Restructure! has an interesting post about how white people can never know what it feels like to be a person of colour.
Here is a bit of it:
However, the argument that a person would know how it feels to be of group X because she spent a lot of time with people of group X is fallacious. If you are not of group X, then spending time with people of group X does not change the fact that you are not of group X.
For example, most people would agree that if a visible person of colour spent a lot of time with white people, it does not follow that the person of colour must know how it feels to be white. Some white people find the reverse idea more plausible, because they believe themselves to be raceless or even racially disembodied.
….
A person’s whiteness does not disappear even if she eats dim sum, if she listens to Mos Def, or if she travels to India. If a white person participates in these activities, she is not living and breathing the presumed “essences” of people of colour. People of colour do not have racial essences, other than being confined because of the colours of their skins. No matter what a white person does, she is still embodied in white skin and embedded in a world that confers privilege to whites.
Read the whole thing at Restructure!
See also:
i agree – I live life through MY eyes…I can intellectually understand why a person of a different race reacts one way or another…I can even understand the emotions associated by quating them to similar experience. But the experience will not be the same…only similar. I can not truelly FEEL what they feel. ther ARE other forms of discrimitation and unfairness and evil in the world. But I will never know what it is like to be a indian women or a black man. I can only know what it is like to be me. But at the same time..you can not assume – because of the color of my skin – things about me.
LikeLike
Honestly, I feel like this is a given for everything so I don’t really see what the big deal is
LikeLike
Amen. I would also add that all white people all suck because they all think non-white people all suck. All of ’em.
LikeLike
Are you suggesting that you know what it feels like to be white?
You obsess about race and racism. It is boring, but you are apparently easily amused. My guess is that is because you aren’t that bright.
Your obsession makes it tempting to bait you with racist comments. For example, I said that the reason black people were slaves was because at the same time that white Europeans had figured out how to circumnavigate the world, black Africans had yet to master social organization beyond the tribe, that would likely get a rise from you. But it would only validate your prejudices.
The reality is that there are racist blacks and racist whites. There are non-racist blacks, and non-racist whites. Your incessant stereotyping makes it obvious where you sit.
You are no different, and no better, than that which you revile.
You will fester in your little racist pit and die bitter and angry even though you are likely far more educated and financially successful that many of the whites whom you blame for holding you back.
No irony there.
LikeLike
This post is accurate but irrelevant. Of course nobody can know what it’s like to be somebody else. Specifically with black and white people, there is no “universal black person’s experience” just as there is no “universal white person’s experience.” Contrast, say, the life of the Simmons girls to that of Mike Tyson, or Chante Mallard to Johnny Cochran. Similarly, a tall person cannot know what it’s like to grow up being very short. As a left handed individual, I’ve learned that right handed people for the most part are completely unaware of how right handed our modern urban environment is. Etc. So what’s the point?
Throughout your posts you arrogate the conceit that black people are the only people with insight or perspective on racism. You’re wrong on that point. While it may be true that many whites tend to discount the presence and impact of racism, it is also true that many blacks tend to inflate them.
LikeLike
Here’s my take:
Some folks ’round here pontificate their blow-hard (while knowing precious little of anything regarding non-white realities) diatribes with an extraordinary measure of white supremacist attitudes and “privileges.” They are wonderful examples of “ignorance” and stupidity (in some cases) personified.
If they could only just LISTEN to and BELIEVE that which is outside of their personal paradigm and experience, we might just maybe travel further along the road of racial healing, for lack of a better term.
LikeLike
Matari – Is the journey down the road of racial healing only a jorney you expect a white person to take. Shouldnt it be traveled by everyone – meeting together in the middle. I cannot know what it is like to be born male, or left handed, or blue eyed or short or tall (being a depressingly average women.
But – the white – 32 yr old – depressingly average women sitting on the bus next to me…could not possibly know what my life is like. Just because our external appearance is the same does not mean We have lived the same life. To say that anyone can pinpoint and understand anyone elses life by virtue of their outward appearance is ridiculous.
So to – my skin does not limit my empathy and compassion or outrage when i speak to my family (who are not white) or my friends about the racisim, classism or sexism they have delt with in their life. Simply because it is not done to me does not mean I can not learn from it and develop a viewpoint on it.
It is of course not the same as living it (my comment above referenced actually FEELING what its like) – but it does give me the ability to learn from their life experience and become a better person, raise my children to be better people. And this is how we travel down that road…but one must be willing to believe that a white person can change as well. As long as we are judged as all being racist – simply because we were born into white priveledge is to deem us all as unable to be compassionate, empathetic or to learn from life experiences.
LikeLike
No, the sad thing is that you can tell something about a person’s past experiences based on how he looks. If you “look black” in America then sooner or later you will have certain experiences – and feelings – that white people do not go through. And that experience, if not universal among all blacks, is certainly universal enough.
Racism is far more profound than what left-handed people go through.
LikeLike
Blanc2 said:
Throughout your posts you arrogate the conceit that black people are the only people with insight or perspective on racism.
Well, no. In point of fact Restructure herself is not black – she is Asian. Nor is Tim Wise, whose insights on racism I have also featured on this blog. He is white.
White people can understand racism. Some do. But the thing I go on and on about in this blog, what you might be thinking of, is how I am amazed at how blind so many whites are to their own racism. Before I started this blog I knew most of them were blind, but the comments I get on this blog have shown me that the blindness is far more profound than I ever imagined.
LikeLike
racist white dude said:
Are you suggesting that you know what it feels like to be white?
You need to read the post more carefully:
For example, most people would agree that if a visible person of colour spent a lot of time with white people, it does not follow that the person of colour must know how it feels to be white.
LikeLike
racist white dude said this:
The reality is that there are racist blacks and racist whites. There are non-racist blacks, and non-racist whites. Your incessant stereotyping makes it obvious where you sit.
You are no different, and no better, than that which you revile.
I know all about that – about racist blacks and racist me. I have admitted as much on this blog. Just last week I stated that I have a “moderate unthinking preference for blacks”.
LikeLike
Matari said:
If they could only just LISTEN to and BELIEVE that which is outside of their personal paradigm and experience, we might just maybe travel further along the road of racial healing, for lack of a better term.
Right, unlike some commenters who want to talk racism away into nothingness and act like it is no big deal.
LikeLike
Re: Davida #7
I stated, “…we might just maybe travel further along the road of racial healing.”
“We” means EVERYONE. But FYI friend, the force of my comment wasn’t meant nor directed at you personally.
@Abagond: EXACTLY!
@EVERYONE: The system of Racism (White Supremacy) needs to be replaced with a system of JUSTICE. A system of JUSTICE = NO person is ever mistreated, and those who need the most help receive the most help.
If racism (white supremacy) isn’t dismantled, it will destroy the whole world.
