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In a nutshell Experience Racism as Republican strategy
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For what it’s worth, I don’t like Bitch Lab, I don’t read her, I don’t think she’s very bright, and I think the main thing she piggybacked on recently was a comment thread to a post she didn’t author. Nice appropriation, that.
So: Don’t like Bitch Lab? Join the club, and don’t read her. Read the women she rips off instead. They’re better.
So: Don’t like Bitch Lab? Join the club, and don’t read her. Read the women she rips off instead. They’re better.
04-03-2006
Just go ahead and bitch
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[...] Bitch|Lab: What Should White People Do? [...]
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Wow! I have GOT to get this book! We just read an article of hers recently in my fem theory class. I’ll add it to the pile of books on the coffee table I was going to read over the summer if I didn’t get the internship I just got! LOL
Anyway, in response to this:
“Every individual, I would argue, needs to feel a connection to community, to a history, and to a human project larger than his or her own life. Without this connection, we are bereft of a concern for the future or an investment in the fate of our community.”
Right, of course, but the question is who is your community? I *do* feel very connected but I feel more connected with humanity as a whole rather than with one particular grouping of humanity. I know that sounds idealistic but I really feel no particular alligence to white people, the U.S.A, Scotland (where my grandma’s from) or anything else besides maybe activist/social agigitator type people. It’s that last category I guess that really gives me a sense of history, that makes me feel like part of something larger than myself. I see myself as part of a long wave of a historical resistance movement.
“the unchecked frenzy of consumption that ignores its likely long-term effects to the anarcho-libertarianism that is rife in the corporate United States at all levels and that values only immediate individual desires.” this is the “white North American culture” I was talking about over at my blog! (not to open that Can of Worms again, just sayin’!)
Anyway, great post!
@ Barb
I think the problem with that — and this will probably be kind of opaque for now — is that you don’t get any bonus points, in my book, for identifying with a chosen community that ostensibly transcends nations, ethnicities, and races.
For one, choosing a community is a very American thing to do — a deeply felt sentiment that’s part of our heritage. Indeed, the whole nation was pretty much forged on the notion that it could escape the evil and corruption that was Europe at the time and build a city on a hill.
Bellah et al. (Habits of the Heart) call this attempt to identify with a political community that transcends these problems — the very real power structures that make such a political imaginary possible — a “lifestyle enclave”. It can be political, consumerist, based on traditional notions of identity, or some combo. . The notion that you can simply shuck off the community in which you were born and/or socialized and create your own — well, you bring the US with you when you espouse that ideal. The whole concept is really very Western and deeply embedded in the history and cultural mythology of the US. (Mona Harringtong calls it the Dream of Deliverance in US Politics)
And, Bellah et al. also argue that the choice to live in a self-selected ‘lifestyle enclave’ while it has it good sides, it is often founded on precisely the kind of alienation of which you speak. So, while you may wish to suggest that a lot of other people in White culture are alienated, how do you know? Who says you aren’t alienated and can transcend it to something more free in your estimation (because of your lifestyle choice) and they are and will remain alienated because they’ve chosen not to give up their identity? This is the undercurrent that bothers me about positing the superiority of choosing a transcendant community to which one can belong, leaving behind what’s troubling.
Then, there are people who don’t feel they can simply give up their identity. After all, to foreswear a racial or national identity and say, “I identify as an activist” is not something people of color always feel they can do. They can’t say, “I’m not Latina and I don’t identify. Instead, I belong to this political community of historical activism.”
They can say it, but it is WAY harder for them to do and it may just feel really _bad_ to them to do it. The ease with which one can shuck off US identity and whiteness, I think that idea comes from primarily experiencing the world as privileged by whiteness. And also from the privilege born of having the time and energy to explore how you are privileged by whiteness.
Those are just a few thing off the top of my head that sound really problematic about taking that position.
One other thing, which I want to think through more carefully, is the implication of claiming the possibility of identifying with ‘humanity’. Who’s humanity? How do you define humanity? What’s human? What’s not human?
These sound like academic questions. Yet, they are the very questions at the heart of these wars we’re having in Blogoliciousville — what’s a woman, what’s women’s sexuality? how is woman shaped by class/race/nation/etc.?
It’s pretty much impossible to create a definition that doesn’t exclude and name some thing(s) not human or as not part of humanity.
So, we need to ask: what are the implicit assumptions aobut what counts as human? What western traditions are you bringing with you? Who’s/What’s being othered. (the environmnetalists might object here.) In forging this new understanding of what counts as human, whose voices are we listening to? Do we decenter US notions of what counts as human/humanity to privilege those who’ve been dominated, marginalized, excluded, silenced?
How do you know that you are reinscribing the same patterns involved in the way whiteness was built — by simultaneously erasing whiteness even as it racializes Others? If you cn know, how to you take care that the methods you employ to come to that knowledge aren’t also reproducing domination?
Just a few thoughts and sorry if they make no sense! :))
I think it all starts with basic curiousity about your fellow human critters. The willing to accept just the presence of the “other” (in this case, meaning pretty much anyone who isn’t you, or anything you already know), without judgment. And you take it from there.
