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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
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
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I went off and read the
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The capacity of several-generations-back happenings to influence my own views and emotional landscape is something that I only started thinking about after some counselling, and then later reading an interesting book called They F*** You Up.
Great point on the distinction between past and present oppression and trauma - while the experiences of my paternal grandparents have had an immense formative influence on my own life (and continue to do so), there's such a difference between carrying the scars of past suffering and experiencing it first-hand.
Intersectionality
White women also face discrimination. Point isn't that no white people ever experience discrimination, more that 'whiteness' (invented over the past few centuries) provides huge advantages. There isn't really a white ethnic group, but white skin does help in joining The Club - employers won't see your skin and instinctively associate it with laziness, violence etc. And yeah, whiteness is heavily tied up with class. (http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=9zJnuW87TlA).
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It is my understanding that as the female child of a female child of a female jewish person, you technically could be considered Jewish, if you wanted (you could pick up a free citizenship for Israel, wouldn't that be awesome?)
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Those white people suffer class discrimination, same way I suffer from gender discrimination (and have suffered class discrimination) but once again, while that is definitely a thing (and a very important thing) it is a different thing. Those oppressions should definitely not be ignored, and they might even have a place in discussions about race (ie the way the two interact) but people do not get to say (and they try) "I am oppressed in X non-racial way thus I do not have any responsibility to consider the ways in which I benefit from being white" etc.
I agree the ideas can be too narrow in these discussions, really what it boils down to is replacing one incredibly faulty set of assumptions about ethnicity and race etc with another, still faulty but much better one. It would be nice if people didn't need these boxes at all, but I've yet to find an effective way of combating oppression that doesn't use them. In my experience if you try to judge every case on it's merits without some sort of framework ones subconscious bias ends up supporting the status quo. It is still important not to let the framework totally obscure the individual human experience though, and I have seen people do this. (As always, every group has it's people who suck, including anti-racists and POC)
People with complicated ethnic identities (specifically those on the boundary of "white and "not white") do get the short end of the stick when it comes to discussions of race from both sides, same as any other group in a liminal state (bisexuals, transsexuals, people who cross class boundaries, immigrants, etc) I have a particular bee in my bonnet about this sort of thing, you may have noticed my rants about transphobia in feminism. But while I try not to perpetuate simplistic attitudes to mixed race people myself and bring these issues up where I think they're appropriate, I tend to feel that on the whole it's a conversation that needs to be had between mixed race people and non-mixed race POC and the best thing I can do is try not to get in the way and where it helps offer my support. And afaict (though I am willing to be corrected, what do I know) the static mixed-race people get from anti-racists and non mixed-race POC etc, while bad and in need of improvement, is still much less hurtful than the way they get treated by regular society.
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Absolutely. But it is important to acknowledge those scars, because they are there.
Where I think a lot of these conversations derail is that one person says "I am in pain because of this particular thing" and someone else says "But I'm in pain too, why is yours more important?" and it gets into a "Whose life sucks more?" contest and none of the problems actually get fixed.
(edited for spelling :))
Re: Intersectionality
It's one of many possible examples of real systematic prejudice against certain groups of white people now. Women as well, as you point out. But that's nothing new. I have enjoyed a huge social privilege in my life, one that has guaranteed me a good education and an effortless entrée to a career as a white collar professional. In my country, a person who suffers from systematic disadvantage relative to me is far more likely to be white than to be of any other "race".
Returning to
The Tim Wise video to which you linked seems concordant with that point of view, discussing as it does the politically expedient use of interethnic prejudice against systematically disadvantaged whites as a diversionary tactic manipulating that electorate. You can't even begin to combat politics like that without highlighting the illusory character of the white monolith. The ruling class is white, but to be white is not to be a member of the ruling class. And ultimately I believe the more important dialogue is about power and privilege and how they're located, and not about race.
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But having stayed at a jewish college (by coincidence, someone else chose it for me based solely on price) and talked to actual jewish people...I am not jewish, and I have only a very vague and distorted idea of what being jewish means. Which I can live with, but my attitude to the whole thing is rather complicated.
Re: Intersectionality
I think race is a part of those power structures. It doesn't exist genetically, it's a social construct which is handy in aiding accumulation by the ruling class. And because of that system, people are now instinctively icked by African features, for example. So instinctive prejudice against non-Europeans is a problem in itself, resulting from European imperialism.
