“Whites are individuals”

“Whites are individuals” is a common argument brought up by whites. It is part of a set of closely related arguments:

• Whites are individuals. There are all kinds – bikers, soccer moms, coal miners, business men, goths, etc – so you cannot make general statements about them.
• To make a general statement about whites is itself racist. It is stereotyping them. It is hypocritical. It is seeing them according to skin colour and that is racist.
• The “all whites” argument: “All whites are not like that”. They bring this up even when no one said all whites were anything. But that is how they heard it. It amounts a straw man argument.

These arguments seem to be driven by two things:

1. “Blacks are racist too.”
2. They are uncomfortable with being called white because they have been taught not to be race conscious.

Just for the record, I do know that whites are individuals. I live in America, a country that is mostly white: I work with them, they are on television and presented as individuals with their own storylines and not as racist stereotypes or even as too-good-to-be-true supporting characters.

On the other hand….

It does seem like most of them, like at least 60%, at least in the Greater New York Metropolitan Area, all went to the same secret course on whiteness. They do act in certain common ways, ways that support racism.

And, based on comments on this blog, this stuff extends well beyond New York. In fact it seems to go clear across the country and into Canada, and, in a slightly different form, into Britain and South Africa.

I have never been to the Southside or Oakland, but they sound strangely familiar to me. Another sign that the racism of white people in New York is not just a New York thing.

And having seen the Maori in New Zealand and the Sioux in South Dakota, I know full well that this has surprisingly little to do with the faults of black people – or the Maoris or Sioux – and everything to do with how white people are. Whites do not like to hear that, but that does not mean it is not true.

And there is no way I can talk about white people – or any subject – without making general statements. It would be nice if I could back them all up with studies, but this does not seem to be a well-studied field.

Of course I am quite capable of making racist statements. But to say that every general statement about whites is necessarily racist makes it impossible to talk about how racist they are!

The most maddening part is that it is white people who draw the line between themselves and everyone else. They are the ones who apply the colour line and all the injustice that goes with it. They are making themselves white – and yet they do not want to be seen as white!

See also:

• How to argue like a white racist
• stereotype
• The r-word
• race conscious
• white people
• Maori
• Sioux
• How to help end racism

 

guns, germs and steel

The phrase “guns, germs and steel” comes from Jared Diamond’s 1997 book of that name. He calls it “a short history of everyone for the last 13,000 years”. It answers the question of how whites got on top. He says our destiny is written not in our genes but in our geography.

Diamond went to New Guinea to see its birds. He made friends there and one of them, Yali, asked him why whites were so rich:

Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?

Diamond ruled out intelligence: New Guineans were “more intelligent, more alert, more expressive, and more interested in things and people around them than the average European or American is.”

He also ruled out culture and politics: those things are always changing and have little long-term effect across thousands of years.

That leaves him with geography and biology: with the lands and seas, the plants and animals that make up the world.

Not all places are created equal:

• Of the 13 kinds of large animals that are easy for man to tame and control, 12 live in Eurasia: cows, pigs, goats, horses, camels, etc. Only the llama is missing. Men do not ride zebras, for example, because they are too wild to be tamed. Places like Australia, New Guinea and North America had no large animals that could be tamed – just dogs.
• Of the grains that are easy to plant and store, again most are found in Eurasia. Australia had none at all!
• Eurasia goes mainly from east to west. So plants and animals that work in one part of Eurasia work well elsewhere. That is way less true for Africa and the Americas which run from north to south.

This meant that civilization could spread more widely and deeply in Eurasia than elsewhere. Civilization is based on being able to produce more food than you need, freeing up human labour for other things.

So the world’s four largest civilizations are found in Eurasia in a chain that stretches from east to west: China, India, the Middle East and Europe.

It was just a matter of time before one of these invented gunpowder and ocean-going ships and be able to take over the world. It was China that invented those things, yet it was Europe that took over. Why?

Because Europe’s geography makes empires rare. There are just too many mountains and rivers. So while in China the emperor could (and did) outlaw building ocean-going ships and not suffer in the short term, no country in Europe could get away with that.