“anything you *don’t* already know”
I also believe we need a profound connection to community and history. But I struggle with a loosely-held heritage of invaders and “settlers.” I don’t feel much of a connection with my history, so I live in ambiguity adopting bits of culture here and there and creating others for myself and my family. (More on that here) I’m not “giving up” my identity so much as ignoring it because my ancestory background has had little clear impact on who I am. It’s like finding out an uncle you never knew you had died. There’s an affiliation in name only.
But beyond heritage, I think we often connect with people based on a mainstream or majority perception of “otherness” about us as a smaller group. In that sense, it’s not my whiteness that stands out in a sea of pale. If anything, it’s my different lifestyle and opinions. When I think about the community I’ve formed for myself, it’s with philosophy types, the social analysts, the think-outside-the-box people.
It’s a chosen community that transcends nation, ethnicity and race, and it can certainly be seen as founded on alienation, but it can *also* be seen as merely a natural tendency to collect together based on shared experiences or other basic similarities.
@ Sage
That’s just my point. You don’t transcend it at all. You just bring it with you. Saying you transcend whiteness, as if you can create your own community on your own go-power? — that’s an extremely western way of looking at community. So, by founding community on the idea of making our own, out of whole-cloth, you aren’t leaving whiteness or USness behind at all.
Other cultures may not see community this way. The very notion might be ludicrous to them.
So, while it may be ‘natural’ to create communities, the notion that we create them by dropping our identity like a cardigan tossed into the dirty clothes pile, is a particular idea about how to ‘do’ community. I think we have an obligation to interrogate the concepts we’re using, the way we’re constructing “community” for example.
This is nothing new — the idea of forging a community that transcended local identities. Perry Anderson wrote about how nationalism emerged as a shared, “imagined community”. The idea of belonging to a nation made no sense to people at the time. You belonged to a vilage, fiefdom, family. But to belong to some other group on the other side of a territory? That you were a citizen of France? of England?
Now, people want to imagine another community, one that transcends the nation and unites the globe. To adjudicate belongingness, we apparently have to drop our ethnicity and race at the door and unite around a shared community of activists? Yet, this very ideas of doing this — imagining a transcendent community where the identity with that community trumps all others? — very Western way of thinking about it.
The ideal of appealing to a common humanity was also part of the Enlightenment. The French Revolution appealed to it. The Declaration appealed to this common humanity. Then, we were mistaken about who counted as human. Who’s not human in our new imagingings of a transcendent global community? Asking about who the “others” are, when you imagine a transcendent global community, is asking people to think about how we must be reinscribing our whiteness and westerness in ways we don’t even realize.
I wonder if this idea of “transcending” communities of race and ethnicity isn’t what lies at the root of the recent uh, “conversations” around here. It would never occur to me that I can ignore my background and join the feminst community. I have to, and want to bring it with me. It’s part of what I’m fighting for.
And, I think it’s hard to
oh wait, is not having any special allegience to a community the same as transcending it? ’cause I don’t think I’d say that I could transcend whiteness.
but whatever.
I don’t want any bonus points from you anyway.
@ Thagmano
I think you are exactly right! This is an excellent way to think of it. And it’s funny, but I’ve been bugged about the “critical whiteness” stuff for quite some time and I could never put my finger on it. I think I’ve read Rachel at Rachel’s Tavern critically assessing the limitations of these approaches sometimes. Will have to go search around to see.
I’ve written something here on the forms of logic which can be the underlying basis for “community”.
It IS more than a little succinct, however…………………………..
[...] Bitch|Lab: What Should White People Do? [...]
Identify as: Homo sapiens sapiens, majority-race, “white”, female, middle-aged, American, urbanite, geek, lesbian, privileged socioeconomic status by upbringing and occupation, Midwestern, academic, leftie, dilettante-artsy (ie, hobbyist), Christian, out-of-date, ….
We all have origins and personal histories, thus we all have multiple identities which are emphasized or de-emphasized according to the situation. I am female and that identity governs which restroom I use - in that setting no-one much cares about my politics or musical hobby. I am more likely to get a warning and not a speeding ticket from a cop because I am white (not black), and am not likely to get a pass because I happen to be playing a Verdi opera rather than Beatles or Kanye West (some may argue with that point, saying that the officer would rather just get rid of me than listen to some of that operatic “screeching”). You can’t totally shed an identity, however, since it is part of your past. Transwomen aren’t “exactly like” birth-genital women, because the history pre-transition isn’t the same. So transwomen are women and “formerly considered men by others” at the same time.
We will eventually have to co-identify with Homo sapiens sapiens, simply because we all share the same planet, and all have vulnerability to various infectious diseases and natural disasters that do not respect our national boundaries.
[…] This post, What should white people do? over at Bitch Lab is running through my brain right now. In comments, Barb says: […]
@ barb
I’d say so. #2 and 3 seem to fit your own word to a T.
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=transcend
You advocated a way of looking at your identity where you have no “special allegiance to a community.”
The community you have no special allegiance to is a concept of community in terms of your whiteness and national identity. That’s a notion of community as one you’re are born into with no choice in the matter.
