Category Archives: racism

Assorted Thoughts On The Definition of Racism

I have concluded that part of the problem with talking about racism is that the word “racism” can be interpreted to mean about four different things.

Some people use “racist” to mean “having explicit beliefs about someone based on their racial background, particularly if those beliefs are derogatory.” (We can call that Racism-1.) Other people use “racist” in a broader sense, which encompasses subconscious, unintentional racism and systems that tend to treat people of different racial backgrounds differently (even if nobody means to treat people differently based on their race). (We can call that Racism-2.) At the same time, some people use “racism” to refer to an individual’s beliefs (Racism-A) and some people use “racism” to refer to an overall societal structure (Racism-B).

This causes much confusion, because anti-racists are usually working under the Racism-2B definition and ordinary white people are normally working under the Racism-1A definition (or maybe 1B). So you get a lot of conversations like this:

Anti-racist: You’re racist!
Ordinary white person: (checks beliefs, still doesn’t believe that black people are inferior) No, I’m not. I’m not racist at all; I’m colorblind.
Anti-racist: Of course you’re racist, all white people are racist.
Ordinary white person: …That’s really racist.
Anti-racist: No, it’s not, you can only be racist against people of color.
Ordinary white person: …
Anti-racist: …

I tend to use the Racism-2B definition myself, so I would like to say some words in its defense. Most white people don’t explicitly believe that people of color are worse than white people; we’ve had a very successful forty-year propaganda program explaining that people of color and white people are equal and Martin Luther King is great. However, most white people do get more scared when they walk by a black person late at night than they do when they walk by a white person, we do feel more comfortable living in a majority-white neighborhood than in a majority-POC neighborhood, and we do all kinds of other racist things we don’t explicitly know about.

Because the non-explicit-belief racism is more common, it’s also more damaging. Most of the hiring discrimination against black people isn’t because people believe black people are terrible. It’s because they want to hire someone who fits in, you know, is like us, is in tune with the culture of the company, who seems competent and together and smart, and what a coincidence all the people who are like that are white.

And the thing is… it’s totally possible that some majority-black company will not hire me because of my race. (Although people of color can be biased in favor of white people too– it’s not like people of color live in a Magic Not Picking Up On Cultural Racism Bubble.) But I’m in a much better situation than a black person, because most companies are biased in my favor and against black people. An act of hiring discrimination has very different effects on a white person and a black person; you can’t look at the act itself without looking at the context within which it takes place. Which is why I call discrimination against white people “prejudice” and discrimination against people of color “racism.”

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Grammar!

I really, really love grammar. Seriously. I grew up in a family that had more copies of Strunk and White than people. When I went off to college I was accompanied by a treasured copy of the AP Stylebook. I have gotten into shouting arguments about the Oxford comma. I take grammar seriously.

Which is why some people may consider it odd that I think grammar Puritans should shut up and fuck off.

Not everyone had the benefit of a house full of books and parents that encouraged the love of language and their very own copy of Strunk and White. Some people had to try to learn grammar from (gasp) English class. A lot of those people went to schools that were underfunded, overcrowded, and full of not-very-good teachers. Furthermore, there are lots of people with disabilities that make speaking with “proper grammar”– or speaking at all– extremely difficult, as well as people who don’t speak English as a first language. Nitpicking other people’s grammar is silencing.

And can we talk about this idea of “proper grammar” for a moment? “Proper grammar” is the grammar that privileged people use. Textspeak is bad because it’s associated with teen girls! Appalachian English is bad because poor Southern people use it! African American Vernacular English is bad because poor black people use it! I cannot imagine how people who call themselves grammar nerds think that AAVE is bad, given its absolutely amazing tense/aspect system. Seriously, if you can read about tenses and aspects in AAVE and not die of joy, I question your commitment to grammar geekery.

Nevertheless, I think there are times that grammar really matters. For one thing, it is impolite to make your readers do a lot of work trying to work out what you’re saying*. (It also makes them less likely to bother to read your message.) Therefore, you should probably refrain from, randomly, putting commas in, where commas do not, belong because it slows down and confuses the reader. However, two people who both understand AAVE speaking to each other does not violate this rule, while Judith Butler does constantly, so I expect that people should be equally annoyed at Ms. Butler and at people, who put commas, everywhere.

Furthermore, I’m actually still more of a prescriptivist than a descriptivist by bent. I would prefer that people speak forms of English that have the most possible nuance, shades of meaning, expressiveness, logic, and beauty. For that reason, I’m overjoyed about the use of “he went” to mean “this is a paraphrase of what he said,” but displeased about the use of “disinterested” to mean “bored.” (It means unbiased! Bleh.) I also reserve the right to be upset about the abomination that is “irregardless” (irregardless and regardless mean the same thing! Christ, people, we just got the flammable/inflammable thing sorted out, don’t go adding more words that look like opposites and mean the same thing).