But genes do matter in one way: disease. From living with cows for so long  most whites had built-in defences against smallpox - but not against malaria. That made it easy for them to take over and stay in North America (where smallpox played a big part in wiping out the American Indians), but not in most of Africa.

See also:

• The white inventor argument
• sexual selection and race – also based on Jared Diamond’s views
• white people
• Steve Sailer

 

Herb Alpert, Lisa Keith & Janet Jackson: Making Love in the Rain

Remarks:

I had completely forgotten about this song because it does not appear on any of my Janet Jackson albums. Lisa Keith is the lead singer. It “sounds” like a Janet Jackson song – like maybe something towards the end of “Rhythm Nation 1814″ (1989) – because it was produced by Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis at about the same time.

This song reached #7 on the R&B charts. You may have heard it being sampled in other songs.

Lyrics:

Making love
in the rain,
I can’t believe the joy it brings me.

Making love all alone,
I hear the rain on my window.

It’s just a little thing,
but it means so much to me.

Our bodies together,
while the rain plays a melody.

Every raindrop makes think of you.
(Wishing you were close to me)

There is nothing that I’d rather do than…
Making love in the rain,
I can’t believe the joy it brings me.

When we’re done – all alone,
I hear the rain on my window.

When it’s stormy outside,
It’s warm in my heart,
with you in my arms.

And when your away from me,
I wish it would rain,
’cause its always the same

Every raindrop makes think of you.
(Wishing you were close to me)

There is nothing that I’d rather do than…
Making love in the rain,
I can’t believe the joy it brings me.
(I can’t believe)

When I’m here all alone,
I hear the rain on my window.
(On my window)

Making love in the rain,
I can’t believe the joy it brings me.

Making love all alone,
I hear the rain on my window.
(On my window, I hear the raindrops fall)

Every raindrop makes think of you.
(Wishing you were close to me)

There is nothing that I’d rather do than…
(Nothing that I’d rather do than)
Making love in the rain,
I can’t believe the joy it brings me.
(Making love. oohh making love)

When we’re here all alone,
I hear the rain on my window.
(On my window, I hear it rain)

Making love in the rain,
I can’t believe the joy it brings me
(ooohhhh, yeah)

All alone I hear the rain.
(I hear the rain)

My love here comes the rain.
My love here comes the rain.
My love here comes the rain.
My love here comes the rain.

 

White is not neutral

I read a post by Wildflower that got me to thinking: “Is It Neutral and Normal Because It’s White?”

White Americans as a whole do not have a neutral point of view. They do not see the world in a fair, open-minded way like they think.

This should be as plain as day, it should go without saying. Not so.

I will go further: most whites have a dishonest, self-serving, closed-minded, narrow way of looking at the world that is far from neutral, far from fair, far from objective. They are more interested in maintaining a false image of themselves as a kind and good and just people than, say, the truth.

White Americans are born with perfectly good minds, just as good as anyone else’s. Most have at least 14 years of schooling. America is a remarkably open society – it was before the Internet came and now it is even more so. There is every reason to expect them to be the most open-minded, knowledgeable people in all of history.

The trouble comes because of their power:

1. It makes them believe they have all the answers - so why listen to others? Why care what goes on in other countries? Why take people of colour or other cultures seriously? Why even take voices from their own past seriously?
2. It fills the world with their own voice – with television shows, news, Hollywood films, magazines, blogs, etc. They can barely hear anyone else but themselves.
3. It makes them morally blind - they turn a blind eye to the evil done in their name.
4. It makes them think the world is juster and less screwed up than it is – not just because they are morally blind but also because in their corner of the world things are fine. Most seem to believe in just world doctrine, which is hardly the way the world works.
5. It separates them from other people – most live in an all-white world and rarely hear forthright, honest opinions seriously defended that are far from their own except of a narrow political sort. It also makes them blind to their own skin colour so that they think they are raceless, that their race does not affect how they see things.
6. It allows them to write their own history – and fill it with lies and half-truths, putting themselves at the centre, making themselves its heroes, making themselves what all of history was leading up to!

In short, there is little to keep them honest. They believe what they want to believe. Not just in regard to history, race or foreign affairs, but even personal morals. In 1900, for example, abortion, divorce, illegitimacy and same-sex marriage were all beyond the pale and had been for at least 1500 years. But now?