Then, you switch to a different concept of community — a chosen community — and you position the identity you have with that community as chosen. Not only that, it’s the one that gives you meaning. The others don’t.
Thus, you’ve set up a hiearchy, where one is preferred to the other. (Def 2.) The chosen community is greater in intensity and power to your communities of birth.
Hence, against what you assume is Alcoff’s reference to whiteness and possibly nationality, you set out to show how that’s not good enough for you. You have a better idea. Your idea is to define for yourself a community to which you shall belong.
I merely pointed out that your notion of community and the idea that you can simply join one, tell yourself that you’ve declared that community superior by virtue of the meaning you personally derive from it, and to insist that the others s mean nothing to you is a position you take because it is made possible by whiteness and USness.
Thus, from your very privilege, you embrace and uphold the superiority of an identity that others cannot so easily embrace. Those others are the very people you wish not to oppress further. So, taking care with how we conceive of things like ‘community’ matters because we may just not realize we are working from a standpoint of privilege.
Isn’t that what being cognizant of privilege is supposed to be all about? the things you can take for granted?
Although you position the chosen community as one that has no attachment to the other communities to which you have no allegiance (def. #3), the fact is that the very idea of a chosen community is very much a part of the given communities of which you claim to have no allegiance.
Well, as you said, I’m a dummy. That might explain the problem. Right?
I’m not sure why you’re so hostile but calling me dummy isn’t likely to put me in the mood to choose my words carefully.
Although you position the chosen community as one that has no attachment to the other communities to which you have no allegiance (def. #3), the fact is that the very idea of a chosen community is very much a part of the given communities of which you claim to have no allegiance.
This is an excellent point! It also relates to a difference between bourgeois (middle class) perspectives in general, versus the experiences (noting that one’s perspectives may at times be different from what one’s own experiences would suggest as being appropriate self-interested perspectives) of non-privileged people.
Bourgeois ideology generally posits that identity (including the various and contingent experiences which make up our sense of self-identities) is necessarily CHOSEN. So, if I work in a place which is bad for my health, or I have family members who are abusive, and so on, then to the bourgeois mindset, I must have CHOSEN these circumstances on some level. And if they were environmental elements of my own choosing, then why help me in any physical, material way? There would be no point! I’d simply have to raise my consciousness level enough to be able to pull myself up by bootstraps! — and, indeed, some oppressed people do manage to succeed with this.
But going back to the specific topic of choosing one’s racial identification — I think the issue here, too, must be brought back to a material level. It must be removed from the level of ideology and abstractive morality. So, if by renouncing my “whiteness”, I actually am able to practically help somebody less well off, then that is well and good. If the renunciation occurs at the level of ideology and abstract principle, then I would say it is of no value whatsoever — except for salving delicate and overly pampered consciences!
Bare with me, I’m still not getting it. Then again’s post helped a bit, but I hope you can clarify further for me.
Here’s how I understand what you’re saying (but I think I’m mistaken):
I know I’m not leaving my whiteness behind in choosing an intentional community, but bringing it with me. I’m not sure why that’s a problem. Will anyone non-white necessarily see me as the enslaver or invader? Because some white people think blacks are thieves (like in then again’s post), will every non-white believe that’s how I view them too??
I’m not denying whiteness (does this post help?), but I don’t seek out other white people specifically in my quest for connectedness. Must my community be only with other people of the same ethnicity? Since my ethnicity is mixed with none dominating, how do I seek out others like me? (I’m not being glib or sarcastic here; I’m trying to understand your point more clearly.)
I’m not looking to create a global community, but my need for a profound connection to community with others has brought me to a group of people in which race/ethnicity isn’t a dominant factor, a group that includes a variety of races and ethnicities. As someone who never fit in with others very well, the first time I did fit anywhere was a pivotal experience of connectedness for me. It was in a philosophy class that I took on a lark.
I feel like you’re telling me I must reject this created community because there’s something wrong or dishonest with connecting outside my race or ethnicity. Must I exclude my non-white friends in being part of a community with me in order to be true to my heritage?? Because that feels racist to me.
I don’t look at someone white and think, “They’re like me.” But I do think that when I meet people who hold similar ideas or a similar willingness to explore ideas to death.
I hope you can help bridge the gap between your views and my understand of them!!
@ Sage
There’s a lot here, but I want to correct a misunderstanding.
I’m not saying you can’t join a community or see that community as more important than anything. What I reject are implicit claims that such communities are superior or that they are free of oppressive relationships by virtue of their being chosen, which you may not be saying at all.
“I don’t look at someone white and think, “They’re like me.” But I do think that when I meet people who hold similar ideas or a similar willingness to explore ideas to death.”
This is interesting, but I always thought this was almost the very defintion of white privilege: the ability to imagine there isn’t a whiteness that unites you and necessarily makes you like other whites.
Am I wrong about that?
@ sage
damn dog — he noses my wrist when I’m typing and I hit some kind of short cut or something, sending that out before I was done.
Anyway, I want to go through the thread again more carefully and respond later. Thurs is a busy day and my deadline is around midnight. I’ll try to set aside time to reply more carefully.
jeez! the damn dog wn’t leave me alone. what a baby!