Comments | coffeeandink: Will Shetterly: DO NOT ENGAGE

coffeeandink

Will Shetterly: DO NOT ENGAGE

Jan 19, 2009 18:17

I am not putting this public just because I banned willshetterly a few years ago and I think it's tacky to make a public post warning people against him that he cannot comment on. But I am willing to be tacky in front of my friends! Never mind, I will be tacky in front of the world. It is worth it if I can spare someone the pain of attempting to argue with ( Read more... )

fandom, race, class, sf/f, will shetterly is an abusive asshole, gcadod09

Leave a comment

Back to all threads

Will Shetterly IHU sparkymonster January 20 2009, 02:27:16 UTC

Case in point about willshetterly

(orig context, since deleted http://willshetterly.livejournal.com/53471.html)

Will Shetterly (willshetterly) replied to your LiveJournal comment in which
you said:

> I wish someone would do a taxi test with a middle class black and a
> "trailer trash" white. For those who want to play the oppression
> hierarchy game, the result would be interesting.> Michael Moore did with Yaphett Kotto and a poor white man who had an ( ... )

Re: Will Shetterly IHU sparkymonster January 20 2009, 02:30:47 UTC

(orig context, since deleted http://willshetterly.livejournal.com/53471.html)
Will Shetterly (willshetterly) replied to your LiveJournal comment in which
- Hide quoted text -
you said:

> Of course OJ is an anomaly in the experience of African Americans. The
> point is that he's not an anomaly in the experience of the rich. By
> becoming rich, he becomes green, not black.> Actually he doesn't. Rich black people face a lot of the same racially ( ... )

Re: Will Shetterly IHU sparkymonster January 20 2009, 02:31:28 UTC

(orig context, since deleted http://willshetterly.livejournal.com/53471.html)
Will Shetterly (willshetterly) replied to your LiveJournal comment in which
you said:

> So you do in fact believe in a hierarchy of oppression.

Their reply was:

Yes. I don't believe that if you remove classism, all the other isms die
instantly. But I believe life becomes better for everyone once classism
is gone, and it's easier to get rid of the other isms when people are no
longer desperate. Classism bolsters every ism I can think of. Racism and
sexism and all the rest are tools that the champions of hierarchy love to
employ.

Re: Will Shetterly IHU sparkymonster January 20 2009, 02:31:46 UTC

Will Shetterly (willshetterly) replied to your LiveJournal comment in which ( ... )

Re: Will Shetterly IHU sparkymonster January 20 2009, 02:32:27 UTC

All of this came from a post of his, now deleted, about how his life wouldn't have been very different if he was born black. IT WAS AMAZING BY WHICH I MEAN THE WORST THING EVER OMFG

Re: Will Shetterly IHU veejane January 20 2009, 03:12:06 UTC

Ah ha ha. I remember some of that from summer 2007. Actually what I remember was how he called himself lower-middle class, and yet had a trust fund and went to Choate.

(My Choatey white butt laughed and laughed at him, but after the first or second try didn't even bother. If he can't even speak truthfully about his own personal wank issue, how on earth could he possibly give the time of day to any other issue? It was clearly all about his proving his righteousness, from a very slender body of evidence.)

Re: Will Shetterly IHU brown_betty January 20 2009, 03:40:33 UTC

WHAT? Are you able to source that? Because, TRUST FUND? I mean, I don't distrust you, but it's so incredible I kind of want-- something.

Re: Will Shetterly IHU icecreamempress January 20 2009, 03:48:56 UTC

According to him, he went to Choate "courtesy of" family money.

Re: Will Shetterly IHU brown_betty January 20 2009, 03:58:12 UTC

Uh, wow. I mean, not that one needs to be poor to concern oneself with poverty, and in fact it's nice that he could overlook his relative comfort etc., but that's not precisely the image I had of him, which was more in the line of “cuttig the toes out of tennis shoes to get another years' wear” kind of stuff.

Re: Will Shetterly IHU icecreamempress January 20 2009, 04:02:21 UTC

As I said somewhere about this, it seems to me that the Self-Identified Poor White Men Who Are Just As Oppressed As Everyone Else are generally comparing their privilege to George W. Bush's, not to actual poor people or actual oppressed people.

My family didn't have much money growing up, but I was still marinating in upper-middle-class white American privilege, and the fact that we were broke didn't mitigate that. Nobody was ever stopped for Driving While Broke.

Re: Will Shetterly IHU skywardprodigal January 20 2009, 14:44:38 UTC

Tis a digression, but there are parts of America where (white) people get stopped for driving while poor.

Re: Will Shetterly IHU icecreamempress January 20 2009, 17:21:40 UTC

Yes. What I'm arguing is that families like mine were broke but not poor.

If my father had gotten stopped because he was driving a rusted-out beater, his self-presentation as a former college professor with an accent almost indistinguishable from John F. Kennedy's would almost certainly have made a huge difference in how the person who stopped him treated him. My father would have had a lawyer he could call. My father would have been able to read and fully understand any document that he was pressured to sign.

A lot of people with the same or even more money than my family had growing up didn't have any of those resources. And those came from privilege.

Re: Will Shetterly IHU skywardprodigal January 20 2009, 17:37:52 UTC

Yes. What I'm arguing is that families like mine were broke but not poor.

Thank you for making sure I understood the distinction you make between broke and poor.

Certain kinds of privilege aren't liquid, but still valuable?

Shetterly trips me out with his insistence that all white people of lower classes are the same as people who grew up in a holler.

Re: Will Shetterly IHU icecreamempress January 20 2009, 18:10:26 UTC

Shetterly trips me out with his insistence that all white people without money are considered members of the working class. Odd words indeed for someone who went to Choate thanks to a family inheritance.

Re: Will Shetterly IHU skywardprodigal January 23 2009, 19:45:09 UTC

I think that's got to be a selective thing. But maybe he really doesn't get that in the states, black families are less likely than white families to be able to go to school because of an inheritance, small or big, left to them by another family member.

Wealth stripping of minorities is so common in the states. And black communities have/are targeted for that. Canada's special in that black communities have often been cut off at the knees/isolated and then made to disappear. :(

Maybe he likes to think that all white people have earned (through their own work, and no one else's) every financial resource they have at their disposal.

Wow, wouldn't that explain his obvious (except to him) sense of entitlement on behalf of so-called working white people everywhere? Maybe he thinks he earned the inheritance that got him into Choate? Or perhaps because he didn't finish up at Choate he didn't benefit from it?

Re: Will Shetterly IHU coffeeandink January 23 2009, 19:49:39 UTC

But maybe he really doesn't get that in the states, black families are less likely than white families to be able to go to school because of an inheritance, small or big, left to them by another family member.

The thing is, I am fairly sure more than one person attempted to explain this to him in the now-deleted "My life would have been the same if I'd been born black" post. I mean, he "really doesn't get it" in the sense that he is apparently sincere in all the arguments he makes, but that doesn't mean the way he misreads people is any less whacky.

Back to all threads