I am not my grandmother

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").

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More thoughts about Art and responsibility

I've decided to do a bit of a summary to get my thoughts re the last couple of posts in order since I was confusing myself in the comments.

In summary, I think my argument boils down to the answers to these questions:

• Q: Does art sometimes have a negative social effect?
  A: Yes. Certainly I don't think anyone would disagree that it can sometimes have a negative effect on an individual person.
  
• Q: Can the artist predict this effect in advance?
  A: Not perfectly, but to some extent.
  
• Can the artist fix this by just working on making the piece better?
  A: No. At least not unless they make the piece perfect, which they never will. So this approach isn't very effective. Also not all artists hold themselves to very high standards, which is fine as an artistic choice, but that doesn't let them off the hook consequences wise. (That argument comes up a lot with fanfic. It's just a hobby!)
  
• Q: Should the artist worry about these consequences if it means the art will suffer?
  A: Worry? Yes, at least a little bit. It's part of every person's responsibility to worry about the consequences of any of their actions. Let it stop them making or sharing that piece of art? That depends, and is a personal decision. Be censored by outside forces beyond negative peer pressure? No.
  

( Some more thinky thoughts )

( A note about the context )

Not getting comment notifications

For some reason I'm not getting all my comment notifications (lj has been playing up all day so that may be it)

I can still access my inbox for all the replies to stuff on my own lj, but if you've replied to a comment I made on someone else's lj and I don't reply, assume I'm not ignoring you :)

Anyone else having this problem?

Everyone's a little bit anti-racist

One of the ideas that comes up in anti-racist discussion from time to time and I find very challenging is the idea that "white anti-racist", "anti-racist ally" etc are meaningless or even destructive terms. EDIT: I'm talking about criticism from POC in the anti-racist movement who have a problem with us self describing as "allies", not white people who don't like being called 'white'.

Note that Disclaimer 3b applies (I keep meaning to revise this and then post but always end up posting about something else instead!).
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