International Blog Against Racism Week
Aug. 8th, 2008 11:03 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
minxyI am a traveler. I mention this at the outset of a blog post about racism because Paul Fussell once said, "But the traveler’s world is not the ordinary one, for travel itself, even the most commonplace, is an implicit quest for anomaly." It is a seeking, an inquisition that doesn't quite leave. It's a part of one's personality, lifestyle and soul.
When I was a child and stuck in a blonde-haired, blue-eyed, 'but why would you want to *leave*?' kind of Midwestern town, I felt like I was suffocating.
I was blonde-haired and I still am blue-eyed. I *looked*, for all the world, like I should have been happy there. We've never had money to spare, but if you saved and saved your babysitting money, you could travel Europe with your language class at 15 years old for a month. When we moved in the middle of high school, I was thrilled. Because it would be different, and the stories would change. (I read a lot as a kid, as you may imagine.)
I am smart enough to realize that people have different experiences than I have. I am also wise enough to know that I am occasionally going to say dipshit things that offend other people's truths. But I love stories that are different than mine; I find the people who carry those stories so interesting and I will seek them out on the internets, at work, in my friendships and my books and in the world.
I am, just to recap, white, middle to upper class, smart, tall, educated, abled, strong, athletic... well-traveled (but never well enough.)
I freak people the hell out; let's make no mistake about that. I have a host of things I do to be less intimidating, but that's a story for another time.
I am deeply, deeply blessed. Both with privilege and with health and with a supportive family who have always accepted me just as I am and wherever I go. But I'm also a traveler, a seeker, a researcher and a scientist. My reaction to people willing to teach me almost always borders on euphoric. Sometimes pornographic, but let's not go there today either.
Not all stories are spoken. Not all teaching is intentional. I watch, I observe, and whether or not it's intentional on your part, I learn from you and us and how we interact and how it's different from your interaction with that person over there. In this last week, within the time of IBARW, as it happens, I have noticed two incidents that I shall now blog about under the title headings of racism.
A woman in my laboratory, who works with and underneath me in the heirarchy, fielded an invitation to dinner from an older man in shipping/receiving. This man is The Guy Who Can Get Things Done; he is practical, he is helpful and he is, as far as I can tell, a good man. He's short and slim, probably in his forties, and a white American. A, on the other hand, is a small, 25 year old woman, married for a year and a half, whose husband is out of town for several unavoidable months (she misses him.)
An older man makes a pass at a younger woman when her husband is out of town. The older man is a good man, and the young woman is very clear in her rejection of the offer, which is then dropped. Does it matter that she's latina? Is the man concerned that this small foreign woman is in an unhappy marriage (she's not) and trying to protect her? Is he making an assumption about a married hispanic woman who's husband is away? Either way, it's sketchy reasoning, and he's off-base. A is neither helpless (I mean, she's 5'2" and maybe 100 lbs, but apparently she also holds a black belt in a martial art and could kick my ass) nor unhappily married. She is, actually, my student-most-likely-to-succeed. Her greatest hurdle in the last two years has been language (both functional street fluency in English and functional science fluency in English) but it won't be a problem much longer.
A reported the strange incident of the dinner invitation (over the phone) to me, ostensibly because I know and work well with the man who invited her out, but I doubt very much that he will ever make a pass at me. I am rather sorting out whether I need to play a role addressing her lingering feelings of awkwardness about it; but she is not frightened, and I think the matter is over. So we've talked it through a couple of times, without minimizing the experience or overreacting, hopefully; but we have here the variables of my hatchling abilities to manage people, workplace interrelationships, age, race, gender and marriage status, all at work in this scenario.
Why the small, married, young Mexican woman, eh?
My housemate S is an ass sometimes. He likes to assert that racial issues are far less complicated than people think and hold forth, loudly and at length about how he *knows* Jews/Asian Americans/Gay People/African Americans/Hispanics and therefore yadda yadda yadda. As if being a rich white boy from San Francisco means you have inherently have the understanding of issues because you have decent gay-dar. Or an (apparently, from the voice used to retell the story) flaming gay man says you have good gay-dar.
S has the personality of a salesman. Sometimes it feels like he's selling you swampland in Florida, or a used car, or a watch he made himself.
He was holding forth Wednesday night about how being Jewish is a religion and couldn't possibly also be anything else; this would slide, based on the response he would get, from how being semitic is not an ethnicity to how there is no state of Judea to whatever the fuck. Also the Jewish people he knows are snobby, and shouldn't get any special treatment. (Although, he's seen anti-semetism, he's not denying that.)
