Wiscon '08: The Year We Were Bitchy
Let me say at the outset that I love Wiscon, I always love Wiscon, and this year was no different. I am bitchier than usual about it this year for a number of reasons, including that four panels turns out to be just too many for me to be on, and that I didn't get organized enough to write my notes before I left, so I missed a lot of stuff I wanted
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I thought the thing was apropos for the part of the discussion that was being had at the time. You were moderator - if you thought it was not you should have said something at the time, I've been moderated before on panels and I do understand the "let's move on" message (but not being telepathic I could not be expected to get it from the moderator if it was in thought form only).
My point, such as it was, for those who may not have been present, is that a lot of racial prejudice IS basic cultural background and upbringing - you really DO have be taught to hate, and learn how not to. Because I was brought up by the parents that I have - including the father I mentioned - race is completely irrelevant to me when I first meet a person, other than a basic background register of that person's physical appearance so that I would be able to recognise him or her if we ever meet again - in that context, black/white/Asian/whatever falls in the same box as straight hair/long fingers/big eyes/round cheeks/wears glasses/has ears that come to a point like a pixie's (all of the latter are attributes of people I met at this Wiscon alone). Not being a complete idiot I do realise I live in a world where prejudice does exist and does colour (if I can be forgiven the choice of word) people's interactions - and the panel on the Elves/Dwarves thing was loaded from the get-go with all the baggage that our real world does bring into the topic. I don't think that self-identifying with a certain ethnic or cultural "label" (such as "I am Latino", or "I am Jewish", or "I am black", or "I am white") is the problem, the problem is when that label becomes a basis for judging other self-identifiers on a sliding scale and thinking that your label somehow makes you better or worse than that other person at whom you are looking.
It IS a good thing that we are talking about the problems that do exist, even if they happen to be couched in the Elf-Dwarf controversy. It is perhaps inevitable that in this context remarks are bound to be misunderstood, ignorant, or plain twisted out of context by someone else who has a different agenda and needs a platform for it which is almost but not quite unlike anything that was said or meant at a discussion. But at least - if you think that I was guilty of any of those things - tell me that at the time, so that I can explain, elucidate, discuss further, or even agree to disagree.
This is already going on too long for a comment post, so I'll stop now. But - just for the record - there it is.
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There is a situation where one can be damned for doing something and damned for not doing it. Treating everyone the same is bad because you DON'T notice their race (and therefore wind up offending, hurting, marginalizing, etc). Not treating everyone the same because your first response is to register their race is bad because then you are being inherently racist (otherwise your first response would not be to notice their race).
So - honestly - what is the answer here? Should we all just go around blindfolded? Race issues exist and are very real - but if the only response to anything said is "you are white and privileged and therefore you don't know what you are talking about" then is there any hope of ever finding a way out of it all? Once again, and for the record, I REALLY don't care what colour your outer wrapping comes in. Your blood is the same colour as mine. I have to believe we have a common base to start from, as human beings, both.
If "privilege" as perceived by one subset is used to prevent anyone not in that subset from ever having an opinion that is taken seriously without being dismissed, in the end, with a "you are privileged you don't know of what you speak" comment then we will NEVER talk to each other in a meaningful way. And I for one am sorry if that is the case.
Yes, for the record - I am white. As for privilege - yes, I grew up in a house full of books. I had the opportunities that were inherent in a decent education (but then I threw over my Masters degree in science to go and write books. Go figure). I have never starved. I have never been abused. I have always been loved by somebody, somewhere, sometimes a great deal. But none of those things correlate with "white", particularly. There are plenty of well-read, well-educated, well-fed, well-loved people living in China, in India, in the Arab world, and yes, even in the non-white section of the population in the USA - just as there are just as many dirt-poor white "privileged" kids living in tenements and eating potato peel soup and never seeing a book and being beaten every day by a vicious monster masquerading as their parent's current and often transient boyfriend or girlfriend. I CANNOT be held to be utterly privileged simply because I was born pink, and I'm sorry, but that's just as bad as a white person holding a brown-skinned person of any particular lineage (be they black, Latino, Indian, Arab) a less worthy "sub-species" than themselves by virtue of ONLY the colour of their skin.
Next time we're at the same con at the same time - next Wiscon, perhaps - look me up and I'll buy you a drink or a cup of coffee or whatever your poison happens to be at the time and we can talk about it. Not as Brown and White. As people.