Most do not seek out other voices from other times and other places, not even from people of colour from their own time and place. And so in spite of all their money and power they live in a very narrow world.

See also:

• Wildflower: Is It Neutral and Normal Because It’s White?
  • which was partly in reply to a post of mine: Are most white people benevolently clueless
• How racism helps and hurts white people
• What this blog has taught me about white people
• the single story
• just world doctrine
• racelessness – the opposite of race conscious
• white gaze

 

The white inventor argument

The white inventor argument says that we know white people are better than everyone else because of all their wonderful inventions.

The argument has three main uses:

1. To prove that whites are better – and the world better off despite whatever racism they may have practised.
2. To change the subject. Blacks hate this argument and will jump on it, pushing aside whatever it was they were arguing about before. They are ready with their long list of so-called black inventions, stuff about the stoplight and Egypt or something. Not that you care – you just wanted to change the subject from whatever uncomfortable thing they were saying about whites.
3. To point out that x would not even be possible without white people. So like if they are arguing about how racist a film is, just point out that film was invented by whites, so shut up already.

When people bring up something bad that whites did, like the slave trade, you quickly point out how other people have done it too, like Arab traders, how it is “natural”. People have such a bad habit of overlooking Historical Context! But with the white inventor argument you can take advantage of this: act as if whites invented everything, as if it is an uncommon gift that the whole world has been blessed with through the overflowing kindness of white people.

What is wrong with this argument:

1. Doing something good does not excuse doing something bad. More particularly, inventing x does not give you or anyone else the right to misuse x. The invention of television, for example, does not excuse using it to push stereotypes about blacks.
2. If inventions “prove” one part of mankind is better than all the rest, then the Chinese and Egyptians have a way better claim than whites.

The four inventions that made possible the rise of whites to world power were all Chinese: gunpowder, the compass, paper and printing.

The Egyptians invented civilization itself along with stuff like writing, calendars, irrigation and so on. They made huge pyramids that no has been able to match. Egypt was the most advanced part of the world for over 2,000 years – twice as long as even China.

True, most of the important inventions of the past few hundred years were made by white people. But that is only because they have been on top during that time. If it was because white people are born with more brains, then white people would have been on top throughout human history – instead of just a fifth of it.

If you assume that the largest city will tend to be in the most advanced part of world, then you can say how many years different people have been on top:

• 2072 Egyptian
• 974 Chinese
• 364 Roman
• 360 Sumerian/Babylonian
• 359 Persian
• 285 Greek
• 281 Arab
• 140 Anglo

Anglo power – British and American – is fresh in our minds, but it is merely the latest chapter in the book of history. And that is the Historical Context that this argument forgets.

See also:

• Largest cities through history
• How to argue like a white racist
  • The Arab trader argument
  • “Go back to Africa”
• Mighty Whitey – where would people of colour be without those good, kind white people?
  • We darkies were just born bad
• white people
  • white gaze – which puts whites at the centre of history, even during their dark ages!
• bits of history
  • Ancient Egypt
  • Babylonia
  • Roman Empire
  • Byzantine Empire
  • Arabs
  • Persians
  • China
  • Anglos
    • British Empire
    • American Empire

 

Reading Beverly Tatum

Beverly Tatum is a child psychologist who wrote “Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?” (2003, updated). Despite the title it is not about self-segregation – though she does answer that question. It is about how race affects growing up in America.

Being black herself, her main concern is black children and that is where the book shines, but she covers the other races too: white, Asian, Hispanic (counts as a race in this book) and even Native American and Middle Easterners (who are becoming racialized as a dangerous other). She covers biracial or mixed race children too. Even if you are “Other” it is worth reading because it turns out that what matters most is whether or not you are white.

She lays out the stage models that psychologists have come up with for how people of different races come to terms with their own colour. Some models are more solid and worked out than others. She points out their limits. She does not assume a background in psychology or act as if these models are the way, the truth and the light – just the best working answers by those who study such things.

The black stage model is the one that is most worked out and best supported by studies. It is surprisingly good:  you see how the things in your life that you thought were just accidents (like how some white friends from grade school fall away in middle school for no apparent reason) or just you (a sudden, consuming interest in black authors at a particular age) are not chance events but follow a particular pattern driven by race.