Why is it, internets, that the most cutting criticisms I can level at person, that they are not being logical, that this makes no sense, that x, y and z reasons argue against their unsupported claims, that there is evidence of this but not that, that we've already addressed and dismissed that point as wrong, why don't those carry weight in arguments like this? Why was he only taken aback when I told him that he had just made a Very Poor Argument, slipping from a discussion of ethnicity to nationality as if they were interchangable? Because his being an asshole, far too blind and dismissive of his own privilege and *wrong FOR THESE REASONS WOULD YOU LISTEN* is irrelevant? But being called out on how he presents information is?
What is it likely to change, anyway? Two white people discussing intersectionality at cross-arguments while one sews curtains for her mother and the other sips on a microbrewed beer and holds forth in a comfortable house in Southern California? (The frustration of the argument is that S will end it with a laundry list of how many religions he *knows* and *understands* and how many people he's been friends with over the years of different ethnicities and races and how my arguments don't hold up at all because back in the day the Greeks and the Turks killed each other and raped and pillaged and created mini-holocausts and that doesn't make the Greeks in need of affirmative action. And he has Greek Heritage, so he *knows* this. Tell me that conversation is going to change the world, internets.)
It is so much easier to hide in the safe confines of people I like and trust not to say stupid-ass things that I then have to address with my substandard knowledge. But then again, it's my appearance and my lifestyle that lets me hide from ugly things. It's perhaps the most brilliant thing about![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
ibarw that it brings together really really smart people to say intelligent things about complicated subjects like intersectionality. I love to learn, I do; but sometimes I associate racial discussions (and incidents of racism) with such sadness and disappointment that I wonder if that's where some of my reticence to blog about racism at other times of the year comes from? The simple answer is that it's a healthy white guilt complex, or blind privilege, but really, if discussions of race and racism teach us anything, it's that things are rarely simple. And damn it, I don't want to miss out on learning about complexity and differences of experience.
Thank you for blogging about racism this week.
Theibarw community is collecting many and myriad links on a daily basis this week; go peruse to find all kinds of different points of view.
When I was a child and stuck in a blonde-haired, blue-eyed, 'but why would you want to *leave*?' kind of Midwestern town, I felt like I was suffocating.
I was blonde-haired and I still am blue-eyed. I *looked*, for all the world, like I should have been happy there. We've never had money to spare, but if you saved and saved your babysitting money, you could travel Europe with your language class at 15 years old for a month. When we moved in the middle of high school, I was thrilled. Because it would be different, and the stories would change. (I read a lot as a kid, as you may imagine.)
I am smart enough to realize that people have different experiences than I have. I am also wise enough to know that I am occasionally going to say dipshit things that offend other people's truths. But I love stories that are different than mine; I find the people who carry those stories so interesting and I will seek them out on the internets, at work, in my friendships and my books and in the world.
I am, just to recap, white, middle to upper class, smart, tall, educated, abled, strong, athletic... well-traveled (but never well enough.)
I freak people the hell out; let's make no mistake about that. I have a host of things I do to be less intimidating, but that's a story for another time.
I am deeply, deeply blessed. Both with privilege and with health and with a supportive family who have always accepted me just as I am and wherever I go. But I'm also a traveler, a seeker, a researcher and a scientist. My reaction to people willing to teach me almost always borders on euphoric. Sometimes pornographic, but let's not go there today either.
Not all stories are spoken. Not all teaching is intentional. I watch, I observe, and whether or not it's intentional on your part, I learn from you and us and how we interact and how it's different from your interaction with that person over there. In this last week, within the time of IBARW, as it happens, I have noticed two incidents that I shall now blog about under the title headings of racism.
A woman in my laboratory, who works with and underneath me in the heirarchy, fielded an invitation to dinner from an older man in shipping/receiving. This man is The Guy Who Can Get Things Done; he is practical, he is helpful and he is, as far as I can tell, a good man. He's short and slim, probably in his forties, and a white American. A, on the other hand, is a small, 25 year old woman, married for a year and a half, whose husband is out of town for several unavoidable months (she misses him.)
An older man makes a pass at a younger woman when her husband is out of town. The older man is a good man, and the young woman is very clear in her rejection of the offer, which is then dropped. Does it matter that she's latina? Is the man concerned that this small foreign woman is in an unhappy marriage (she's not) and trying to protect her? Is he making an assumption about a married hispanic woman who's husband is away? Either way, it's sketchy reasoning, and he's off-base. A is neither helpless (I mean, she's 5'2" and maybe 100 lbs, but apparently she also holds a black belt in a martial art and could kick my ass) nor unhappily married. She is, actually, my student-most-likely-to-succeed. Her greatest hurdle in the last two years has been language (both functional street fluency in English and functional science fluency in English) but it won't be a problem much longer.