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Because you are white and you get not to have to notice other people's race, that means you don't know what race issues are like for people who aren't white like you.
The way to start finding out is to listen.
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I know where you are coming from -- I have a mother who was raised in an environment where she just didn't absorb a lot of the everyday assumptions of racism in the U.S. This does not, however, mean she is color-blind. Those are two different things. I tell cute stories about her obliviousness to certain stereotypes; I do not hold her up as an avatar of progessive blindness.
Ignoring context -- and race and culture are a context -- is not progressive. There are certainly ways of talking "brown to white" and vice-versa that can be meaningful. Blindness is a *deficit*, to be corrected, not rewarded. If you can't see or acknowledge difference, privilege, etc., you are never going to be able to contribute to tearing those power systems down. That's not the fault of the person who *does* see difference and tries to talk about it. We call that "blaming the victim."
If you haven't read the essay by Peggy McIntosh about "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack," I strongly suggest you do.
In the meantime, people are letting you know that you are inadvertently marginalizing and offending them. Right now. Please try to listen.
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All right. I am listening.
Like I said in my earlier replies, I understand there is a context. Part of MY solution to the problems inherent in that context is trying to treat everyone as equals - not by dismissing the past, the history and baggage that came before, but by attempting to trying to create a future where they become less divisive than they have been before.
But all right. I am listening. I will say no more.
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I hope by "say no more" that you are not withdrawing from the issue. It's problematic, because that kind of withdrawal is another kind of privilege that accrues to being white. It might be more useful if you went to the Peggy MacIntosh link, read through that, and came back to discuss it further.
Just a thought.
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She says that it seems to her that obliviousness about white advantage … “is kept strongly inculturated in the United States so as to maintain the myth of meritocracy, the myth that democratic choice is equally available to all. Keeping most people unaware that freedom of confident action is there for just a small number of people props up those in power and serves to keep power in the hands of the same groups that have most of it already.”
Ain’t that the truth. But that cuts across all sorts of lines, and not just racial ones.
In the "White Privilege, let me count the ways" section - which is full and enlightening, there are definitely items that absolutely apply in modern-day America - there is an utterly disproportionate number of people in American jails who happen to be black, put there for having done things, or on suspicion of having done things, that one could easily see a guy with a white face being given at the very least a lighter sentence if not a free pass on. We can be almost certain that if a darker-skinned individual was seen anywhere near a scene of a crime that would be the first suspect the police would look for. We have that infamous video of police piling into a guy called Rodney King to show that police can be more brutal, with impunity, with people who happen to be upholstered in the "wrong" shade of skin. I, as a white woman, might have been made to feel the ill-will of a police posse in more psychologically intimidating but less physical ways - I would probably not be treated in the same way as King was.
But there are items on Peggy’s list that I do take issue with. Some of them are issues of class as well as or equally those of race - “I can talk with my mouth full and not have people put this down to [my color]; I can swear, or dress in second hand clothes, or not answer letters, without having people attribute these choices to the bad morals, the poverty or the illiteracy of [my race] - replace the bracketed text with “my class” and you have the stratified society of a Britain where Eliza Doolittle had to be taught how to drink tea if she wanted to be considered “a lady”. And a lot of the early American segregation signs bear mute witness to much of this - “No Blacks or Irish”. Even the “I can walk into a salon and be certain of finding someone to cut my hair” is an iffy one - only women of a certain societal level have the kind of disposable income required for regular visits to a salon, and therefore a certain kind of hairdressing has evolved to accommodate this. I might add that I have YET to find a haridresser who can cut MY hair properly, and I’m shinigly Caucasian, just with fiercely independent kind of hair that obstinately refuses to take any hairdressing ministrations lying down.
It would take too long to discuss it in detail here, but a quick look at her #23: “I can criticize our government and talk about how much I fear its policies and behavior without being seen as a cultural outsider.”
My (white) husband does this on a daily basis, and trust me, he is frequently made to feel like the lunatic fringe.
Oh, there’s more here than just one comment on a blog post. This will have to do for now.
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But I'm troubled that you've immediately reached for the "exceptions" (which are not really exceptions so much as items showing the intersectionality between class and race, and the buzzsaw effect they have on communities of color).
FWIW, I've taught this subject at Iowa State University, so much of what you've said is familiar to me from students who do not want to recognize their own privilege or the persistent character of institutionalized racism in our society. We're not quite to the pulling out tons of research stage, but I assure you it's quite real and quite powerful - and people in advantaged positions (white, middle-class, male, heterosexual, etc.) benefit from this structured inequality - even when they individually protest against it. So the question ought not be, "does this exist?" What it ought to be is, "so what are people in advantaged positions going to do about it?"