The white stage model seemed like something from another world. I am surprised anyone worked it out, to tell you the truth, since whites seem to think of themselves as raceless, as if their race does not affect them. But in any case, that model is next to useless anyway because few whites get beyond stage one – the stage where they think they are colour-blind and that America is fair. But it does show you how hard it is for a white person to shake his racism and self-delusion. It is way harder than you think – more like a fish swimming up stream, say,  than some blinding moment of enlightenment.

Note that the models only apply to those who grew up after 1970, after the civil rights movement. They apply best to those who go to mixed-race government schools since they are the most studied.

Even if you do not have children, it is still good to read if you want to understand how race shapes people in America and what it might take for it to become truly post-racial.

But, as it turns out, that is just why some people do not like the book. They think racism is over. They say Tatum sees race in everything and is making it worse. But that is just what you would expect from stage-one whites!

See also:

• If you like these posts you would probably like the book since they were based on it, at least in part:
  • growing up black
  • growing up white
  • growing up Asian American
  • growing up Native American
  • growing up biracial (the black-and-white kind)
  • Why all the black kids sit together
  • racelessness
  • acting white
• colour-blind racism – “I do not see colour”
• just world doctrine – “America is pretty much fair”
• crying racism
• Is racism in America over?
• racism = prejudice + power? – Tatum uses this defintion, which I disagree with: coming from a black person it comes off as too self-serving

Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?”

 

The whiteness of Roger Ebert

Renee of Womanist Musings has a wonderful post on Roger Ebert’s review of “Good Hair”. I was going to comment on it at Stuff White People Do where it was guest posted, but I feel a post of my own coming on:

Roger Ebert wrote a review of Chris Rock’s film “Good Hair” (2009). Nothing surprising there: he makes his living as a reviewer. But what makes this one priceless is it shows up his whiteness in two ways:

1. He assumes he knows more than black people – even about black women’s hair!
2. He downplays what black people go through by comparing it to something white that is not at all the same thing.

Roger Ebert ends the review this way:

The movie has a good feeling, but why do I know more about this subject than Chris Rock does? Smile.

The smile presumably refers to the fact that he is married to a black woman, Chaz Hammel-Smith. Earlier in the review Ebert takes issue with the film based on the Wikipedia, of all things. So Ebert feels he knows more about black women’s hair based on what? This:

1. I am married to a black woman.
2. I look up stuff in the Wikipedia.

Compare that to Chris Rock:

1. Also married to a black woman.
2. Has a black mother and two black daughters.
3. Spent two years making a film about black women’s hair.

Where in the world does Ebert get off thinking he knows more about black women’s hair? Since Ebert does not strike me as a know-it-all blowhard – I used to watch his reviews on television – it is hard for me not to think this is racist: “White people know what they talking about, black people do not.” Help me out here.

He even assumes he knows more than his own wife, who has had such hair all her life! You know this because it is clear he printed the review without her looking it over – either that or he did not take her comments seriously. It would have kept him from making a fool of himself. But, again, he thinks he knows better.

I find it hard to imagine his wife agreeing with this:

The use of the word “natural hair” is, in any event, misleading. Take a stroll down the hair products aisle of a drugstore or look at the stock price of Supercuts. Few people of any race wear completely natural hair. If they did, we would be a nation of Unibombers.

See that: what black women go through with their hair is no big deal at all! This is stock racist deflection: what black people go through is no different than what white people go through.

White people talk that way because they have a hard time accepting difference in people – what leads to the whole “good hair” thing to begin with. They also do it because, like Ebert, they do not want to take black people seriously.

See also:

• Roger Ebert: Good Hair – the review itself
• Womanist Musings: Roger Ebert Proves Good Hair Was Made For White People – guess posted at Stuff White People Do where it gets more comments
  • Stuff White People Do: question non-white knowledge and authority – examples of how white people always think they know more than people of colour
• good hair
• Wikipedia
• How to argue like a white racist
  • “But that happened to me too!” argument – in Ebert’s review this shows up as: white women have natural hair too!
  • “Some of my best friends are black”- or wife, so I know black people
• The Barbara Bush Award for Deluded Whiteness

 

The Goldstone Report

The Goldstone Report (2009) isthe United Nations war crimes report on the war in Gaza last winter. Richard Goldstone, a former South African judge (pictured above) led the UN’s fact-finding mission to Gaza.  The report finds both sides guilty of war crimes and possible crimes against humanity, but Israel much more so.