LikeLike
Abagond said:
“I know all about that – about racist blacks and racist me.”
Abagond, the original meaning (supposedly stated by Magnus Hirschfeld in the 1930s for German killings and attacks on Jews) of RACISM before US white supremacists refined it in their definitionary to mean just any bigotry, meant “institutionalized” racism. So, blacks can only be “racist” if we discriminate against whites on a large scale in US institutions – like employment, housing, justice, finance, education, etc. We do not do this, thus we cannot be racist. Any group or individual can be prejudiced, or bigoted, or hateful, or reactionary but only the dominant group in or with POWER (white people) can be racist. We should all try to use words which tell the whole truth as accurately as possible.
LikeLike
What the post above basically states is that if you have white skin–which is privileged due to a SYSTEM set in place called White Supremacy you can’t fully know the weight of the experiences of those who don’t have white skin–even if they’re part of your family. Note the word ‘system’ not ‘individual.’ The post doesn’t say that anyone is racist. Actually the first racist statement was made by Commenter #4 who was kind enough to clearly disclose his agenda in the name he used to comment.
Noone one should be judged by the hue of their skin, but the fact still remains that white skin is judged positively & non-white skin is judged negatively for the most part. The proof is right here in the responses to Abagond’s posting of this article, which he didn’t write by the way. Some of you feel comfortable scalding, condescending to and damning Abagond to hell for talking about RACE because you believe he’s ‘other’ & therefore deserving of your harshest words. Commenter #4 gleefully proved that he sees Abagond in the most racist light.
I’ve been reading Abagond for a while & have no idea what race he is. He could be the ‘good’ race for all I know. I’ve met many whites who are sincerely concerned about race & race relations.
Discussing race & the ugliness of racism does not make one a demon. Silence and silencing makes you a conspirator to racism–the real demon. I’m sure there’s more to add to the conversation than ‘shut up and suck it up’ or maybe you’re just not Abagond’s target audience.
LikeLike
I fully agree with temple and abagond and Matari that the system is part of the problem. But I think its a smaller symptom, along with sexism, classism and many other symptoms that are part of inante human sickness. Humanity will always find ways of opressing each other, dividing each other – and created excuses to justify their sinful actions.
I do not see racism as a “whites in power” opressing people with a different color of skin. I see it as “power corrupts and those in power will always find a way to opress”. If we had a black, asian, latin, female system of power than they would opress and try to control those not the same. As proof – women are still not equal in many ways out in the job market to men. Thats because it is a male system.
Like I said – where I defer is in my view of the problem…I see racism (a real and horrible evil problem) as merely a system of a skin and corrupt race…one that has only one cure. I am subject to that sickenss as much as any other human..but i try to be aware of it..and strive against it – because racism, sexism and classism are all things that I think is a sin and therefore I hate
LikeLike
Davida #16 wrote:
“…I see racism (a real and horrible evil problem) as merely a system of a skin and corrupt race…one that has only one cure.”
Hello Davida,
Would it accurate for me to interpret your words this way? ‘I see racism (a real and horrible evil problem) as merely a SYMPTOM of A SINFUL and corrupt race…that has only one cure.’
I think you’re saying here that men’s hearts are evil/sinful without the spirit of God dwelling within. Is that correct?
You also stated:
“If we had a black, asian, latin, female system of power than they would opress and try to control those not the same. As proof – women are still not equal in many ways out in the job market to men.”
Even if all men are NOT intrinsically GOOD, as the Bible states, what evidence, research, data do you have that supports your theory that groups of “non-white” people would oppress and mistreat others (white people) on the basis of skin color? I don’t think the current situation in South Africa is a good example of mistreatment … as that is, IMO a rather excellent lesson or example of karma and cause and effect and what goes around-comes around.
Are you aware that virtually all “non-white” people did NOT create, implement, maintain and adjust the race/color and value categories over various groups of humans for 400 years?
LikeLike
To your first comment Yes – you are correct – I am pretty bad at typing on this standard keyboard…typos are a chronic problem.
Second comment – I dont have data at finger tips but I am sure there is historical evidence of groups -in those 400 years – implement and maintain other value categories, with in their own human groups. This tribe vs. that…this region against that. The evil that men has done to each other began long before different races had the technology to travel and interact.
Racism is not invited by this white power that is currently in control. This is the same old sin – just made global and documented better by advances of technology
I would say that if we were not different in appearance – humanity would find another way to implement, maintain and control people by other categories.
LikeLike
With guns and ocean-going ships Europeans got a huge lead over the rest of the world. The power went to their heads and they started doing things they knew deep down were not right – like putting other people in chains, raping their women and taking their land. The only way they could live with themselves was to come up with a big lie – racism. Racism lives on in American society because it is still a useful lie for white people.
Whites have done far more evil in this world than blacks. Not because whites are naturally more evil, but because they have had more power to do so.
LikeLike
Davita wrote:
“Racism is not invited by this white power that is currently in control.”
The North American/European/Australian/Middle Eastern … model of the system of racism – White Supremacy is so corrosive, so malevolent and so pervasive that one can hardly travel anywhere on Earth where this malignant “color caste” system doesn’t exist. Color caste, the MIND CONTROL of the masses that assigns human worth, value, intelligence, potential, beauty, etc according to the color of one’s skin.
White supremacy and “JUSTICE” can’t co-exist at the same time. White supremacy has to go.
LikeLike
Agreed.
Davida is using a variant of the Africans-had-slaves-too argument, the everyone-does-it-so-it-can’t-be-all-that-bad argument. She is partly trying to excuse white racism.
LikeLike
when white supremacy goes (and it will) – another form of evil will rise up. your focus is to small to narrow and to self centered. and your refusal to see this bigger threat gives me some idea of which way the pendulum will swing.
I came to your blog looking for the chance to view the world throw anothers eyes.
I know see that if you meet a person – who had never benefited from the color of their skin – who was pure of heart and kind – but had white skin…you would refuse to believe what all your other senses told you about them…allowing the color of their skin to define them for you.
LikeLike
I came to your blog looking for the chance to view the world throw anothers eyes.
That’s exactly what you got, Davida. And I sincerely hope you draw the right lesson from this.
LikeLike
I did – I am greatly sadden by the view
LikeLike
Davida wrote:
“I know see that if you meet a person – who had never benefited from the color of their skin – who was pure of heart and kind – but had white skin…”
Davida, I have read or listened to the words of several well known white anti-racists like Joe Feagin, Tim Wise, Joshua Solomon, Robert Jensen, Ferrell Winfree, Peggy McIntosh … to name just a few, that clearly and plainly state that virtually all white people BENEFIT from the system racism-white supremacy. I personally don’t need white people to tell me that this is the current reality, because I live it and see it, but maybe you need to hear the truth from THEM since you don’t seem to believe the non-white people here who are telling you directly that these things are true — which is yet another typical white privilege; non-white people are not to be believed, taken serious or listened too because we aren’t … white.