That rule is part of the reason I, as a grammar nerd, am endlessly in support of non-”proper”-grammar English: sometimes it has a beauty and emotional expressiveness than “properly” grammatical English does not. (I point skeptics to the Twitter of the incomparable quailitree.) To ignore that because of some bullshit rules that people made up in the nineteenth century is shitty as fuck.

*Unless for some reason trying to work out what you’re saying is part of the point. This is the James Joyce Exemption.

Why I’m A Choice Feminist

Certain feminists tend to get very upset about “choosey choice” and “I choose my choice” and “empowerful” feminism, which (as far as I can tell) is feminism that has no problem with women doing sex work or wearing makeup or staying at home and raising kids or having kinky sex. “A choice that a woman makes isn’t feminist just because a woman makes it!” they point out.

This is very true. For instance, it is not a feminist choice to go about shaming other people’s life choices.

The first problem I have with “I don’t support ‘I choose my choice’ feminism!” is that a lot of the women who talk about it tend to have bundles of unchecked privilege wandering around and getting in the way. For instance, criticizing Beyonce for calling her tour the “Mrs. Carter Tour,” without thinking about how a black woman embracing being a wife is radical in a way that it isn’t for a white woman. Surprising news, fellow white people: racialized misogyny doesn’t work the same way that regular misogyny does! There’s an assumption that “giving into the patriarchy” looks like the same thing for all women, an assumption which is stupid and privileged and horrible and needs to go die in a fire yesterday.

Rad Trans Fem has a parable she calls the “Parable of the Shitty Lemon,” which I also think is relevant to the “wow, anti-choice-feminism rhetoric is super-privileged” issue. Imagine a table with two plates, one of which is empty, and one of which has a lemon with a bit of shit on it. This is the situation a lot of marginalized people are in. Put on lipstick or hate yourself for being ugly. Change your last name or piss off your husband’s very traditional family.

A lot of anti-choice-feminism rhetoric is yelling at people “why are you eating the shitty lemon? Don’t you realize there’s shit on that lemon? You’re contributing to the social pressure for women to eat shitty lemons! You horrible anti-feminist shit-lemon-eating monster!” This is completely unhelpful. The point is to figure out how to get some food that isn’t a lemon and isn’t covered in shit!

But I disagree with their premise on an even more fundamental level.

My feminism is about people having freedom from the constraints of gender norms. Freedom means that no choices are off-limits. Freedom means that my wife can stay home with the kids, or we both can work, or I can stay home with the kids. Freedom means that I may choose to wear natural lipstick or no lipstick or bright purple lipstick. Freedom means I can have kinky sex or vanilla sex or no sex. Freedom means I can change my name to my husband’s name, or his to mine, or we can invent our own surname.

Staying at home with the kids isn’t empowering. Being able to decide for yourself whether you want to stay home with the kids is empowering. I mean, of course it is. “Being able to make choices with few or no constraints” is literally the definition of power.

Therefore, we ought to direct our attention at the people who are adding a bunch of unnecessary constraints onto women’s lives for no reason and away from the people who are trying to make the best choices they can within a patriarchal framework.

On Gendered Oppression

Memo To The Social Justice Community At Large: the privilege/intersectionality model of how oppression works? Is a model. It’s an oversimplification that people use because the actual reality of how oppression works is way too complicated to talk about. It is not the Ultimate Truth Of How Oppression Works Forever and Ever. 

Therefore, there are dynamics of how oppression works that the privilege/oppression model doesn’t talk about at all.

Let’s talk about prison. Men of color are overwhelmingly more likely to go to prison than any other group, far disproportionate to their numbers. The white men who go to prison are usually poor. While women of color are also more likely to go to prison than white women, and poor women than rich women, the problem so vastly disproportionately affects men that it’s not even funny.

Or anti-queer hate crimes. Of the sexual-orientation-related hate crimes recorded by the FBI in 2011, nearly 60% were a result of the perpetrator’s hatred of specifically gay men. (I checked a couple previous years to make sure this wasn’t a fluke and, yeah, it hovers pretty consistently around ‘slightly more than half.’) You can argue that the FBI’s data-collection strategy is fucked (I’d be happy to edit this to include a correction if it is), but assuming that it isn’t, gay men are disproportionately likely to be victims of a hate crime.

This just doesn’t work in the privilege/intersectionality model, which predicts that women of color will face more racism, poor women more sexism, and LGB women more homophobia, than their male counterparts. But– at least in certain aspects of these oppressions– men clearly and objectively have it worse. 

