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.
03-25-2007
Just go ahead and bitch
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Don’t worry too much. We PoC aren’t above perpetuating racism either. Oppression intersects with privilege, too. PoC can be just as demanding and dismissive of less-privileged PoC as white people can be towards PoC. Everyone has something to learn about being an ally.
But I do see what you mean…
Whiteness trades on masking structural privilege behind individuality, so when white people are challenged on their privilege, there’s an automatic sense that it’s about them-as-a-person, their identity rather than their social position. Other types of privilege (middle-class and male privilege, mostly, but other types perform this ideological trick too) work by rendering their corresponding oppressions invisible too, as well as mystifying the conditions enabling that privilege.
Part of undoing whiteness is undoing that knee-jerk defensiveness, IMO.
I think one can -listen- without -shutting up,- yanno. “active listening,” say.
I know what you mean; I also think it’s hard to rally engage as a “silent partner.”
There is still a difference between engaging WITH [the people you want to ally with] and speaking for them and how VERY MUCH YOU’VE DONE FOR THEM, like y’know f’r instance o FUCKING THEM and MARRYING THEM and HAVING KIDS WITH THEM *koff*
and yeah, even so, you’re gonna fuck up, and some people are gonna think yer a ___ist asshole, and maybe…
well, rule of tails, as always; one person says you have a tail, you can ignore it, two people, look behind you, three, four, more–yep, you’ve got a tail.
and then, you do with that news what you will, yanno.
I dunno, Bitch, shutting up and listening is probably a good idea in almost any context, hah, like I follow that advice (not!), and white people could surely stand to shut up and listen to PoC without being surprised that they’re so “articulate.”
But it does not seem to me that guilt and self-flagellation are particularly constructive emotions. Cool outrage, irony, humility, and solidarity strike me as better.
Sure, white people have undeserved privileges, but wtf, it doesn’t help anyone to feel guilty about.
It seems that every year about this time I have another reason to quote the Brecht poem that is the source of my handle, An Die Nachgeborenen, To Those Born Later. Here’s a verse that seems apt in the context:
They say to me: eat and drink! Be happy that you have!
But how can I eat and drink, when
Every bite that I eat is ripped from the mouth of a starving man, and
My glass of water is being denied to one dying of thirst?
And yet I eat, and I drink.
Brecht goes on to discuss struggling against the circumstances that produce starvation and thirst and asks Those Born Later, in a future when people help each other, to look on us with forebearance.
The rhetorical posture is a little complex and it embodies all those emotions or perspectives I mentioned, but not guilt. Except in his case for having to lie down with butchers to fight those circumstances, since he was a Stalinist; I suppose we do the same, even if we are not Stalinists, but the guilt here is not in having unwanted privileges but being complicit in bad things to fight the circumstances that produce those privileges.
As a white male, I have been subjected to anti-white racism literally my entire working life — both in the military and in the civilian world. This has always taken the form of my having lost opportunities I had earned through hard work, diligence, and what I know to be exceptional intelligence and ability to those who exhibited and applied few or none of those qualities, but were “people of color.” In other words, Affirmative Action. What I’d like to know is — have I been the victim of racism?
I’ve certainly never had the power to practice any sort of constructive racism on any non-white person, even when it would have been the right thing to do at the time. I’ve always been required to let the PoC’s pass, regardless of their individual lack of qualities which would have caused them to be suitably deserving of greater rank, responsibility, and privilege. I could be just as fair and objective about the “white” people under my command as I cared to be, but the PoC’s had to be handled with kid gloves, and not made to feel disaccommodated in any way, lest there be retribution from the masters of political correctness.
If “whiteness” can be defined, then in my case, it would be described as “an attitude that where one ends up in life depends on his or her abilities and actions.” IOW, you get out what you put in. The PoC I’ve had to deal with, for the most part, feel that they have a natural entitlement to whatever they want, and all they have to do to “earn” it is to demand that they be given what they want, when they want it. Or else. For people of whiteness, there is never an “or else.” We have no power over anyone. At least, I never did.
I don’t know where this “whiteness” and it’s ill effects in society exists anymore, but I’ve never seen it in my 50+ years of life, and doubt that any other honest person has, either.
“…and doubt that any other honest person has, either.”
Way to invite discussion, Larry!
Since you believe anyone who disagrees with you is dishonest, I’ll leave you and your mirror to happily agree with everything you say! Have fun!
I agree with Larry Roll. POC do get everything we want when we want it. Just look at how many of us are leaders of industry, are senators and congresspersons, how many gated communities we occupy, how about the Fortune 500, every year 99.9% of the people it features are people of color! Then there is the media, every television program you watch the major characters are black, latino, asian, or native american. Oh they are nice enough to throw a token white in there once in awhile. In the news they only show whites as criminals all the feel good stories are about people of color. Then there is the fact that whites have to worry about being stopped by the cops randomly and for no reason, or checked as terrorists in the airports, or followed around stores afraid that white people are shoplifting, or imprisoned for minor offenses compared to people of color who have access to attorneys and are really innocent until proved guilty. As you can see everything in this country is geared towards people of color and whites just can’t catch a break.
There is more going on when I am tempted to add, that “I don’t mean you” when I am posting about racism, B|L. It’s kind of a protective mechanism for me which I really should learn to avoid. I don’t want to find out that another one of my friends is not really my friend. When one of these friends identifies with the white racist, I know I have probably already lost him or her. Even if it’s not directed towards me, but “those other people” are inferior, these are not people I want for friends anyway.
The same goes for the ones who close ranks instead of doing what is right. There were enough words thrown about during the burka incident that Marc, Amanda, and Lindsey should have understood what we were talking about but it was more important to protect the white privilege of their friend at the expense of their POC friends.
I just don’t like the feeling I get when I have the urge to type that I don’t mean “you”. Because it says that I still don’t trust my white friends. That I wonder if you think I am inferior and are humoring me. While I shouldn’t care about hanging on to one of these kind of people, everytime I find out that this is what they think of me it is painful, and I stop and wonder if I really am inferior. That is what I am avoiding.
And what I know to be exceptional intelligence
Can I put a hinge on the join at the top of your skull and use you as a jack-o-lantern come halloween? You do sound like a pre-scooped pumpkin and all.
I don’t know where this “whiteness” and it’s ill effects in society exists anymore, but I’ve never seen it in my 50+ years of life, and doubt that any other honest person has, either.
So for the, at minimum, first 20 years of your life, you lived in segregation era america, yet you’ve never seen the results of white supremacy in your entire life?
I get it! You’re amazing powers, Oh you big Hero you, is one of selective memory and a gross inattentiveness to the society you live in.
o~ I close my eyes/I cannot see/where oh where this racism be? ~o