I’m not defining anyone’s personal character. I and others here are simply saying that this current racist system benefits white people much more than non-white people. It benefits you whether you want it or not, and it gives you privileges whether you see them or not.
But of course you are free to keep denying what many of us here know is the truth.
LikeLike
Davida:
1. Matari is right: nearly all white Americans benefit from the racist set-up of American society, whether they know it or not. Tim Wise, like Matari said, is big on this point and quite good. He is white. Check him out on YouTube or his own website.
2. When whites are faced with the fact of white racism they react in certain ways. Commonly they try to play it down in one way or another. Each one of their statements might be perfectly true (“Blacks owned slaves”, “Racism is rooted in sin”) but the motive behind such statements seems to be to talk racism away into nothingness. I have observed that in your own comments several times.
3. When commenters disagree with me but do not know what to say, they start insulting me. Racist White Dude did that right here in comment #4: I am boring, not that bright, obsessed, racist, etc. On other posts it can get even worse where my manhood is called into question. Ad hominem attacks prove nothing.
LikeLike
Matari – I believe that I have benefited from the system racism. I agree with that. I have not once said i didnt. I also know that my loved ones who are of color have been discriminated against and its wrong. I dont need to hear it from a white person. It is fact. I do not dispute the problem exsists. I just think its a symptom of a much bigger problem. i think the focus on one symptom means that you miss the larger sickness…that is my fear. My example was as if a person arose from the depths of the ocean – never living in our society (POOF _ MAGIC) – pure of heart and mind – you would judge them by their skin.
Abagond – I never insulted you. I am just saddened
LikeLike
Davida wrote:
“My example was as if a person arose from the depths of the ocean – never living in our society (POOF _ MAGIC) – pure of heart and mind – you would judge them by their skin.”
Davida. It would help me understand, or see, what you’re saying – if you can show me exactly where in my comments I caused you to have this idea? Thanks.
LikeLike
Davida (and other white folks):
Besides South Africa and Zimbabwe, there are a few other historical examples reminiscent of the current situation: different actors involved in similar dramas. Namely, Russian intelligentsia, forever trying to find a middle ground with the Bolshevik regime, until the only ground left to them was Kolyma’s permafrost. And, almost simutaneously, another group of idealists:
“There is no question that Jews tried to enter into a dialogue with Germans, and from all possible perspectives and standpoints: now demanding, now pleading and imploring; now crawling on their hands and knees, now defiant; now with all possible compelling tones of dignity, now with a godforsaken lack of self-respect. . . . No one responded to this cry. . . . The boundless ecstasy of Jewish enthusiasm never earned a reply in any tone that could count as a productive response to Jews as Jews—that is, a tone that would have addressed what the Jews had to give and not only what they had to give up. To whom, then, did the Jews speak in this famous German-Jewish dialogue? They spoke only to themselves. . . .”
(Gershom Scholem, a great Kabbalah scholar and a prominent Zionist, wrote this in 1962.)
White is the new Jew. Think about it.
LikeLike
Re Comment #22
“when white supremacy goes (and it will) – another form of evil will rise up.”
Nope. I don’t believe that in the slightest. When white supremacy collapses JUSTICE will prevail. JUSTICE and evil cannot co-exist in the same place and time. The question now is will racism (white supremacy) fail in the short term or the long term?
I’m betting that THE BEAST – white supremacy will kill itself in your lifetime (as well as the present world as we now know it) by its insatiable lust for violence, control, power, profit and resources.
LikeLike
I think Davida is saying that racism is a symptom of something deeper. In American society it expresses itself as white supremacy but even if you got rid of that, some other evil would spring up to take its place, one that might have nothing to do with race. It would just shift its ground.
LikeLike
nonserviam said:
White is the new Jew. Think about it.
Sorry, but I do not see that.
LikeLike
abagond – yes thats what I am saying…
every once and a while I delude myself into thinking that if I am loving and kind to all I meet – if I teach my children to live like this that we can make a difference. They I read the newspaper about all the violence and crime, the injustice etc…and it overwhelms. I know my bible teachs that this is a lost world…but I keep hoping that somehow we can make things better. Your blog tends to focus alot on the negative aspects of people (which shouldnt be ignored). but then I begin to focus on it as well (instead on loving and being kind and happy which is me normally). and its like a dark shawdow of forboding settles over me. People at work actually complained this week I was not myself
as I was typing this – my newphew came up and played peek a boo around my keyboard…certainly lifts ones thoughts away from the evil that men do. I am 32 today…I think I might let this topic rest for a bit.
“whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.” at least for today.
LikeLike
Re #31
Abagond, I think that’s exactly what she is saying, too. My hope however is that EVIL will see its end, its final death. Never to be seen or heard from again. Whatever humanity survives ‘the annihilation’ will finally have had its fill of EVIL. That’s what I see happening. Whatever it actually looks like in the end is up to the Creator.
LikeLike
White is the new Jew. Think about it.
Sorry, but I do not see that.
The metaphor isn’t meant to be comprehensive, but striking parallels do exist. The vilification and scapegoating, the exploitation of ingenuity coupled with official discrimination, the forcible extraction of wealth, and — in places where whites do not have the (relative) safety of numbers — open persecution and genocide-by-a-thousand-cuts.
LikeLike
Only one thing will bring an end to the sickness of the human soul…rebirth
LikeLike
ive seen many white people act as if they know what its like to be black. most whites just try to deny racism exists, and pretend that the experiences blacks go through arent real.
i hate it when im talking about some racist white person, and the white person decides to talk about some “racist” black person, as if that has anything to do with what im talking about. you cant even equate the two. to me, when one does that, it just proves to me that the white person supports and condones racism.
and when they say what is or isnt racist to the black race…i cant help but ask “since when did you ever have to live life as a black person?”. you cant possibly know what is racist to blacks, if you have never lived life as a black person.
white people cannot understand what its like to be black.
and whites AND blacks cannot understand what its like to be mixed (although biracials and blacks do have similar experiences, mixed people deal with some things full blacks will never have to deal with).
it really bugs me when white people act as if they actually know anything about the black race. they know only what the tv shows, and all of that is just stereotypes.
you honestly cant compare the two races. both races have had different experiences in america.
the minute you try to compare two different things…its like apples and oranges. if you say they are the same, then you miss out on what makes the orange what it is, and what makes the apple what it is.
in the end…the only way whites can remotely begin to understand what someone of color goes through, is to stop being judgmental. and just listen. dont make it about you. you have to educate yourself…be open minded about it.
white people will never be able to empathize or experience what people of color go through, but that is no reason for white people to not try to understand why people of color feel the way they feel.
the only reasons they would want to try not to understand why, is because they are either racist, or they just want to avoid having to make changes in their life, or forgetting everything they thought they knew about the world.
