I am not my grandmother

[sqbr]

EDIT: In this post I am using "white" as shorthand for "people who do not experience race based prejudice". The two are fairly correlated in Australian and American society, which is the two contexts I'm thinking of. But they haven't always been and aren't everywhere (certainly one can be very pale skinned and still experience racism) This post is about people who definitely don't experience racism and never have derailing conversations about people who have and do: the skin colour of the people involved is not the main issue.

Also there is nothing wrong with talking about the experiences of white people in general, either specifically white experiences (being anglo-irish, say) or issues which affect people of all ethnicities (class, gender etc).

One of the things that comes up in any discussion of cultural appropriation is scads of white people talking about how irish dancing has been appropriated etc and how this affects their feelings.

The Current Race Discussion and That Caught-in-the-Middle Feeling is a mixed race person who passes as white talking about how this complicates their reactions since it not the same as being white nor is it the same as being obviously not-white.

And again people bring up the experiences of white-but-have-a-family-history-of-oppression people. A jewish person talks about why she thinks we do this. And I must admit, this is a topic I've pondered myself, so since this is my lj and talking about it here is not derailing anyone's conversation, I will. I'm going to go into a bit of detail since I often get the feeling white people feel like sure, those other white people have (EDIT: ethnically, see caveat below) privileged lives but they have a unique understanding of (EDIT: ethnic) oppression (also I just feel like talking about it. Part of the point of this post is getting it off my chest so I'm not tempted to bring it up elsewhere).

But I think most of us have stories like this in our pasts (if you go back far enough there's always the romans), the point is that non-white people have this stuff in their present.

EDIT: Also stuff like class/gender/sexuality etc is even more irrelevant. It's not that those things don't cause huge important problems and injustices which deserve just as much attention in the right time and place, but they are not the same as race and so shouldn't be brought up as equivalent in a conversation which is about race. Same way as it would be inappropriate for a POC man to come into a conversation about sexism and say "But what about racism?" (this is different from "Let's consider the way sexism and racism interact").


On the one hand, I am definitely white. The only grandparent who isn't totally white is my jewish grandmother. I've never directly suffered as a result of racism based on my appearance or actual ethnicity, people at most wonder why I look "slightly exotic". My experience is definitely not comparable to actual POC.

On the other hand, my maternal grandparents both suffered some pretty nasty racial and cultural prejudice growing up which had a huge effect on their lives. My great-grandma's family left Poland to England because of all the jewish pogroms, and the one member who stayed behind was murdered by the nazis. As a result of various issues my grandmother became an atheist, moved to new zealand, and pretty much cut herself off from the jewish community but was still (emotionally) close to her family.

My other great-grandmother was a ukranian immigrant to Canada. When she and her irish-canadian husband died my grandad was left to grow up speaking ukranian with an uncle. The well to do english speaking side were horrified, and packed him off to a catholic orphanage, where he was so horribly treated he was still incredibly messed up about it right up until he got Alzheimer's so bad he forgot it. For understandable reasons he became an atheist, cut himself off from his father's family, and moved to new zealand. When he married my grandmother he was cut off from his (ukranian) inheritance for marrying a jew, and he eventually lost contact with that side of the family too.

As a result of her jewish-irish-ukranian heritage people have trouble picking my mother's ethnicity, and she grew up getting racist taunts for being Maori. She also has a really complicated relationship with her own jewishness, feeling incredibly drawn to it but apart from it, especially since she was first atheist and then christian. (Her brother has converted in a very odd child-of-the-70s way) Growing up with my grandparent's stories she feels a duty to fight prejudice based on religion, culture or ethnicity.

Now my father's family are white-bread anglo-irish-australian, but for various reasons I won't go into I feel closer to my mum's family(*), and thus my maternal grandmother's family, which leaves me with a disproportionately strong identification with jewishness despite not being jewish or really knowing much about it. I also grew up very aware of my eastern european heritage (my grandad went on a very strong ukranian kick, he even made some sadly failed attempts to relearn the language) The fact that my grandparents are communists-turned-socialists, and that this was the 80s so the usual attitude was eastern european=communist=EVIL left me feeling very conflicted about the whole thing and desperate for positive portrayals of eastern europeans, specifically first and second generation immigrants (luckily these weren't that hard to find, ie "To the Manor Born", "Perfect Strangers" and "Alexei Sayle's stuff")

So that's me, and my family. These stories have greatly affected me growing up, and I think are largely responsible for me being so strongly opposed to racism.