I could suggest that you re-read Letter from Birmingham Jail by Dr. King, but that might be a bit much.
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And your solution to the problems is soaking in white privilege, is incredibly dismissive to people of color, and also derails the hell out of conversations about race and racism.
PS
http://www.amptoons.com/blog/archives/2005/12/02/how-not-to-be-insane-when-accused-of-racism/
http://seamonkey.ed.asu.edu/~mcisaac/emc598ge/Unpacking.html
http://coffeeandink.livejournal.com/607897.html
http://blog.shrub.com/archives/tekanji/2006-03-08_146
http://brutalwomen.blogspot.com/2007/07/why-writing-colorblind-is-writing-white.html
http://blogs.dallasobserver.com/unfairpark/2007/05/color_theory.php
http://jonquil.livejournal.com/603766.html
http://community.livejournal.com/sex_and_race/296541.html
PPS Your "solution" and talking about your dad are some classicly clueless solutions. They are nothing new and they are not helpful. Please stop using them.
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But I utterly fail to comprehend why an honest attitude of NOT differentiating between any two people on the basis of what their physical packaging happens to be is considered "dismissive" - especially when any sort of reverse reaction, responding a colour difference simply BECAUSE of the colour difference, would (rightly) be considered resoundingly racist.
So my question remains, what is it that I SHOULD do? Because it seems to be that those are my two choices, SEEING the colour line constantly and differntiating between myself and another human being on that trivial surface basis every time I set eyes on an unfamiliar face or choosing to NOT see the colour and accepting the person in question as just another human being whose place in this world is as deserved as mine.
Once again I can simply say I'm sorry and I'll back away.
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I am uninterested in having a dialogue if you are unwilling to do some of the very minimal reading which would answer your questions.
Also, please note that you are the one martyring yourself as unredeemable and resoundingly racist, not me.
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For the record, I HAVE been poking around the net and I've seen the video blog of the people leaving the panel and their comments in the aftermath. There were several that I recognised as pertinent to things that I myself had said - and at least one of them was painfully Americentric in the sense of somebody living in a continent-sized country completely having failed to get the concept of the response of somebody who has shifted borders and continents too many times to count and learning to buffet the culture shocks any way they can. No, I am not trying to change the subject, but I was sharing a piece of the world *as I had experienced it*, a part of the human race in diaspora, and it does not make it any less valid for apparently being misunderstood in context.
Which brings me back to the subject under discussion, which (in the context of the comment above) is dialogue. Should I return after dutifully having read every URL thrown at me - which may take some time, thank you, because I am not about to drop all the threads of my post-con life and do exclusively that for the rest of the week - are you willing to have any dialogue at all unless I come back saying, ah, I see, and I agree with every sentence down to the punctuation?...
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That is not an accurate translation. You may want to do some more thinking and reading about what white privilege is. Reading some of those links will help.
Which brings me back to the subject under discussion, which (in the context of the comment above) is dialogue. Should I return after dutifully having read every URL thrown at me - which may take some time, thank you, because I am not about to drop all the threads of my post-con life and do exclusively that for the rest of the week - are you willing to have any dialogue at all unless I come back saying, ah, I see, and I agree with every sentence down to the punctuation?...
It seems like you have already decided what my opinion is of you and how I am going to respond to anything you have to say.
I have not stated how I think you are going to respond to any of those links, because I don't know what that reaction will be. I assume it will include some of the very typical responses white people have to being confronted by their privilege (defensiveness, discomfort, etc.). Those are normal reactions. How you as individual will deal with them, unknown.
I said I am not interested in having a dialogue with you unless you have done the basic reading. That is still true. If you're asking me if I promise to engage in dialogue with you after you have done some basic education on racism, that is not a promise I can make. I would hope you would want to educate yourself on this topic out of a general desire to understand race and racism, and be better equipped to fight against it, rather than out of a desire to score points in a debate, but I'm idealistic like that. I can say that I am willing to engage in dialogue after you have done some basic reading. I can't promise I will.
Also, I would remind you that there is racism based on skin color going on in places outside of America, and that many of the people who had strong negative reactions to "but my dad doesn't see race" have strong ties to communities and cultures outside of the US.
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