The report does not “prove” that war crimes took place, merely that it seems so based on facts found. The report calls on both Israelis and Palestinians over the next six months to carry out their own independent investigations that meet international standards.

If they fail to do so, then the UN Security Council should hand the matter over to the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the The Hague. But most likely America will block that: it has veto power in the Security Council and turns a blind eye to Israel’s misdeeds.

Findings:

• Palestinians:
  • Fired rockets into southern Israel with little hope of ever hitting a military target, thereby spreading terror among civilians.
  • Hamas, the ruling party, used the war as cover to kill some  from the opposing party, Fatah.
• Israelis:
  • Israel struck mosques, hospitals, schools, apartment buildings, water treatment plants and factories that had no military value. One mosque was struck while hundreds were there praying. If Israel’s true concern were weapons that may have been hidden there it would have struck the mosque in the middle of the night.
  • It struck a house after the Israeli army told Palestinians to stay there to be safe.
  • It used white phosphorus, which burns and kills people, in the middle of Gaza City.
  • Israeli soldiers used Palestinian civilians as human shields.

In war you are supposed to fight the enemy’s military and destroy things of military value, like bridges, roads and weapons factories. Some civilians will get killed, but you are supposed to take reasonable measures against that.

Israel did not. It was not just carelessness either: it went after things like water treatment plants that were a threat to no one.

The Israelis called the report “one-sided” and unacceptable – months before it even came out! They would not help the UN one bit, which had to cross into Gaza from Egypt.

After the report came out Israel said it was “one-sided” (again), “inaccurate and flawed” and that it would derail the peace process (a lie: the Israeli government is hardly serious about peace). Sadly American Congressmen and even The Economist repeat the same words and excuses as the Israelis.

Hamas does not agree with everything in the report but accepts it. Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority and a Fatah man, says he will not hold a vote on the report till March 2010. He is seen as giving in to the Americans. That has led to protests (pictured below). In Gaza there are posters of Abbas with a black X across his face at which people throw their shoes.

See also:

• The war in Gaza
• Israel
• Palestine
• United Nations
• The Economist
• how to deny a genocide: #11: Peace matters more than justice

 

Do I hate white people?

I do not hate white people. Am I racist against them? Yes. Do I sometimes have a hard time trusting them? Yes. Do I hate some of the things they do? Yes. But do I hate anyone just for being white? No, of course not. Even with racist jerks I try to hate the sin not the sinner. But, I must admit, I have not always been successful.

I do not want to put people in a box. I want them to surprise me and sometimes they do. But too many times white people act like they all went to the same Secret Course on Whiteness that I was not invited to.

Some commenters assume that because I say bad things about whites I must hate them, that I think they are pure evil, that no one else in the world is evil, that I do not know that black people can be evil too. No, it is not like that. It is just that white people do bad things too and, unlike with black people, it tends to get overlooked or played down.

Have white people done good things? Of course. I would have died at 13 if it were not for modern medicine. My wife would have died in childbirth. There would be no Internet or television game shows. Etc.

Have white people made progress? Of course. In America they no longer use whips and chains on black people to force them to work for free. They no longer force blacks to sit at the back of the bus or hang them from trees. A big fraction of them – more than I expected – voted for a black man for president. Etc.

Whites have the same hearts and minds as everyone else, the same human nature. What makes them different: power.

Power corrupts: it hardens your heart, it wears away your sense of right and wrong, it weakens your hold on the truth. Because there is no one to keep you in check, to keep you from going off the rails. Power leads to evil and self-delusion.

So in the case of White Americans they take land from the American Indians (because they can) and make black men slaves (because they can). They knew it was wrong, but instead of stopping they made up lies about blacks and American Indians (because they can), many of which they still believe to this day (because they can). They went off the rails, losing their hold on right and wrong, on the truth. It is still going on.