LikeLike
Alwaysright101 said:
i hate it when im talking about some racist white person, and the white person decides to talk about some “racist” black person, as if that has anything to do with what im talking about. you cant even equate the two. to me, when one does that, it just proves to me that the white person supports and condones racism.
I get that all the time too. It is like they want to turn a blind eye to white racism.
dont make it about you. you have to educate yourself…be open minded about it.
I agree!
LikeLike
There’s some real cloudy thinking going on in the “feels like” arguments above.
Let’s break it down…
First of all, “black” and “white” experience are not at all homogenous. My skin color doesn’t give me an automatic “in” when it comes to understanding how someone who looks like me feel.
I’m a white guy who’s originally from central Wisconsin in the U.S. and who’s spent most of his life living in Brazil. I most certainly DON’T know how the average white southern bubba feels, based on my skin color alone. On the other hand, I’ll lay dollars to donuts that I have a better understanding of what my black and brown carioca neighbors feel than a non-portuguese speaking black american who just got off a plane from New York.
Our ability to learn and manipulate culture is what we share as human beings and what allows us, ultimately, to step into the shoes of another human being, if only imperfectly. What Emilé Durkheim labeled “mechanical solidarity” – the sense of “belonging” we have with another person based upon our shared experiences and collective consciousness – is ultimately something we all share with very few people and is not at all extendable to large groups like nations and races.
While yes, eating dim sum or listening to Mos Def does not erase one’s prior cultural training, “spending time with people of group X” can indeed make you into a member of group X. All human groups have rituals for adoption of “the Other” and while one’s “strangeness” may indeed never disappear entirely in such an arrangement, one may end up being “less strange” than certain people who were born into the group and are supposedly part of it “by nature”.
At the very least spending a lot of time around a given group will teach you how members of said group think and are likely to react and – yes – feel.
The belief that people of a certain biological makeup have a “natural” understanding of one another and a shared ethos that is absolutely impenetrable to outsiders is properly termed RACISM and is, in fact, a pretty fascist variant of racism at that.
LikeLike
on Thu 24 Dec 2009 at 21:44:25 Thaddeus Blanchette
There’s some real cloudy thinking going on in the “feels like” arguments above.
Let’s break it down…
First of all, “black” and “white” experience are not at all homogenous. My skin color doesn’t give me an automatic “in” when it comes to understanding how someone who looks like me feel.
I’m a white guy who’s originally from central Wisconsin in the U.S. and who’s spent most of his life living in Brazil. I most certainly DON’T know how the average white southern bubba feels, based on my skin color alone. On the other hand, I’ll lay dollars to donuts that I have a better understanding of what my black and brown carioca neighbors feel than a non-portuguese speaking black american who just got off a plane from New York.
Our ability to learn and manipulate culture is what we share as human beings and what allows us, ultimately, to step into the shoes of another human being, if only imperfectly. What Emilé Durkheim labeled “mechanical solidarity” – the sense of “belonging” we have with another person based upon our shared experiences and collective consciousness – is ultimately something we all share with very few people and is not at all extendable to large groups like nations and races.
While yes, eating dim sum or listening to Mos Def does not erase one’s prior cultural training, “spending time with people of group X” can indeed make you into a member of group X. All human groups have rituals for adoption of “the Other” and while one’s “strangeness” may indeed never disappear entirely in such an arrangement, one may end up being “less strange” than certain people who were born into the group and are supposedly part of it “by nature”.
At the very least spending a lot of time around a given group will teach you how members of said group think and are likely to react and – yes – feel.
The belief that people of a certain biological makeup have a “natural” understanding of one another and a shared ethos that is absolutely impenetrable to outsiders is properly termed RACISM and is, in fact, a pretty fascist variant of racism at that.”
The topic is simple and not that hard to understand,
If you are white you don’t know what its like to be black because you aren’t black and you have white privelege.
You have never been targeted or mistreated for your skin color like black people have, so, no, you don’t know what it feels like.
But because you’re white you come on here saying what we already discussed.
White people try to tell black people what they feel or don’t feel and try to make our experiences of white hatred seem unreal. Same old, same old.
LikeLike
Dear Borlanina,
Thanks for the prompt reply, but in the future, might I ask that you not repeat my entire post? It makes it hard to read your comments and is ultimately a waste of bandwidth.
To tell the truth, though, yes I have been targeted and mistreated for the color of my skin on several different occasions, but that’s neither here nor there.
The point is do I have to experience something to understand it?
Now before you give a knee-jerk reaction, think a bit…
If it were so that we can only understand things we ourselves have been through, then human civilization would not exist. The very point of symbol manipulation (and we are the only species on Earth which I know of which engages in this) is to allow us to pass along data to other individuals who weren’t physically present to experience a given event.
Now, is all writing, speach, poetry, music – in short, all human communication – simply useless? Because that’s what a “yes” to my question above would imply.
Furthermore, you yourself quite clearly don’t believe the horseshit proposition that one must live something to understand it. Abagond isn’t white (I presume), but I’m sure we can agree that he’s got a pretty solid view of white people based on his carefully listening to what they say and watching what they do.
It’s a simple fact, cousin: culture does indeed allow us a window into other peoples’ lives. That is the POINT of literature, music, poetry and rhetoric and the point, in fact, of a blog like this. For you to say you believe otherwise is obvious and arrant hypocrisy, otherwise why would you even bother to show up here and post?
As for telling you what to feel or what not to feel, perish the thought! You are free to feel whatever you like. If it makes you feel better to think I’m a rigid old racist fuck who’s trying to keep you down, feel free to indulge.
If you want to change my mind regarding culture and our ability to learn it, however, you’re going to have to offer up more logic than “me black, you white and never the twain shall meet” because both you and I know that’s obvious bullshit.
Just because most white people WON’T understand anything else in this world but their own belly buttons does not mean that they CAN’T.
LikeLike
Language is powerful and amazing but it most certainly has its limits. Just as a blogger I know that. I am sure most poets will tell you the same.
I could become the world’s most famous gynecologist, but since I am not a woman I will never know what it is like to give birth. Or what it is like to have sex as a woman.
Living with my wife I know more about women than I ever knew before, but women are still a mystery to me. For me to say “I know what it is like to be a woman” would make me a laughingstock, and rightfully so.
Tim Wise, who is white, probably understands more about racism than most black people, but I doubt very much you will ever hear him say he knows what it is like to be black. He knows enough to know that he does not know.
LikeLike
Dear Abagond,
First of all, for a guy who believes in the limitations of language (and believe me, I do too), you sure spend a lot of time eloquently trying to express to white people what life is like as a black person in the U.S. Obviously, if you felt that all of that was for naught, because only by experiencing something can you truly understand it, you wouldn’t bother.
So it’s pretty obvious that while you feel language has its limitations, you still feel you can communicate something with it and that to do so is worthwhile. I’d thus say you quite clearly come down on the “culture” side of the “culture vs. racial nature” divide.
But let me get to the center of the thing at hand: OK, you certainly don’t know what it’s like to give birth, but does ANYONE? Can anyone truly say they understand another person’s experience? Women give birth in many different ways: for some it’s pain and blood; for some a sublime experience. Some do it drugged. Others with no medical aid whatsoever. And here in the Brazilian Amazon, we have several indigenous groups where the MEN suffer birth pains and the women do not (seriously: look up “couvade” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Couvade_syndrome).
So are you seriously suggesting that the average American middle class woman who has her kid while drugged to the gills in some HMO hospital has some sort of ineffable link, some great insight into the experience of a Ianomani woman whose husband is experiencing the birth pains for her?
Sorry, that argument I just do not buy.
Now, you say:
“Living with my wife I know more about women than I ever knew before, but women are still a mystery to me. For me to say “I know what it is like to be a woman” would make me a laughingstock, and rightfully so.”
I agree.
What I DON’T believe, however, is that your wife can also say the same thing and not equally be a laughing stock. Femininity is an extremely plastic thing and her experience of it does not allow her to talk for women, in general. 99% of what your wife can know about the feminine experience, she’s going to learn the same way you and I do: through communication with women.
Frankly, I don’t believe that that remaining 1% provided by subjective experience is such a sublime and untranversable barrier to human understanding.
Note, however, that I’m not saying that such understanding comes quickly or easily. What I am saying is that the racist/fascist mistake is to assume that subjective experience is necessarily objective experience, at least among people who have the “correct” identity markers.
LikeLike
Let me be a bit clearer.
Restructure says people of color “do not do not have racial essences”.
OK, fair go.
However, they then imply that if one has the right identity markers (correct skin color, etc.), one implicitly understands the subjective experience of all other people with said identity markers.
That could only be the case if there were, indeed,, “racial essences”.
This is what I call cloudy thinking.
It’s not the idea that “white people can’t be black people” I object to, but the idea that “black people understand black people the world over based on subjective experience alone”.
(BtW, appologies for swearing above. I didn’t realize that such was prohibited here. I won’t do it again.)
LikeLike
Restructure and I are thinking of people of colour in North America, though much of it is probably true in Britain, Australia and South Africa too. We are not talking about Brazil or Africa.
Her thinking is not cloudy. She has a very sharp mind. It has nothing to do with essences. Here is how it works:
If you look black in North America, then you are going to have certain experiences that white peole just will not have. Those experiences are going to shape you and give you a certain understanding of the world that, again, very few white people will have.
If you are white then being married to a black person or living in a black part of town will help you to understand some of it, but not all of it: your white skin protects you too much and your upbringing and white social network will be next to impossible to overcome.
Whites tend to think their skin colour does not affect them. They think of themselves as “universal”. They are not. Their skin colour affects them PROFOUNDLY. Because of how it changes their experience of American society and therefore the world.
You should read these posts:
LikeLike
Also good (and I think Restructure would co-sign):
LikeLike
This is what I don’t get:
If you are white then being married to a black person … will help you to understand some of it, but not all of it: your white skin protects you too much and your upbringing will be next to impossible to overcome.
But if you are married to a black person then it directly affects the person you love and your children! It’s like watching someone slapping the person you love (your wife, your child). True, you don’t feel it physically, but you do mentally. I won’t say it’s worse for you, but watching someone doing bad things to the ones you love is horrible. It does affect you. So it doesn’t really matter if you personally are protected; your loved ones aren’t.
LikeLike
Well, that is why I said “some”. But not all:
1. It is not you going through it. You are one step removed from it.
2. Even if it radicalizes you – and it could – you will still have to painfully unlearn what you have been taught since you were a child – in the teeth of your white family and friends. Everything in white society points the other way.
LikeLike
You will also have to give up your “white pride”, which very few whites are willing to do because too much of their self-image is built on it.
LikeLike
Abagond, I mostly agree with what you said. But here’s my point:
Those “certain experiences” you have are not homogenous across the black race. They do indeed form you. What they don’t do is give you some sort of mechanical solidarity with blacks across North America.
Let’s take lynching for example. Now, we can both agree that this is an experience that has heavily marked black identity in the U.S., correct? And yet you’ve not experienced it, I presume. Your relationship to it is based on your reading of what people who’ve gone through it or witnessed it have said and your imaginative extrapolation of the experience onto your life.
Now, that imaginative extrapolation is what’s key, isn’t it? While, certainly, you’re going to extrapolate off of a different set of experiences than I am, you’re going to ultimately have to grapple with the experience through communication with others, just like me or just like, say, a Pakistani.
You do not “understand all of it” simply by being black: like me, you need to read, listen, think, imagine. That’s the problem and the point.
I think you’re mixing up two things here, probably due to your many conversations with other whites on this topic. You seem to feel that I’m arguing that race doesn’t exist and that we are all “universal” beings.
What I am arguing, in fact, is that race does indeed exist but that it is a much more fractal experience than common American identity dogma would have it. My argument follows Paul Gilroy here, not Casper W. Liberal. I do not think there is a coherent set of experiences that all members of any one race have which gives them an ineffable understanding of each other that is ultimately impenetrable to anyone else. That belief is properly deemed fascism, as Gilroy goes to some pains to point out.
Saying that, however, is not the same thing as saying “gee, we are all the same and can’t we get along?”
Now, you say…
“You will also have to give up your “white pride”, which very few whites are willing to do because too much of their self-image is built on it.”
Which is why I go to some pains to self-classify as white trash (something which shocks my family, no doubt!) I believe that embracing that accusation is one of the best ways to knock down white superiority thought. Everytime I see a black person doing something which I think is stupid, I think of two or three examples of white people who’ve done the same thing. So yeah, crack in the ghetto. Like meth in the trailer parks and coke on Wall Street, hey what? 🙂
LikeLike
I don’t know what to think. I understand what you’re saying, but for some reason, I can not believe a mother wouldn’t be affected if someone does bad things to her child, or if her child is discriminated against! (Same goes for father I guess).
I am not saying it’s the same thing as to be the direct victim, but I can’t believe it would be so hard to be affected by your own child’s suffering.
LikeLike
I’d say that it’s close enough as to be no nevermind, Mira. Other peoples’ mileage obviously varies.
LikeLike
Mira said:
“I can not believe a mother wouldn’t be affected if someone does bad things to her child, or if her child is discriminated against! (Same goes for father I guess).”
Will she be upset? Most likely. But will she understand? Most likely not.
.
LikeLike
Will she be upset? Most likely. But will she understand? Most likely not.
