links for 2009-01-17
January 17, 2009-
I think now is as good a time as any to talk about anti-semitism. To say otherwise is to play into the idea that the middle east is a zero-sum game between ‘Jews’ and ‘Palestinians’ and I don’t believe that. I don’t think that opposing anti-semitism diminishes our ability to stand in solidarity with the people with Gaza. I think opposing anti-semitism strengthens the movement in solidarity with the people of Gaza.
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I get the general, maybe unfair impression that most (white) writers who post that sort of comment are afraid not of actually screwing up what they write, but of being unfairly accused of doing so. It's like saying "I can't write about space travel! People will accuse me of knowing nothing about physics!" Bzuh? X does not imply Y, at least not if you do your research and don't write such a rushed hack job that it's blatantly obvious that, yeah, you really don't know anything about physics and can't be bothered to learn … in which case you kinda deserve to be taken to task for it.
That's a frivolous comparison, though, because it's much less important to get your physics right than to try not to screw up when you're writing about people's lives, people's identities. You're not going to break someone's heart if you misremember the Planck constant.
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Your learned, deeply ingrained way of relating to text IS NOT MORE IMPORTANT THAN NOT HARMING A PEOPLE. They're hell of not more important than not hurting me and others like me eager to see some semblance of self in a book and who instead end up having to discuss all over again, for the umpteenth time why YOU STEPPING ON MY FOOT HURTS!
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roundup/thoughts on the latest appropriation discussion/imbroglio.
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So the great cultural appropriation debate returns, and one thing in particular has been bugging me. A lot of the people talking in all these comment threads — clarification; a lot of the white people talking in these threads — keep complaining that all this scary appropriation stuff means they're damned if they do and damned if they don't, they can never write people of color to the satisfaction of PoC so they're not going to bother, I guess this means white men should only write white men, o woe, o melodrama.
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And there's the other frame, the idea that racism is structural and institutional and you can perpetuate it even while intending the opposite, because it's ingrained and pervasive and that POC see it everywhere because it is everywhere, not because they've got mean, faulty, POC goggles on. Racism is interwoven with everyone's history, and we all have to live with it and unmake it (or just survive it.) The goal for white people (but hint: the whole point of this frame is that it's not All About White People) is not to divorce themselves from their privilege by denying it, but to try to make things suck less for POCs, particularly by dismantling insitutional privilege where they can, and supporting POC's efforts to do so.
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- No one is interested in your guilt
I'm not interested in causing it, and I'm not interested in assuaging it. It bores me.
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It's so infuriating to see white people turn the issue into a drama with themselves at the center, where it's all about their conflict, their angst and anxiety, their needs and desires. Where people of color are only conceived of as undifferentiated masses of potential critics with impossible standards, whose sole form of engagement as readers is to scrutinize fiction for traces of racism to be denounced — where white people's sense of vulnerability to the extreme perceived harms of being challenged on putative racism threatens to eclipse entirely any sustained attention to and engagement with the lived experience of racism among actual people of color.
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So — if you are a living author, or a friend of one, I am happy to discuss the text, but I do not want to hear arguments about intent. It really matters very little if a writer is a racist or a well-meaning idiot or a passionate ally or a self-hating POC or a green alien. What matters is the effect of their words on (in this journal) me and my people. To steal an analogy from [info]daedala, dropping a bowling ball off a bridge that accidently smashes a car and deliberately dropping the bowling ball onto the car in order to hurt someone both result in people getting hurt. In a court of law, the distinction of intent is very important, because it is the difference between manslaughter and murder. But to the ambulance drivers and car repairpeople, it doesn't matter–they are only discussing the particulars of how the ball fell and what it broke in order to better serve the victims. Consider us ambulance drivers.
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If every time I spoke about women, I painted them as some mysterious other- magical and wise, vicious and cruel, stupid and helpless, lusty and animalistic, unfathomable and alien? You'd tell me I'm crazy and a sexist dick and you'd be right. (and yeah, there's guys doing this still.)
You'd say this not only because I'd be telling lies, but because these falsehoods are so easily shattered that I would have had to went through considerable effort in mental gymnastics, in not interacting with women (either literally or practically by behavior), that in the end, "But, but, no one pulled my head out of my ass, I NEVER KNEW" would not be a valid excuse. My not knowing would be the result of a lot of work on my part.