That is what power does to people. Read Orwell’s “Animal Farm”, Thucydides’s “History”, Shakespeare’s “King Lear” or even the Bible.

Whites use their power to make themselves look good and blacks look bad. From the time we are little children our minds are filled with “white is right” and “black is bad” over and over again, making white people big-headed and blacks self-hating. I am not going to use my blog to add to that.

See also:

• white people
  • How racism helps and hurts white people
  • The hearts of white people
• The oneness of mankind
• I am racist
• black patriotism
  • In defence of Michelle Obama
• Race in New York
  • Uptown
• Orwell

 

Anita Baker: Same Ole Love

Remarks:

This is favourite Anita Baker song.  Even when I first heard it it seemed like a song I had known for years. It only made it to #8 on the R&B chart.

At the very beginning of the video you can see Donnie Simpson the host of “Video Soul” on BET in the 1980s and 1990s. The video shows scenes of Detroit.

Lyrics:

Flashbacks of the times we’ve had
Some made us laugh some made us sad
We used to break up to make up
All the fun that came from those love games
Oh well, I think I need someone new
Oh, it just won’t do, because I think about you baby

From beginning to end 365 days of the year
I want your same ole love
All I want to do is keep on loving you
I want your same ole love

There’s a reason I feel this way
All the things you do, well it might be the things that you say
Your love never changes
It’s like a picture in a frame, and it remains the same

Your undying love for me
Oh it keeps me strong, keeps me holding on

From beginning to end 365 days of the year
I want your same ole love
All I want to do is keep on loving you
I want your same ole love

Slowly, love me
All is forsaken, I love the love we’re making
Cause it’s truly lovely
I’ll never leave you, you’ll know I need you baby

From beginning to end 365 days of the year
I want your same ole love
All I want to do is keep on loving you
I want your same ole love

From beginning to end 365 days of the year
I want your same ole love
All I want to do is keep on loving you
I want your same ole love

 

How racism helps and hurts white people

This is partly in answer to Macon D’s post on Stuff White People Do: “fail to see how racism harms white people”. Here is my take:

Racism both helps and hurts white Americans. I cannot prove all of the following statements with studies, charts and figures, but this is the truth as best I know it:

How it helps:

• They are way richer than they would have been:
  • They live on land taken from the American Indians.
  • They benefit directly or indirectly from the free labour of black slaves and, later, from the cheap labour of blacks and other people of colour.
  • They get paid more for a given level of education.
  • Lower unemployment: they are less likely to fired and more likely to be hired – even with a prison record.
• They get to live in nicer, safer neighbourhoods with better schools.
• They live longer: even poor whites live longer than middle-class blacks.
• It helps to keep them from falling to the very bottom of society.

How it hurts:

• They become morally blind. Since they do not see the evil they do they are surprised by 9/11, race riots, failures in foreign policy, poverty at home, etc.
• They harden their hearts.
• They become partly deluded: they believe lies – about themselves, their history, their society. They do not take the truth seriously when it comes from a person of colour.
• They have a limited idea of what it means to be human. At root, racism is the idea that being “different” means there is something wrong with you. That means many whites hide or slowly kill their true selves in order to fit in, making them into plastic people.
• They become small-minded:
  • Because they feel good about themselves by looking down on others.
  • Because they narrow their minds by not taking other people and their cultures seriously.
• They are not true to themselves and their belief that all men are created equal – and so they live with guilt.
• Crime is higher than in other rich countries – and so they live with fear.
• By hurting people of colour they are hurting their own country. At the very least they are wasting a part of its human capital.
• Many whites vote against their class interests in part because of race.

That is what comes to me off the top of my head. I might be forgetting some big ones. Commenters can kindly point them out.

In short, whites are not true to themselves – to their morals, their beliefs, their heart, their soul. They are sell-outs to an idea that is beneath them.

If I still have any white readers left I know they will strongly disagree. Perhaps they will think I hate them, that I am trying to put them down. Wrong: I am trying to be honest.

Whites signed up for racism to create America and they continue to hold on to racism to hold on to its advantages. They made a deal with the devil and we know how that ends.