But what’s there to understand? Remember, I say “understand”, not “feel”. The mother in question can’t really know and can’t feel what is like when people mistreat you because you are not white. But is that hard to understand what’s going on?
I use word “understand” as a logical process. If you are a sane person you can get what is going on, especially if your child tells you about it. Is it so hard to realize: “They discriminate against my child; my child is a victim od racism (even that racism is more subtle and not the old kind of racism). I don’t know what is like to be in that situation, but I can see what is going on”.
Maybe I don’t understand you. Are you saying mother wouldn’t realize what’s going on, or that she wouldn’t know what is like?
LikeLike
Oh. I get thet. But for some reason, it’s still really disturbing to me to think that a mother wouldn’t understand that someone is doing bad things to her child, and that they are doing them because her child is black. Maybe that’s because I see racism as really easy to understand process. What’s so dark and scary about it is the fact it’s almost natural and universal, no matter what we like to think.
I am not saying I know what is like to be discriminated based on race. I never felt what is like, and it never happened to anyone I know or love. But still, racism as a concept seems really easy to understand. Way to easy, in fact.
But like I said, maybe racism is something much more subtle.
LikeLike
Thaddeus says:
“I do not think there is a coherent set of experiences that all members of any one race have which gives them an ineffable understanding of each other that is ultimately impenetrable to anyone else.”
I disagree.
Sometimes when I write a post it is striking how black commenters will understand it right away and add to it or point out things I missed while white readers keep missing the point. Even though I am writing in the English we all learned in school.
If it were the fault of my writing, then both sides would misunderstand me equally. Instead a black person on the other side of the country understands me way more easily than a white person in my own city. Why is that?
In your model we would not expect that split – because language would be powerful enough while the life experiences of blacks would not be coherent enough.
But it takes more than mere words: there are the experiences you bring to those words. Like, when I watch “The Cosby Show” now I understand Bill Cosby way more than I did in the 1980s. The words are the same, but I am not.
LikeLike
Mira:
White mothers who did not understand their child because of race:
A white mother who seemed to understand them well enough:
In the last case she was an outcast from white society. Having given up her white club membership, she was free to see America the way it truly is and therefore begin to understand what it is to be black.
LikeLike
Oh sorry, wrong word here. When I said “natural” I didn’t mean bological. I used the word in a different meaning.
It is natural in humans to fear the unknown. When it comes to facing people who are in some way different to them, that fear can lead to prejudice and hate. Not always and not all the differences lead to this. But many of them do. This mechanism leads to many horrible things. Racism is one of them.
Also, people always think of their own culture as superior, especially superior to culture of their enemies. That also tend to be universal about human groups.
That’s why I think things like prejudice, racism, miscominication and war are more “natural” than understanding, acceptance and peace.
After all, you were the one who wrote:
Whites teach racism because they need to stay in power using their white hatred and supremacist beliefs of superiority.
And it makes perfect sense to me. I am white and I don’t know what is like to be discriminated based on race. I don’t have any black friends, I never even met a non white person. Still, what you’re saying makes perfect sense to me. And you explained it in 20 words or less.
LikeLike
@ Abagond
I will read those posts. I already know about Nezua. But I guess there’s something in my head (or generally about me) that simply refuses to believe a mother would be unable to understand what’s going on with her own child while the chile is suffering because of social injustice. Or if you’re married to a black person and see how people treat your spouse (and perhaps you).
LikeLike
Oh please, if its not natural for you to understand acceptance and peace then you must be a sociopath with no ability to have human compassion.
It is natural to me as a human being. It is natural to most people as individuals. However, when in group, especially large ones, such as tribes and nations, it doesn’t work that way. This might be my presonal opinion, but I do believe this: “a person is good, people are evil”. Once again, just my personal opinion.
Unless whites have some kind of mental illness and they can’t see that black people are human, there is no reason to be naturally afraid of black people.
And yet, that was exactly what happened in history. White people didn’t see black people as fully human. They did know even back then, that it is wrong to own a human being. However, owning an animal or a non-human wasn’t. Africans and Native Americans weren’t seen as human. Religious and political leaders had great debates over whether Native Americans are human or not. Somewhere back in 17th and 18th century. That’s how it all started.
Black people don’t go around claiming to be better than everybody else, white people do that. And no, people don’t always see themselves as superior, white people do that.
People do tend to believe their culture is superior, or at least not inferior to their enemies. Remember, I say “culture”, not “race”. Do Americans believe they are inferior to people of Iraq? Do Americans believe they are inferior to Russians? Do Americans believe French are better than themselves? There are always individuals who would answer “yes” to the above question, but in general, people will always assume their group (group can mean anything) is not inferior to others, especially if “others” are their enemies.
LikeLike
Her “superior white family” that disowned her, suddenly showed up AFTER her son got his book on the bestseller list.
Yes, that’s really interesting (in a disgusting kind of way). I am still reading those posts and will post comments when I finish.
LikeLike
“Sometimes when I write a post it is striking how black commenters will understand it right away and add to it or point out things I missed while white readers keep missing the point. Even though I am writing in the English we all learned in school.
If it were the fault of my writing, then both sides would misunderstand me equally. Instead a black person on the other side of the country understands me way more easily than a white person in my own city. Why is that?”
“In your model we would not expect that split…”
Actually, Abagond, my model is pretty on the spot here. Language IS powerful enough: the problem is that there is no will.
First of all, my model doesn’t presume there’s no such thing as racially-coded information. Race and racism are real. Given that, there’s no doubt in my mind that differences in understanding will show up.
What I’m pointing to is the root of those differences of understanding. From what I’m hearing here, you seem to feel it’s some deep, ineffable, unbridgeable gap between the subjective experience of whites and blacks, which creates more-or-less instant understanding of all things “black” among blacks and a more-or-less complete lack of understanding of all things “black” among whites. (I may be wrong here and you can correct me if I am, but that’s what I’m hearing)
I look at the same phenomenon and say it’s created by the fact that most whites simply DON’T CARE to understand and the few that do don’t put the time and effort into creating anything that approximates deep understanding. This isn’t a phenomenon that’s caused by racism, btw: it’s most properly called ethnocentrism and black americans are just as guilty of this when they, say, come to Brazil and try to grasp Brazilian experience based on their prejudices and a handful of songs and pop movies.
What’s racist about the whole thing is that white americans feel that they don’t have to bother because they see their fellow citizens as fundamentally Other and , when it comes right down to it, as fundamentally non-American precisely because of their race.
So what I’d say is that you are mistaking ethnocentric indifference and racist hostility for lack of ability. My model would predict the exact sort of response that you see. Where I feel that my model is a superior model is that it a) doesn’t contradict what we know to be true about human culture and learned behavior and b) it’s not absolutist and determinist.
