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

[aquaeri.livejournal.com]

What kind of Turks am I talking about? I'm talking about the Turks in the rest of Europe, who get treated like sh!t because they look like Turks. The ones who do all the menial jobs and end up living in virtual ghettos and who white locals who are feeling particularly virtuous about, can institute programs to try to integrate them into the surrounding community.

(Denmark, which is the particular case I know about, was doing the virtuous integration attempts in the 1950s and is still doing them today. As far as I'm concerned, that's a Big Frakking Clue the underlying racism isn't being addressed.)

This isn't some complex, you-must-know-all-the-historical-and-colonial-issues-and-judge-each-case-on-its-merits thing. This is plain and simple, "do you look and dress like the local whites? No? You'll get treated differently, mainly worse", can-be-explained-to-small-children, racism.

[aquaeri.livejournal.com]

Oh, alias_sqbr, if this bothers you, I will delete and stop. I let my anger override my manners. But I'm getting sick of non-American whites pretending that just because certain aspects of US racism towards blacks are unique to the US, this is some kind of debate they can be all high and mighty about, especially when their arguments end up sounding exactly like white Americans trying to claim they're not racist.

[alias_sqbr]

Nah, you're all right. I wouldn't want either of you getting much more heated but this is a loaded topic so it's hard not to let any emotion slip in.

That and I agree with you :) I mean I agree with gyges_ring that American models of race don't apply as well to Europe and Australia, but that doesn't make them useless nor does it mean that race is magically Not A Problem. It just works in a slightly different way. (That's certainly the impression I get from Actual Europeans Who Experience Racism)

(nb can't really reply properly right now, have work. But then I don't have work again till next Tuesday so expect long rambly screeds :))

[gyges-ring.livejournal.com]

Part of the problem is also my fault, because I'm getting sick of non-Americans pretending that just because certain aspects of European racism have a superficial similiarity, it justifies wholesale adoption of the same mentalities, especially when their arguments end up sounding exactly like European racists. (No, that's unfair to you. Sorry. I resent your implications, but I do think that there are very real and important differences at work, that I feel your arguments are bypassing).

Of course, that isn't actually a counter to your point, for which I'll resort to using people who support me, but are relevantly not me (in that they're black, British, living in America, and more than a bit famous in Race Theory). Oh, also, related point, the background to a lot of his race arguments is in Marxist theory, not Race per se.

"Even if today's unwanted settlers -- lately from Eastern Europe - - are not actually postcolonials, they can still trigger all the ambivalence of the vanished empire. The newest immigrants may be unwanted and abused precisely because they are the unwitting stimulus for the pain produced by memories of the vanished imperial and colonial past. Poles and Kosovars are "white," but they can still be held hostage by the racialized definition of immigration that sets them apart from the local working class because, until very recently, to be an immigrant was to be black....
The new concern about "whiteness" is important because it shows how readily the melancholic pattern of Britain's self-image dovetails with some recent cultural imports from the United States. Like many of Britain's cultural commentators, British politicians have been caught out by their inability to imagine any future for Britain's racial politics that is not deduced from American history. For almost four decades, the United States has exemplified the only racial future that the British punditocracy can imagine. That era should be declared over...
Postcolonial settlement has not created a mosaic pluralism along American lines. Some self-segregation is under way, but the pleasures of clustering and enclave economies have had to compete against an unruly, untidy, and convivial mode of interaction in which differences have to be actively negotiated day by day because people share public spaces that bring their interdependency and their common citizenship sharply into focus...
Civic life has been endowed with a vibrant multiculture. We Britons do not always value it, use it wisely, or celebrate it as we should. But it represents an alternative to Britain's postcolonial melancholy and to American recipes for racial identity circulating through McWorld on the backs of hip-hop, basketball, and MTV...
Britain's political leaders have a lot of catching up to do. Their failures of imagination in this area will not be reversed by reaching for off-the-shelf solutions derived from American conditions that are now very different from our own. In the four decades that conviviality has emerged in Britain, the racial segregation on which American society is premised has been entrenched. It is no longer just spatial, but extends into the market, shaping consumer culture's dreams and desires so that they reinvigorate the most tired racial archetypes and imagery. America's racial groups do not even meet in the marketplace. Today American racial groups are more fixed, more absolutely separated than in the past." - Paul Gilroy

[aquaeri.livejournal.com]

Well, it makes perfect sense why we've been arguing, because I read this thinking "what on earth does this have to do with anything we've been talking about?"

I mean, it's an interesting little essay and I agree with some of its points and I'd argue very hard about the author's understanding of certain issues underlying other points (that I disagree with) and I can understand that if you thought I was like the British politicians of the essay why you might get mad at me.

But their views (if accurately represented) are not remotely close to my views. And I don't think I've actually written anything that suggests that, anywhere here.

[gyges-ring.livejournal.com]

I know. I guessed. But forgive me if I find it coincides with my views, and I find that Paul Gilroy's views correspond fairly closely with mine, and I trust his judgement over an amateur anti-racist on the internet. (Or mine, come to that)

Moral of the story: post more sober

[gyges-ring.livejournal.com]

Sorry, that was a bit unfair again. But that's not an essay in full, it's a set of extracts that I think neatly summarise why I have problems with claiming that racisms in Europe are of the simple variety (and Britain's great for that, because it's like Europe but isn't European). But it is, ultimately, only extracts, and Gilroy does go into a bit more depth in the full essay, which itself draws largely one of his latest books. But being at work means I can't actually get at my copies of Gilroy, so the essay is the easier thing.

[gyges-ring.livejournal.com]

I take your point, but I think you've missed mine. To be Turkish in the way I think you're talking about can be to be blonde haired, blue eyed and pale skinned. And still discriminated against. Not because you're a person of colour, but because your "racial" identity is predicated on your national background. You can be more traditionally "Turkish" (and I use the term loosely) in appearance, and not have the same problems, because you're actually Greek. And that's not a difference that shows up in discussions dominated by American conceptions of race.

[aquaeri.livejournal.com]

I'd say more that "race" in the form of physical appearance and ancestry is entangled in a very complex way with ("race" in the form of) culture, ethnicity, tradition, etc. The nature of that entanglement and how it's dealt with, is significantly different between the US and Europe. And the history of US slavery is a major cause of that difference.

[alias_sqbr]

The fact that some people with pale skin and light features experience does mean it's problematic to use "white" as a synonym for "does not experience racism".

But this is also true in America: there are pale south americans of largely european extraction who get classified as "Latino" while spanish immigrants do not (though they will still experience racism from people who judge them on appearance and accent alone) So it is at best a useful shorthand, and it's important to remember that people who are "white" in one context are not in another.

And yes, it's complicated, and it's important for us non-europeans not to barge in thinking we understand it all. But if they find use in american terminology (and from what I've seen some of them do) I don't think it's our place to tell them they're wrong either. We can sit here arguing from the sidelines but to be honest I'm not sure it matters.

(Which is to say: I'm not sure this tangent has a lot of point, given we're all a bunch of australians working off second hand information)