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Cultural Appropriation: Homage or Insult? at Racialicious – the intersection of race and pop cultureIn other words: It’s the oppression, stupid.
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I am going to turn from Bear's books, which I do not know well, to the work of Joss Whedon, which I know rather better. Willow, Tara, Zoe Washburne, to a lesser extent Charles Gunn and Robin Wood–they do, in fact, work for me as humans, individuals. This does not stop Tara's death from fitting into the Dead Lesbian Cliche. This does not prevent the oddity of a mostly white-washed LA, with the only significant black character coming from a poor black background — from which he is systematically cut off in order to be integrated into the white world of the show and allowed social advancement. It does not mitigate the effect of people of color in Whedon's Buffyverse mostly existing in order to make sharp remarks and die. Looking at characters, people, cultures, purely as expressions of individuality is a habit developed by, encouraged by, and maintained by a particular power structure in order to disguise the workings of power.
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Eva Braun “suckered him”, and Goring made him look anti-Jewish when, in fact, by 1938, Hitler “wasn’t anti-semitic at all.” Hitler wasn’t anti-Semitic? If you look at his career, both in detail and in general, Hitler was the person who protected the Jews,” he continues. “But he was repeatedly outsmarted by the Heinrich Himmlers, the Martin Bormanns.” When I start listing Hitler’s many genocidal rages against Jews, he says he was just “playing to the gallery.” Of course, to maintain his view that Hitler knew nothing, he has to tamper with historical documents – changing words, and deliberately ignoring all the contrary evidence, as was shown ad nausem at the trial. I am more interested in teasing out why Irving should contort himself to believe this.
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I do not believe in "good" and "bad" food. It's food, not a moral dilemma. There are plenty of moral dilemmas around food (vegetarian or not? vegan or not? cage free eggs? carbon footprints? food insecurity? lack of grocery stores in poor neighborhoods?) but "should I eat this cookie?" isn't one of them. You want the cookie? Eat the cookie. You want another one? Enjoy that one too. It is not uranium, it is not a referendum on your moral character as a human being, it is just a freaking cookie.
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Cultural Appropriation Bingo
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One thing that became clear in the last post was the need to clarify what the project of this series is. It is not “my thoughts on Gaza: anti-Semitism is the real issue.” That would be absurd: anti-Semitism cannot be removed from Gaza, but it is obviously not the sole or primary issue and it would be wrong to frame it such.
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Few people will mourn the departure of the 43rd president
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The next four, or eight, years may be a disappointment, a triumphant renewal or something in between. Mr Obama is inexperienced, and right now the world looks especially forbidding. But he is a respectful and thoughtful man, and that is a good start.
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i love the asbestos Fahrenheit 451!
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Symbolic ethnicity is a term coined by Herbert Gans to refer to ethnicity that is individualistic in nature and without real social cost for the individual. These symbolic identifications are essentially leisure-time activities, rooted nuclear family traditions and reinforced by the voluntary enjoyable aspects of being ethnic.
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The ’20s debate over the definition of whiteness—a legal category? a commonsense understanding? a worldwide civilization?—took place in a society gripped by an acute sense of racial paranoia, and it is easy to regard these episodes as evidence of how far we have come. But consider that these anxieties surfaced when whiteness was synonymous with the American mainstream, when threats to its status were largely imaginary. What happens once this is no longer the case—when the fears of Lothrop Stoddard and Tom Buchanan are realized, and white people actually become an American minority?
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copyediting shorthand
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Man once was a truly generic word referring to all humans, but has gradually narrowed in meaning to become a word that refers to adult male human beings. Anglo-Saxons used the word to refer to all people. One example of this occurs when an Anglo-Saxon writer refers to a seventh-century English princess as "a wonderful man." Man paralleled the Latin word homo, "a member of the human species," not vir, "an adult male of the species." The Old English word for adult male was waepman and the old English word for adult woman was wifman. In the course of time, wifman evolved into the word "woman." "Man" eventually ceased to be used to refer to individual women and replaced wer and waepman as a specific term distinguishing an adult male from an adult female. But man continued to be used in generalizations about both sexes.
By the 18th century, the modern, narrow sense of man was firmly established as the predominant one.
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In any event, it's a great list; the sheer length of it reminds one how dizzyingly mismanaged the executive office has been. Here are a few of the highlights, to get you in the mood of groveling gratitude for the new course we are about to embark upon:
