, though the manifestation of prejudice falls on a spectrum (with, for example, discomfort in room full of people who don't look like you being on one end and active racism being on another). 3. Racism is the addition of institutional power to prejudice--which, if you accept this definition, means that racism is always institutional and always expressed by the more powerful against the less powerful. See #1. She goes on to make the, I think, very important point that we need to get away from the binary thinking of racist=individual, intentional and evil. What happens is that people get so bent out of shape when they're accused of making a racial mistake that they can't coherently talk about it. They're too busy proving that they "didn't mean it," and that they are "a good person" to acknowledge that they did anything wrong at all, and nothing is learned and nothing gets any better.
So I had just seen the workshop again and these issues were all floating around in my head when I happened upon this, which was a sort of in media res of Amanda Marcotte's trilogy of racial mistakes recently. Now, I've got Pandagon in my links here, and I read it fairly regularly. I enjoy Pandagon a great deal in general, and I've even used one of Amanda's posts in class (this one, together with the article it references as a lesson on perspective and bias in writing.) So my first reaction to the news that Amanda had been accused of appropriating the work of a woman of color blogger who had done a great deal of work on the issue of immigrant women, but had gotten no credit in a piece Amanda had written on the subject was shock and disappointment. I'm not going to address at all the issue of whether Amanda actively appropriated, passively appropriated, or came up with the ideas all on her own, because I can't know and it's not what interests me here. What was really striking to me was Amanda's behavior after the fact--her language in the comment thread at that Feministe post, and the language of all her supporters. It's the classic obsession with proving "I didn't mean it" and "I'm a good person," and denying anything racial went on at all, and therefore missing the opportunity to really understand the legitimate perspective of a group of people who are used to being ignored, and are really, really angry about it.
Amanda's angry at first too, really really angry at being accused of plagiarism. She immediately paints herself as someone who's "being made a scapegoat" and accuses her accusers of "trying to hurt [her] personally," and of doing it for "sport". Like any heated internet exchange, everyone's angry and the language is very strong. She is repeatedly told that it's not all about her--that the WOC bloggers are seeing her actions as part of a pattern of white privilege in action. BFP and other WOC write for years on an issue and this issue isn't really noticed until a white woman begins to write on it. Amanda doesn't see her role in institutional racism (and can't admit it, for that would make her a Bad Person), so she fights the accusations tooth and nail. She minimizes the effect of a blogger she claims to have read on her thinking, in order to argue that she was not wrong in choosing not to reference her at all in her own article. Her supporters claim she's a target because of her popularity, and question the very idea of her having privilege . They speak in terms of standing in solidarity, which gives a sense of us vs. them that's very disturbing.
There's a lot of interesting discussion in that comment thread, once people cool down a little bit. I found this one, from the perspective of an academic, particularly interesting. When you're working in an academic field and you find someone has been working on an idea similar to yours, even if they did not inform it originally, it is incumbent upon you to acknowledge them and address their points. If you do not, you have a weak contribution at best and you leave yourself open to accusations of plagiarism at worst.
Again, the issue of Amanda's guilt as far as plagiarism or even appropriation aren't as interesting to me as the subtext of privilege that I can't not recognize when I see it anymore. Amanda herself might not have set up the system that makes her work more widely read than Brownfemipower's, but she benefits from it, and it's incumbent on her not to deny it.
Last week, another brouhaha erupted concerning the images chosen for Amanda's forthcoming book. Apparently there was one around the first choice for cover, which I missed, in which Amanda (as well as Pandagon commenters, disappointingly) dismisses concerns that her kitchy Amazonian heroine beating back a large black gorilla has an unacceptable subtext. This time, the images inside the book are deeply problematic. And this time, Amanda apologizes. Pam Spaulding, a Pandagon contributor has a really good post about race and Amanda's trouble, as well as some good comments on the kinds of things that keep us from learning from each racial blowup.
Doing post-mortems on whatever the last color arousal f*ckup - no matter the cause, regardless of parties involved - is important, but not if we’re screaming at one another, all while trying to convince ourselves that we are more self-aware (or less racist) that the person sitting on the bomb, tied to it because of what they said or did. In the end, too much of the righteous anger ends up being the focus of the discussion, rather than the root causes of implicit bias, and that we need to own up to them to put any rational discussion into context.
There was a point, during my reading of the Feministe comment thread, that I considered stopping reading Pandagon. But that's not going to solve anything, and I would be falling prey to that urge to just separate oneself from someone who makes a racial mistake, as if they are pure evil and can't make any worthy contribution any longer because they failed to recognize their own privilege and prejudice. I can't do that, because it's just as likely to be me next time. Or you. It happens. What I can do is add more WOC bloggers to my blogroll, and I'm going to do that. As soon as I'm done writing this monster post.
What does this have to do with the Open Source Boob Project? Well, that went down last week when all this was still swimming in my brain, and as I read up on it, starting with Scalzi, where I heard about it first, and then reading the analysis of many LJers or Whatever commenters whose analyses of other interesting LJ goings-on I've read in the past, like cofax7, the-red-shoes here, or kate_nepveu here. There are also lots of great links to follow in all those posts. Again, I'm not interested in the actual event, or whether anyone there felt pressured to participate, but in the language used in the ensuing discussion. Because, again, a large group of people (women, in this case) were attempting to point out the patterns that can be seen from a feminist perspective in something like the OSBP, and how problematic they are, and the only responses they really get are, "We didn't mean it that way," "We're good guys!" and "Women participated, so it couldn't have been sexist!"
It happens in my own relationship now from time to time, and it's infuriating. No, I'm sorry, your intent does not weigh more in this discussion than my hurt feelings. And stop that, I'm not calling you a bad guy. You just need to listen to what I'm saying. Stop protesting that you're not racist or sexist for a damn minute so that you can hear what I'm saying!
Do you hear what I'm saying?
ETA: Screening all comments for the time being. I want to be able to go to sleep without worrying things will go downhill. Not that I think they will. Just in case.
ETA2: Comments unscreened for the time being. If I have to be away from the computer again for a long time, I'll do it again, and I won't apologize.