And like it or not, "whiteness" exists. Like the "West" isn't a real geographic description, whiteness doesn't describe a discrete ethnic group with a common history. It describes a loose set of features given preference in modern Western society. Have you read How The Irish Became White? That's as good an explanation as any.
Re: Intersectionality
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The deliberate abandonment of nuance is the perfect phrase for the sort of thing that bugs the hell out of me about this sort of debate. I damn well care about nuance.
Re: Intersectionality
And there are plenty of other meaningful divisions of whiteness. Being Catholic was a real social divider in Australia and the US as late as the 1950s, and still is in some parts of the UK and Ireland, for example.
Whiteness is a complicated thing. I've recently had the weird experience in Alice Springs were people would often lapse into talking about the 'black' and by contrast 'white' populations of the town (and I've been guilty of it myself), when what they really meant were the Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal parts of town (black Americans were definitely part of the 'white' community, as were, say, hospital staff of south east asian decent etc).
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Re: Intersectionality
Re: Intersectionality
And ultimately I believe the more important dialogue is about power and privilege and how they're located, and not about race.
This is a very important discussion. But to tackle the overall power structures it is important to also focus on the individual patterns, and racism is one of those patterns, as are sexism, heterosexism, ablism, classism etc. While these are all faces of the same underlying problem and need to be tackled in a consistent way (not fighting racism by being sexist etc) they do not all work in exactly the same way, and it's important not to elide their differences or you end up silencing individual voices, usually those who are particularly disadvantaged. (This is something feminism does All The Time when it talks about the "universal suffering of women" and only ends up talking about things which affect white straight middle class women etc)
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But my gut instinct is similar to
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.
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I understand why anti-racists use a different definition of racism from the norm, but if you're going to do that it's very important to make your definition clear, and that doesn't always happen.
I assume they mean "Racism is prejudice by someone who is on the powerful end of the racial hierarchy towards someone on the less powerful one based on race". Such a definition admits that (often quite damaging) race-based prejudice can happen from POC, but it just doesn't call it racism (most of it, however, a result of racism). Also the hierarchy of race is considered on a global level, so regardless of the local situation only white people can be "at the powerful end".
Personally my definition is "Racism is prejudice which supports the underlying power structure's attitude towards race" and POC can be racist, but words mean different things to different people. Also while white people are at the top of the global hierarchy of race so can't really experience racism I think there's plenty of situations where one non-white group has their own local racist attitudes ie majority japanese people towards the indigenous people of Japan.
I do sometimes think these discussions center too much on whiteness and the definition of race created during colonialism: this idea and experience of race is hugely important and covers pretty much everything that comes up in everyday life, but it can be limiting when trying to put things in a historical/global perspective. But like I said to
Re: Intersectionality
The kind of people the post was inspired by really don't experience any sort of discrimination though. I saw someone saying "I understand what it's like to feel erased. As a child, I would see the asian doll, the black doll, and the blue eyed doll but there was no green eyed doll". Because obviously that one asian doll adequately represented all the peoples of Asia, I mean it's not like any of them have green eyes...
Ah, Europe, such a quaint little village
The reality is that Europe has vastly more complicated and interwoven national politics, which interferes with racial analyses, because skin colour, culture and ethnicity become divergent in ways that simply aren't possible in countries like the US. In the US, people are Americans, who are then white or coloured. But the same isn't true of Europe, because the commonality of European citizenship isn't really a commonality. It's a difference that comes through quite strongly in European writings on race, where race tends to take a subsidiary position to issues like class or national identity. (Well, that's also because Europe have that much stronger history of academic socialism). But dealing with racial issues in Europe (and even, to a similar extent, Asia and South America) in terms of whiteness is at best confusing and at worst dangerous.
To a lesser extent, this is true also in Australia, where Aboriginality and blackness have a huge number of different variants, and what whiteness exists does so in a relatively recent and sometimes fragile state for a lot of those who would be placed within the categories.
If, of course, you're not talking about academic whiteness, I think I've completely missed your point.
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I think there's a quite natural urge to sit down, define terms, build a framework within which a topic can be explored, and from there proceed to political action. However I don't see the benefit of denying a model is a model.
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Certainly marrying, or even dating a bogan would be considered to be seriously distasteful by most people in my social echelon, and might result in one's exclusion from one's erstwhile social group. I don't like what this implies about me, my friends, my family, my society very much.
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I don't want to enter the world of online antiracism to be honest: I see as much evidence in the comment threads you've linked to of people using discourse, position and dogma to acquire and abuse status within their local communities of thought almost as I ever have online, and that evidently includes some of the card-carrying antiracists.