Some people have decided to patch this by creating an alternative “female privilege,” where women have not-going-to-prison privilege and not-being-beaten-up-for-being-gay privilege. The problem here is that if you are a white middle-class-or-above man… you generally don’t have to worry about going to prison! You may smoke your weed in peace! If you are not gay (and not the kind of feminine that assholes think means ‘gay’), your chance of being beaten up for being gay is nigh infinitesimal. The prison-industrial complex and anti-gay hate crimes do not affect straight white middle-class-and-above men any more than average.

The solution here is just to throw out the privilege/intersectionality model in this particular case. It just doesn’t work here. And when you throw out the model that’s making everything more confusing, the only statement left is “gay men, men of color, and poor men face forms of homophobia, racism, and classism that are affected by the fact that they’re men.” Which is perfectly logical, sensible, empirically validated, and supported by both statistics and lived experience. 

(And that’s the NSWATM post I never got around to writing while I was there.) 

Notes Towards A Theory of Cultural Appropriation

I’m white and while I have been educating myself about racism I still have a lot of things to learn. So please don’t consider this post a “this is the be-all and end-all of what cultural appropriation means”; this is just my current understanding of cultural appropriation, which I am presenting in the hopes that someone will tell me where I’ve wandered off into the wrong direction. (Also, I’m going to be using the abbreviation “POC,” which stands for “people of color.”) 

The definitions of cultural appropriation I’ve found are usually something like this: “Taking intellectual property, traditional knowledge, cultural expressions, or artifacts from someone else’s culture without permission.” This is a bit difficult to understand to me, because I find it hard to grasp how you could get permission from a culture. You can only get permission from people in that culture, some of whom will be all “dude, whatever, don’t give a fuck” and some of whom will be all “the fuck? Why are you doing that? Give that back!” (Even the Seminoles, who have an actual tribal government the Florida State University Seminoles talked to to clear their mascot with, have dissenting Seminoles who are pissed as fuck about the whole matter.)

I think that part of the problem might be that when people use the term “cultural appropriation” they mean one of about four different things:

1) Dressing up as or incorporating in your art or naming your sports team after an offensive stereotype of POC. This is the definition that comes up every Halloween when people insist on dressing up as Pocahotties and Injun Braves, and when Victoria’s Secret decides to put Native American headdresses on their models. I am not sure why people think this is okay. Do not dress up as an oversexualized stereotype of the people your culture fucking committed genocide against. Similarly, this point covers Native American sports team mascots, Urban Outfitters “Navajo” bracelets, etc.

I’m… also not really sure why people call this cultural appropriation, because to me it seems like a pretty cut-and-dried case of “offensive stereotypes are bad.”

2) Do not use sacred shit from religions you don’t belong to. This is basic respect. People take their sacred shit very seriously, and it greatly upsets them when you use their sacred shit in ways other than the approved-of one. Do not upset people for no reason. (This guideline also applies to non-POC religions, of course, but very few people put on Mormon temple garments because they look cool.)

3) Do not use things associated with POC in ways that reinforce stereotypes of POC. For instance, do not do Tantra because it is spiritual and exotic and ancient and totally sexy. It is a common Orientalizing stereotype that Asian people are exotic, spiritual, and the heirs to ancient wisdom; thinking that Tantra is awesome because it is exotic ancient spiritual wisdom from the East is playing into that exact stereotype.

Similarly, white-people dreadlocks are problematic. Black people still face all kinds of racist shit– from white people trying to touch their hair to losing out on jobs– if they style their hair the way it naturally grows instead of making it look like white hair; it is incredibly fucked that black people having their hair the way it naturally grows is considered “rebellious.” Many black people are, understandably, somewhat irritated when white people decide that it is cool and countercultural to have dreadlocks. For black people, dreadlocks are a rebellion against a racist society and a statement of pride in their race; for white people they’re… um, cool because, like, black people, man.

4) Don’t steal POC’s ideas and cultural artifacts without credit. See also: the entire history of rock music. Rock music was deeply influenced by black musicians– blues, gospel, vocal groups. So of course white men like Elvis and Bill Haley ran off with their ideas and got all the credit for being musical fucking geniuses. Because, y’know, white. Similar things happen with everything from nail art to feminist theory.