And let me add here that the idea that people have ineffable corporate essences at the level of race is a very WHITE idea. I see nothing in the historical record – or even in the sociological record – that shows this view coming out of Africa. In the U.S. it comes from anglo-saxon protestant belief in a Chosen People. So for me, a lot of what people say regarding the ineffableness of black experience isn’t so much Black as American. I think any American, given their cultural programming, would pretty much instantly agree with the view that “as an X person, only X people can understand me”. Most Brazilians would have a very hard time with that view: it simply isn’t part of our cultural ethnocentric dogma.
“Like, when I watch “The Cosby Show” now I understand Bill Cosby way more than I did in the 1980s.”
And I would submit to you that, absent an American cultural translator, most Black Brazilians would have a very hard time understanding the Cosby Show on anything but the most superficial level, as would most Black Africans. So where’s your ineffable intra-racial experience there?
Furthermore, the people who respond to your posts here are certainly not a random sampling of folks. To begin with, most of them are highly-educated anglos and have been brought up to accept anglo ideals on race, identity and belonging as dogma. Thus it’s not at all surprising to me that you see two and only two general patterns: you’re not dealing with a very diverse group. For most Brazilians (because of our racist dogmas regarding identity) this entire discussion would be opaque if not offensive.
Finally, I notice that many of the folks here – both black and white – make much rhetorical use of strawmen in their arguments. Instead of really trying to grasp what the other is saying, they presume that they already know, raise up a strawman and promptly set it on fire.
I greatly enjoyed your posting on “How to tell if a commenter is white” and found it to be spot-on, in an ideal typical, if not absolute, sense. But I could easily make a similar list regarding knee-jerk arguments made by black people when race is being discussed. The simple fact of the matter is that Americans of both colors are highly reactionary when it comes to talking about race. This isn’t a whites-only thing by a long shot.
I mean, hell, look at the discussion here. I’m being polite, trying to communicate and my PoV is certainly not radically different from yours. But simply because I disagree on a couple of fairly minor points, I’ve already attracted two trolls who don’t seem to get word one of what I’m saying. One of them is so unreflective that s/he gripes that I’m posting comments that are too long even while s/he block repeats said comments.
So go figure. My own knee-jerk reaction at that point is “Well, that’s Americans for you.”
LikeLike
By the way, it’s much more comforting to believe that white people CAN’T understand black experiences than it is to believe that they by-and-large WON’T.
The first belief gives a clear recipe for action. The second opens up ambiguities and if there’s one thing anglo culture has historically had a hard time dealing with, it’s ambiguities. Anglos, in general, seem to prefer Chevy-Ford, Pepsi-Coke, Liberal-Conservative and (of course) Black-white sorts of dichotomies.
It’s a feature of anglo tradition many latino social scientists (and the odd anglo like Richard Morse) have pointed out. In Brazil, anthropologist Roberto da Matta has built a whole theory of human social action based on the idea that Brazilians tend to look to trinary models to organize their thoughts while Americans look to binary models.
LikeLike
Thaddeus said:
“And I would submit to you that, absent an American cultural translator, most Black Brazilians would have a very hard time understanding the Cosby Show on anything but the most superficial level, as would most Black Africans. So where’s your ineffable intra-racial experience there?”
Did I not say that I am only talking about North America, not about Brazil and Africa? Yes I did:
“Restructure and I are thinking of people of colour in North America, though much of it is probably true in Britain, Australia and South Africa too. We are not talking about Brazil or Africa.”
Was that an honest mistake on your part? Or was it ethnocentrism or racist indifference? Or are you lighting your own straw man argument?
LikeLike
“Did I not say that I am only talking about North America, not about Brazil and Africa? Yes I did…”
Yes, you did and I should have used a different example. I’m sorry. But I cited Brazil and Africa as an illustrative ferinstance, not as an absolute limitation. Let’s keep it strict to North America, then – which, remember, includes Mexico and the Carribean.
Do you really believe that the Cosby family is equally intelligible to Black people all across North America? Do you think everyone’s getting the same messages out of it, or even that Bill Cosby is universally enjoyed and respected across black North America?
Hell, forget North America: restrict the question to the U.S. A.
The problem here is the presumption that there’s a homogenous understanding of ANYTHING among black people (or white people or any people for that matter). I submit that understandings within any given ethnic group are just as diverse as understandings between ethnic groups. You yourself have pointed up this fact many times, Abagond.
This “I’m X, no one but X can understand me” is pure dogma: it’s belief with no science to back it up. There can be no science when it comes to such a fuzzy concept as “understanding”. What does it mean to “understand”? Does it mean I have to agree with you or does it mean that I just have to see where you’re coming from? Who determines whether or not I in fact “understand”? Is such a determination subject to independent verification? No. It’s political and, in the ultimate instance, accusational. It is not an objective fact which can be independently verified.
Define the word “understand” in objective measureable terms, man. Just try it: you can’t.
So what it all boils down to is belief in a racial “spirit” or “essence”. This is the only possible thing that would allow people of one group to “understand” a given thing and yet prohibit said understanding for members of other groups. “Experience” doesn’t cut it because as you yourself have pointed out many times, black experience (like white experience) is myriad.
I am white. That does not mean I “understand what it is to be white”. That, my friend, is a ludicrous proposal. What whiteness does is impact upon my life in a series of ways. Given those experiences, coupled with what I’ve read about whiteness in other contexts, I can imagine certain things about it. I do not simply, organically UNDERSTAND whiteness.
Given this, when the folks at Restructure claim that there is no black “essence” and yet only black people can “truly understand black experience”, they are either talking out of both sides of their mouths or engaging in some very fuzzy logic.
I understand what they are trying to express. I realize that their point has to do with white idiots who feel that race is no longer relevant because the eat Vietnamese food on Tuesdays.
Nevertheless, their position is simply, logically and scientifically bollocks. There is no ineffable and exclusive “understanding” that comes from organic experience on the level of race or ethnic group, and that remains the case whether or not you set the borders of said group at the boundaries of North America or expand them to cover the world.
Again, just because people won’t make the effort to understand does not mean that they are constituionally incapable of it.
One thing I quickly learned myself as a white guy dealing with black cultures and histories is that any position claimed by any black person as being “common to black people everywhere” will be strongly refuted by some black person somewhere else. There is no “black understanding”: what there is a multi-faceted and on-going black dialogue (if “dialogue” is the correct word for a multi-sided debate). Paying attention to that dialogue is what creates understanding, whatever one’s color may be.
I think what you really mean when you say “understanding” is “your experience of this is the same as mine”. If you’ve got another definition of the term, I’d love to see it.