A reported the strange incident of the dinner invitation (over the phone) to me, ostensibly because I know and work well with the man who invited her out, but I doubt very much that he will ever make a pass at me. I am rather sorting out whether I need to play a role addressing her lingering feelings of awkwardness about it; but she is not frightened, and I think the matter is over. So we've talked it through a couple of times, without minimizing the experience or overreacting, hopefully; but we have here the variables of my hatchling abilities to manage people, workplace interrelationships, age, race, gender and marriage status, all at work in this scenario.
Why the small, married, young Mexican woman, eh?
My housemate S is an ass sometimes. He likes to assert that racial issues are far less complicated than people think and hold forth, loudly and at length about how he *knows* Jews/Asian Americans/Gay People/African Americans/Hispanics and therefore yadda yadda yadda. As if being a rich white boy from San Francisco means you have inherently have the understanding of issues because you have decent gay-dar. Or an (apparently, from the voice used to retell the story) flaming gay man says you have good gay-dar.
S has the personality of a salesman. Sometimes it feels like he's selling you swampland in Florida, or a used car, or a watch he made himself.
He was holding forth Wednesday night about how being Jewish is a religion and couldn't possibly also be anything else; this would slide, based on the response he would get, from how being semitic is not an ethnicity to how there is no state of Judea to whatever the fuck. Also the Jewish people he knows are snobby, and shouldn't get any special treatment. (Although, he's seen anti-semetism, he's not denying that.)
Why is it, internets, that the most cutting criticisms I can level at person, that they are not being logical, that this makes no sense, that x, y and z reasons argue against their unsupported claims, that there is evidence of this but not that, that we've already addressed and dismissed that point as wrong, why don't those carry weight in arguments like this? Why was he only taken aback when I told him that he had just made a Very Poor Argument, slipping from a discussion of ethnicity to nationality as if they were interchangable? Because his being an asshole, far too blind and dismissive of his own privilege and *wrong FOR THESE REASONS WOULD YOU LISTEN* is irrelevant? But being called out on how he presents information is?
What is it likely to change, anyway? Two white people discussing intersectionality at cross-arguments while one sews curtains for her mother and the other sips on a microbrewed beer and holds forth in a comfortable house in Southern California? (The frustration of the argument is that S will end it with a laundry list of how many religions he *knows* and *understands* and how many people he's been friends with over the years of different ethnicities and races and how my arguments don't hold up at all because back in the day the Greeks and the Turks killed each other and raped and pillaged and created mini-holocausts and that doesn't make the Greeks in need of affirmative action. And he has Greek Heritage, so he *knows* this. Tell me that conversation is going to change the world, internets.)
It is so much easier to hide in the safe confines of people I like and trust not to say stupid-ass things that I then have to address with my substandard knowledge. But then again, it's my appearance and my lifestyle that lets me hide from ugly things. It's perhaps the most brilliant thing about
ibarw that it brings together really really smart people to say intelligent things about complicated subjects like intersectionality. I love to learn, I do; but sometimes I associate racial discussions (and incidents of racism) with such sadness and disappointment that I wonder if that's where some of my reticence to blog about racism at other times of the year comes from? The simple answer is that it's a healthy white guilt complex, or blind privilege, but really, if discussions of race and racism teach us anything, it's that things are rarely simple. And damn it, I don't want to miss out on learning about complexity and differences of experience.Thank you for blogging about racism this week.
The
ibarw community is collecting many and myriad links on a daily basis this week; go peruse to find all kinds of different points of view.![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2008-08-08 06:12 pm (UTC)thank you for being here.
no subject
Date: 2008-08-08 08:32 pm (UTC)Good GOD I'm tired of that old saw. My ancestors fled the potato famine and were poor and yada yada No Irish Need Apply and OMG ARGH. I try to own my privilege (as much as I can). I'm the Whitest Girl of Whitelandia and I do not know what it means to be subject to: antisemitism, homophobia, racism, or sundry other isms I get to be privileged out of because I'm, like you, an able-bodied white middle-class straight educated woman. My ancestor's suffering has little relevance to the situation and it's offensive as hell when people try to claim it does.
Argh.
no subject
Date: 2008-08-11 11:17 pm (UTC)What's a BIC?
no subject
Date: 2008-08-11 11:23 pm (UTC)I love the fact that he's actually adopted, so the Greek heritage argument is even more bizarre than usual. He's not even connected to the culture except the odd Greek Festival attendance.
My distain for this man, let me show you it.
How do you even argue with that crap kind of logic?
no subject
Date: 2008-08-12 12:32 am (UTC)BIC=bitch in charge.