Our friend, the throat-punching machine.

[alexandraerin]

This post is the sequel to my previous post about the notion of a "throat-punching machine". It has been sitting in an open Notepad window on my netbook for a couple of weeks now. A post on a friend's Livejournal made me realize I never actually put it up

Comments

[meleth]

If I do very little with my hair, and never put on any harsh chemicals designed to make it do something it otherwise wouldn't, that isn't considered a political statement. Nobody thinks I'm angry, or radical, or dangerous, simply because I don't do anything more to my hair than keep it clean and brushed. HUGE advantage.

[alexandraerin]

Exactly. Your hair is just your hair... it's not a radical statement unless you do something radical with it.

[fatefox]

Here's a quandry, that some of us will have to deal with.... If you choose not to allow this through, I understand. It's just a comment, not choosing sides.

I am personally an all-American Mutt. (Spanish & Indian on Mom's side, pure WASP on the other.) The irony is this:

I'm just a bit on the dark side of "average". (And why is Italian considered White, but Spanish considered "nonWhite"? I digress....)

To the average White person, I'm "Mexican".
To the average minority person, I'm "White".

Some of us don't even get the benefit of being any racial background. The only (somewhat amusing) benefit of having 12% Kickapoo blood was telling a bunch of WHITE people that if they didn't like it here, they could get off my land and go back where they came from.

[alexandraerin]

My boyfriend's in a similar boat.

If the United States were bordered by/near to former Italian colonies where Italian was still the dominant language and the inhabitants were descended from a mixture of native and Italian blood, "Italic ancestry" would be considered non-white today, and people who actually came from Italy would be constantly clarifying that they didn't come from the country to the south of us but from Italy, that they were Italian, not Italic, much as people from Spain frequently have to do when they visit the U.S.

Of course, for much of our history, Italians were strongly marked as "ethnic", as were Irish and Slavs and other European groups... the WASP stereotype exists because it was the standard against which other groups were judged. And there is still a bit of that around... more in some places than others. But the rise of African-Americans from slaves to freemen and then citizens who are supposed to be equal under the law changed the dynamic quite a bit. When people say "I don't consider myself an [Italian/

Other calibrations

[silromen]

I know your focus is racism, but the example of professional dress got me thinking - we could probably extend the argument of privilege to types of thinkers, aptitudes, things like that. I've been looking around at the world for a while now and it seems like - specifically in this country - there is a bias towards white-collar nondescript office jobs as being the standard and things like art and performance and writing being looked at askance, as though right-brained people are somehow lesser (or open-minded people are lesser). The kicker of it is, all those left-brained people need those right-brained people terribly, and they don't even know it.

Re: Other calibrations

[alexandraerin]

As a free-wheeling bisexual trans woman of the creative sort, I know what you're talking about. Really, it comes down to homogeneity and heteronormativity, full stop

[reynai]

Oddly sychronicitously, The Ferrett posted a link to an article just a few entries down my f-list that also deals with this issue, that if you haven't seen, I thought you might be interested. The article is here while Ferrett's entry, that contains an excerpt that seemed quite a propos is here.

I remember the first time I learned that some people don't have hair exactly like mine, and was utterly shocked -- the concept had never occurred to me, and I wonder even now how many people are unaware of it, and think of some of the 'black hairstyles' as being merely ethnic rather than also functional. It also makes me feel terribly ignorant -- how many more such things are there, differences between people, that I simply do not know about?

[alexandraerin]

I really like the main point of that linked article about "diversity being the canary in the coal mine" for meritocracy... a lot of times people think that anybody promoting diversity is trying to undermine meritocracy, by promoting people because of their race or religion or gender or whatever instead of how good a job they do.

But where diversity isn't present, it's a sign that meritocracy is imperiled... if you actually are bringing in the best candidates for a job, then you should end up with a diverse cross-section. If your pool ends up looking awfully homogeneous, then chances are factors besides merit are at play.

[anelfgirl]

in an ideal world, where everyone got the same education and had the same access to job training, yes, you should expect the most qualified applicants to be pretty well distributed as matches the population proportions.

[alexandraerin]

Well, yes, not all the factors beyond raw merit are going to be within the control of the company/person doing the selection.

[stormcaller3801]

I've actually wondered about this with regards to myself, simply because of the fact that one of my hangouts used to be in a rather high-crime area. Every now and then somebody will come in and their clothing, their hair, and their posture all suggests someone who's homeless or nearly so. And my first reaction is a quick rundown of potential dangers- including whether they might be there to rob the store. That's never happened, they just ask for change for a $5, or something along those lines. But it always goes through my head, and I always wonder, "If this person was white, would I react the same way