See also:

• Stuff White People Do: fail to see how racism harms white people
  • Restructure!: How does racism hurt white people? – Restructure’s answer to the same post
• white people
  • growing up white
  • whites are still racist
  • Why whites are blind to their racism
  • The hearts of white people
• white privilege – more on how racism helps
• white guilt – a way racism hurts
• How to argue like a white racist – some of the twisted thinking required to be a white racist
• bell hooks on loving blackness – talks a bit about racism hurting  whites
• how to end racism – stuff anyone can do

 

the single story

The single story is where the same story gets told over and over again about a people or a place we do not know first-hand. The danger is that it leads to stereotypes, to half-truths not the full truth. So, for example, many Americans think of Africa as being full of wild animals and hungry, unwashed children, not a place where there are libraries, bus drivers and true love. Or they think of Australia as the land of kangaroos, the outback and Crocodile Dundee, not a place of boring suburbs and proper English.

The single story is the opposite of what Chinua Achebe calls “the balance of stories”, where all people tell their own stories in their own words. Something that has only begun with the rise of postcolonial literature – “the Empire writes back”, as Salman Rushdie puts it.

But for the most part our stories are still stuck in colonial times where mainly just white men tell their own stories – or their stories about others – over and over again. Not just in books written, but in news stories told and films directed. The only difference is that now a few tokens, like Achebe himself, are thrown in for good measure.

But tokenism is not enough. Imagine if everything you knew about America and white people came only from the films of Alfred Hitchcock or Quentin Tarantino. There is no way that any token – any single story, author or film director – can present the human fullness of his own people, his own time and place. It will necessarily be limited, making his own people seem limited, strange and exotic to those who know nothing else about them.

Even within America white people think of black men as drug dealers with 13 children by six different baby mamas. I know someone like that, so it is not made up, but most black men I know are hard-working, middle-class family men. And it is not just me: half of blacks in America are middle-class. But you would never know that from watching American television - because there is no balance of stories.

Chimamanda Adichie (pictured above) gave a beautiful, beautiful speech about the danger of the single story (see below for the link). You might remember her as the author of “Half of a Yellow Sun” (2006). She grew up in middle-class Nigeria, the daughter of a professor. When she came to America to study her American roommate was shocked that her English was so good and that her tape of “tribal music” was, in fact, Mariah Carey.

But then came Adichie’s turn to be shocked: from the American press she thought of Mexico as this place where poor, helpless people came from. But when she got to Mexico she saw people laughing and smoking and going to work. It should not have shocked her, but it did.

It was not that the American press had lied to her. Instead it was the power of the single story to paint a false picture of the world.

See also:

• Chimamanda Adichie: The danger of the single story – full video (18 minutes) and text of her speech
• white gaze
• stereotype
• American film and television and race:
  • If blacks ran Hollywood like whites do
  • The blackness of American television
  • race and crime and poverty and television
  • The Missing White Woman Syndrome
  • Mighty Whitey
  • The Bechdel Test and race
• Salman Rushdie
• The black middle-class in America
• exotic women

 

Angela Davis: An Autobiography

Written: 1974
Read: 2009

“An Autobiography” (1974) by Angela Davis tells the story of the first 28 years of her life, from birth to her arrest, imprisonment and trial. It was edited by Toni Morrison, who had already written “The Bluest Eye” and was then working for Random House.

I got it from the library because it was out of print – but now it seems to be back in print again!

It is not as good as, say, the autobiography of Malcolm X, but it is still well worth reading.

Malcolm X was not only more important in history, his story is one of self-discovery, a search for the truth that remakes him. Like St Augustine’s “Confessions”.

Angela Davis’s life was far more straightforward: she saw how unjust American society was growing up and sought to change it by taking part in SNCC, the Black Panthers and the Communist Party. In time this landed her in prison.

The part about the trial was well written: it could have bored you to tears with all the ins and outs that trials have, but she avoided that. Best of all was the ending: even though you already knew she would win, you were still overjoyed when she does win! That is how the book ends.

The book starts two years before with her on the run from the FBI. She is arrested in New York and put in prison. Since she is to stand trial in California, she is sent back. At that point the book jumps back to fill in the first 26 years of her life and then ends with her imprisonment in California and the trial.