It’s difficult to figure out a way to deal with this toxic dynamic. “White people, you don’t get to wear nail art or listen to rock music” is a suboptimal solution. I think ultimately the solution is to be very intentional about pointing out your influences and promoting the careers of talented POC within your field and seeking out POC’s work instead of assuming that what white people are doing is the only interesting culture that’s going on. (For instance, it would be incredibly dishonest and fucked of me to pretend that my thoughts on class and race within feminism and polyamory aren’t influenced by Audre Lorde, or that my thoughts on masculinity or love don’t come straight from bell hooks. I am not original.) But I’m not sure if that’s enough to end that dynamic.

So. That’s what I have. Your thoughts?

“Race Realism” and Penis Size

“Race realists” are pretty much the most ridiculous group of people. For one thing, there’s the name. At some point, you just need to own that you’re a racist. If you’ve used the world “Mongoloid” in cold blood, you are past that point. Think of it as a reclaiming thing!

On Twitter I stumbled across this debunking of a “race realist” (oh god that name) argument that black men have larger penises than white men, while Asian men have the shortest. (It is unknown how long the author believes the penises of Native Americans or Australian Aboriginals are, possibly because continents discovered after the fall of the Roman Empire don’t exist.) The article covers how reliable the study is (not very) and how good the theory the article is based on is (not at all), so if you’re interested in the actual science you may go over there.

The conclusion of the article seems very puzzled about why racis– uh, I mean race realists would be interested in men’s penis size anyway. Penis size is a fairly trivial issue, not particularly correlated to anything of interest. Shouldn’t they be trying to prove that black people are less intelligent or conscientious or more physically strong or something?

At which point I was like: oooh, I know that!

I’m not super-comfortable with talking about this, because I’m white and still pretty definitely in the learning stage of my anti-racist education (feel free to correct me in the comments!), but on the other hand this is also about asshole white dudes, and if there’s one thing I’m an expert on it’s asshole white dudes.

An asshole white dude surveys the world of gender and race. “Well, there are all these black men,” he says to himself. “Black men are all beasts, hyper-sexual and violent and probably commit criminals. They have no ability to control their impulses, which is why they steal things and take drugs and rape women and assault men. In fact, they have too much masculinity!

“On the other hand,” he continues, “look at those Asian men! Terribly effete, they are. All weak and intellectual and sissy. All those Japanese men that stay at home watching anime and playing video games and jerking it to hentai! The Mysterious Chinese People that are going to take us over with some kind of economics stuff I don’t really understand because they don’t have the balls to invade! In fact, they have too much femininity.

“On the other hand, as a white man, I am a Proper Man. I have just the right amount of masculinity! Go me! Now I don’t have to feel bad about not accomplishing anything in my life!”

And the penis thing is pretty much just a manifestation of that. Large penises are manly! Black men are super-extra-masculine, so they have REALLY big cocks, while Asian men are kinda feminine, so they have small cocks. White men have normal cocks because they’re normal right-thinking adults.

Glenn Grothman, Worst Person Ever

People who have been following me for a while may be familiar with my hate-hate relationship with Glenn Grothman, Wisconsin State Senator and worst person alive. Well, he’s decided to branch out from his usual sexism, bizarre theories about abuse and (worst of all) statistical illiteracy to question why schools teach kids about Kwanzaa.

I will now summarize his arguments:

1) Kwanzaa was invented by some dude in the sixties. As we know, no holidays were ever invented (certainly not by Hallmark). Instead, as we have learned from Nightmare Before Christmas, all genuine holidays come from towns where they’re enacted and occasionally stolen by endearing stop-motion animation characters. By ignoring this age-old tradition, Kwanzaa threatens the very definition of holiday itself.

2) Maulana Karenga, the inventor of Kwanzaa, assaulted some people and was involved in an organization that murdered people. Clearly, we cannot celebrate holidays invented by people who did bad things, which is why no one celebrates Thanksgiving  Genocide Day.

3) No black people care about Kwanzaa. Except, presumably, the five million black people in America who celebrate Kwanzaa every year. They don’t count.

4) Kwanzaa is an attempt by liberals to keep black people from celebrating Christmas. Because no one can celebrate two holidays during the same month! That’s just crazy talk. We may expect any day now Grothman’s press release about the anti-Christian horrors of New Year’s.

5) Liberals hate America and want to destroy it by convincing people that the values of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution don’t apply to everyone. You may be like “hey, wait, don’t liberals and other lefty-type people usually support the ACLU?” but actually supporting the values in the Constitution are just the liberals’ cunning attempt to disguise how much they hate the Constitution. Instead, liberals are going to fight the Constitution by getting people not to celebrate a holiday that is nowhere mentioned in the Constitution. Oh those fiendish liberals!

6) Nobody fucking tell Senator Grothman about Hanukkah. I don’t think he could face the revelation that there are people– white people!– who don’t even celebrate Christmas. His head would explode.