But I am still white. The act that ukranians suffered discrimination in Canada in the 1930's doesn't change the fact they don't in Australia now. The fact my mother has people treat her like a POC doesn't mean she is, or that I experience this myself. My experiences are an important part of who I am but they are not the same as actively experiencing racism myself, nor are they very relevant to discussions of it. It's a thing, and worthy of acknowledgement in it's own space, but it is not the same thing.

So. That's my tl;dr piece and I've said it :)

(*)No offense to my dad's family, who are perfectly nice people

Comments

[ataxi.livejournal.com]

I just want to see a discussion that goes together with the real social experience. Which is complex. Here's one: what do you think of this (http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/eo20090115gc.html)?

[strangedave.livejournal.com]

It is odd how the perspective of the article finds discriminating on behaviour so incredibly difficult as to be unfeasible as a solution, so discrimination on race is therefore justified. It sounds to me so remarkably similar to the justifications I saw of anti-Aboriginal discrimination in Alice Springs this year ('well, some of them behave badly, and threaten the business by upsetting people and leaving cleaning bills, so we have to not allow any of them to stay based on race').

[ataxi.livejournal.com]

I found it interesting because I was easily led to the article's final position, that the "no foreigners" policy of these onsen was justified (and I even argued that fairly strongly on Momus' blog entry (http://imomus.livejournal.com/428737.html) linking to the article).

I'm still ambivalent and oscillating.

Whenever I think of the well-reported Japanese propensity to racism I lean away from thinking this ban is justified, and whenever I imagine Russian sailors gatecrashing a pleasant bathhouse I lean back towards supporting it.

And then of course there are the subtleties about how one would implement a house rule that really would just solve the gatecrashing problem without being in-principle racist, which are raised in the article.

I think within the POC/unpacking-the-knapsack framework (need a better term for this) the "answer" would clearly be that this ban is unacceptable. Whilst that degree of moral certainty is pleasant when one can latch onto it, I don't presently feel it myself.

[alias_sqbr]

I agree, there is a lot of knee-jerk reactions to subtle situations which is not always warranted. Then again, there simply isn't time in the world to look at all the angles on any particular topic so sometimes you just have to fall back on rules of thumb.

In this case I feel unable to say if the Japanese decision is right. But I feel confident in disliking that guy's argument for it :)

(and ditto on feeling like an idiot. Tricky stuff this)

[alias_sqbr]

I don't know enough about Japan to say how accurately it reflects the reality there.

But my gut instinct is similar to strangedave's: discriminating on behaviour so incredibly difficult as to be unfeasible as a solution, so discrimination on race is therefore justified? It's not far from "It's ok to ban black people from this building because as we all know they're dirty and it's easier than banning dirty people".

I do know that it gives a flawed explanation of "positive discrimination". As I understand it , in the US these laws just work to prevent injustice by stopping people from not hiring black people for no reason etc. In Malaysia they're actively prejudiced and deliberately disenfranchise chinese people (to give a very dodgy analogy, they're more like American jews than white people. They may have a bit more money on average, but they're hardly the dominant ethnic group) I had some chinese indonesian friends who had to come to Australia to get any decent education at all thanks to similar legislation there.

Now are the japanese (and malasians) right to make these laws? I don't know, I'd want to read up on it from a less dodgy seeming source. Given that this guy isn't even japanese it sounds like someone using a complicated situation in a culture not their own as "proof" that it's ok to discriminate against people based on country of birth.

There are discussions on these topics, but I think unless the people having the conversation can get into a space where they can communicate about basic simple issues they're not going to be able to approach the more subtle ones. One of the motivations behind me reading up on and talking about racism is to gain a solid understanding of it so I feel able to approach these more complex issues properly (ie without flailing and making an idiot of myself) It's taking a long time because it's a tricky subject.

[ataxi.livejournal.com]

(see above for my thoughts thus far on the onsen ban)

It is an incredibly tricky area to discuss, and I more often than not end up feeling like an idiot, not to mention a guilty mouthpiece for all of my privilege.