She writes at great length about her time in prison. It affected her powerfully, but not me: I expect prison to be terrible, so nothing she said shocked me.

The same goes for what she said about the police in Los Angeles: from living in New York I already knew how they can be. But it is nice to know that I am not just imagining it.

One of the best parts is her account of growing up in the Jim Crow South in the 1950s. It makes you see how some things have changed like night and day (like being able to walk in through the front door) while other things remain the same (like the police).

She won me over when she said she loves reading books but hates going to parties.

Another good part was her account of the Los Angeles police trying to wipe out the Black Panthers.

She lives in Los Angeles in the 1960s. There are no Jim Crow laws  there, yet in some ways the racism is worse: because the whites there know and understand blacks less they seem to regard them more like wild animals to be threatened, shot and put safely behind bars.

She says little about philosophy, which she studied for years, and little about racism in New York, where she lived during part of high school.

It is called “an” autobiography. Is going to write another one?

See also:

• Angela Davis
  • These posts are based on the book:
    • 1944-1959: The girlhood of Angela Davis
    • 1959-1969: The education of Angela Davis
    • 1970: The arrest of Angela Davis
    • 1972: The trial of Angela Davis
• Malcolm X
• Augustine
• The police
• Jim Crow

 

The Barbara Bush Award for Deluded Whiteness

From time to time this blog will give out the Barbara Bush Award for Deluded Whiteness to worthy souls. No prize money, no gold medal. Just the mere honour. You do not have to be white to win – you just have to buy into the lies that white people tell themselves. You can add your nominations in the comments below.

The first winner is, of course, Barbara Bush herself.

On September 5th 2005 she visited the Houston Astrodome where 15,000 had fled Hurricane Katrina, having lost almost everything but their lives. Most were poor and most were black. She said this to an NPR reporter:

Almost everyone I’ve talked to says, “We’re going to move to Houston.” What I’m hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality.

And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this, this is working very well for them.

Many compare this to the queen of France, Marie Antoinette, saying “Let them eat cake” when she was told that Paris had run out of bread to feed the poor.

But this is not a case of a rich and powerful person having no idea about how the other half lives. It is worse than that. It is a piece of racist excuse-making. The “sort of scary” tells you she is thinking of them as blacks, not as the cake-eating poor.

The better comparison is to statements that White Americans used to make about black slaves. Here is Robert E. Lee in 1856 on the good fortune of being a black slave:

The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially & physically. The painful discipline they are undergoing, is necessary for their instruction as a race, & I hope will prepare & lead them to better things.

Here is the pattern (the unsaid parts in parentheses):

1. (I know it looks bad but) blacks are better off here (America, the Houston Astrodome) than where they were (Africa, New Orleans).
2. Things will get better.

This is also the pattern of those news stories on the state of Black America that you see on Martin Luther King Day.

It is an exercise in playing down black suffering. What makes it strange and unsettling is that no one who truly cared about such suffering would even think to talk like that. But whites do because they are driven more by their own sense of white guilt than other people’s suffering.

Katrina was hardly her fault, so why did Barbara Bush say this? It could just be habit, but more likely it was in answer to charges that her son, President George Bush, did not do enough to help poor blacks stuck in New Orleans during and right after Katrina. As Kanye West put it just three days before in one of the best pieces of television ever: “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.”

See also:

• How to argue like a white racist
  • “Go back to Africa” – Bush’s comment was a form of this argument
• Katrina
• white guilt
• just world doctrine - tra-la-la

 

Needed: white anger at racism not white guilt

Macon D at Stuff White People Do has an excellent guest post by Nikki of Irene’s Daughters about how white people like derail an argument about racism by pointing out that their family never owned slaves.  I particularly like this point that she made about white guilt (Cayce is her sister):

… conversations with white people about race often get sidelined by the white person saying, “You just want me to feel guilty!” But, as Cayce pointed out, no reasonable anti-racist wants white people to feel guilty for either past or current wrongs — instead, we want them “to feel engaged, empathetic, righteously indignant even, over the injustices in our society.” These are feelings we can take to the bank; these are feelings that aid us in the fight against racism. Guilt, helplessness, and especially defensiveness changes nothing.

Read the full post.

See also:

• How to argue like a white racist
• white guilt