LikeLike
Thaddeus & Mira:
For you as white people to understand what it feels like to be a person of colour is not an afternoon project. You would have to:
1. Be stripped of your whiteness somehow (see below for suggestions).
2. Give up your white pride.
3. Stop talking to your white friends and family.
4. Unlearn you white upbringing.
5. Live life for ten years without any of the advantages of white privilege.
James McBride’s mother in “The Color of Water” went through this:
These days being married to a black person will not get you kicked out of the white club. But there is hope:
The easiest way to be stripped of your whiteness is to become Muslim and dress in a clearly Muslim way. If your hair is not black, dye it black. Always speak in a foreign accent. Do not look rich. Etc.
LikeLike
BtW, switch “feel” in for “understand”: same problem. By it’s very nature “feel” is subjective, as is “understand”. You can’t claim that a feeling is intuitively shareable by tens of millions of people on the one hand, and is yet absolutely beyond the ken of other tens of millions on the other. Not wanting to feel something, again, is not the same thing as being unable to do so.
LikeLike
Or:
1. Be made up to look like a black person in a way that is easy to maintain.
2. Give up your mobile phone and your bank account.
3. Do not talk to anyone from your former life.
4. Go to an American city where you know no one.
5. Try to live there for a year.
LikeLike
Mira:
My blogroll disappeared when I changed themes. I did not lose it – I can still see it on the page where I maintain it. It just does not show up on the blog for some reason.
LikeLike
Abagond, you’ll note that I never claimed it to be an afternoon project. In fact, I think that it would be a project that would consume one’s life and would never be complete. However, I would say the same about a project where, as a white person, I’d try to “feel” what a white person would be like.
The problem isn’t that one needs to be reduced to a zero in human social relations and then be built into something else in order to “truly understand”: the problem is that “true understanding” just ain’t out there, anywhere, for anyone.
Period.
The problem is that even as a member of a certain group, you do not “feel” some sort of generic group experience. You are not simply black: you are male, an American citizen, upper class, college educated, an immigrant or a son of immigrants, a resident of a blue state… The list goes on and on. All of this produces a very specific sence of being in the world which is not simply transducible to “black”.
There’s a basic misunderstanding going on here, Abagond. You seem to believe I’m claiming that identity is infinitely flexible and thus ultimately doesn’t matter.
What I am saying, quite clearly, is that identity is a hell of a lot more fractal than any one simple adjective can account for and it matters a hell of a lot that we pay attention to how these adjectives intersect. There is no “black” or “white” understandings of the world in a singular sense: there are fractal and multiple understandings under each of these headings.
So to repeat myself: yeah, it’d be ludicrous for me, as a man to say “I understand women’s experience”. But it would be just as ludicrous for a woman to say the same. There IS no generic “woman’s experience” that every woman lives through and appropriates in the same way.
I enjoyed McBride’s book, too, btw. It was recently published in Portuguese.
LikeLike
“1. Be made up to look like a black person in a way that is easy to maintain.
2. Give up your mobile phone and your bank account.
3. Do not talk to anyone from your former life.
4. Go to an American city where you know no one.
5. Try to live there for a year.”
So you’re saying John Howard Griffin understands the black experience? 🙂 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Like_Me)
LikeLike
Ok, let’s try. But I can already see I am not doing 3. so let’s try without that.
1. Be stripped of your whiteness somehow (see below for suggestions). Ok, let’s try.
2. Give up your white pride.
I don’t have a white pride. I am not even sure what it means, but if it means that part of my identity is to be white, it isn’t. I don’t identify myself as white. I might identify myself as a woman. If you give me two groups of people: one- white males, second- non-white females and tell me to sit with “my own group” I’d go with the females. In any case, I don’t think I have a white pride. If “white pride” means something else, please explain.
3. Stop talking to your white friends and family.
I won’t do this. I would never left my family or friends. And none of them are non-white. So we’ll have to go without this step.
4. Unlearn you white upbringing.
This is a difficult step and it takes some time. However, I don’t think that anything in the way I was raised could be called “white upbringing”. But, as an archaeologist and antrhropologist my job is to work with cultures- all the different ones. I must learn how to read a material sources. By learning about all the different ways people can see the world and think about themselves makes me re-examine all the ways I see myself. I think this is a good step. After all, I am not here (on your website) because I have any experience with racism; I am here because, as a human being, I believe race is an important issue and we should all fight agaist racism, no matter if it affect us personally or not.
5. Live life for ten years without any of the advantages of white privilege.
I don’t have any white privilege. I am not Muslim, but an Orhodox Christian. I’ve read somewhere that not a long time ago, a Greek Orthodox priest was beaten up by an American soldier who thought he was a Middle Eastern terrorist or something. So maybe that will do. My hair is nearly black. I do speak in a foreign accent; after all I am a foreigner. I am not ritch; in fact, I am more poor than rich and it shows in the way I dress. However, I am educated.
LikeLike
Let’s try these:
1. Be made up to look like a black person in a way that is easy to maintain.
I don’t really understand what it means. I can not hide my race, I am white and it shows. (I think?) I have a non-typical body for white woman, I am built more like a black woman (based on pictures portrayed on this site). Will that do, at least a bit?
2. Give up your mobile phone and your bank account.
I don’t have a bank account. My mobile phone is garbage, and I wouldn’t miss it much.
Ok, and this:
4. Go to an American city where you know no one.
I’ve never been in America. I don’t know any Americans, unless I met them over the internet. So any city will do.
LikeLike
So you’re an anthro, too, Mira?
HIGH FIVE!
(See, you can’t really understand these things unless you’re an anthro…) 😉
LikeLike
What I think it comes down to, Abagond, is that the Restructure people believe in a Newtonian physics style of identity and I believe in a more chaos-theory oriented style.
Going by your writings, I’d have to say that you lean more to the chaos side of things, but that you’re unwilling to let go of some of the dogmas regarding identity that you learned as a young man in 20th century U.S.America.
With your focus on gender and class issues, it’s quite obvious that you really don’t believe that there’s anything approximating a singular black experience, but you haven’t yet figured out how to express that without falling into the white liberal trap of “there is no racism anymore”.
You ever read any Paul Gilroy? He’s the man for me on this dilema, the guy who preaches diaspora rather than community.
LikeLike
Furthermore, the people who respond to your posts here are certainly not a random sampling of folks. To begin with, most of them are highly-educated anglos and have been brought up to accept anglo ideals on race, identity and belonging as dogma.
Where’d you get that impression? Most of the people who respond are anglos, Huh?
To begin with, most of them are highly-educated anglos and have been brought up to accept anglo ideals on race, identity and belonging as dogma. Thus it’s not at all surprising to me that you see two and only two general patterns: you’re not dealing with a very diverse group
Wow you learn something new everyday! Anglos are brought up to accept anglo ideals on race! This is a blog not a sociological study. People choose to respond or not respond.
Instead of really trying to grasp what the other is saying, they presume that they already know, raise up a strawman and promptly set it on fire.
Perhaps it is you who presumes that you already know.
I am white. That does not mean I “understand what it is to be white”. That, my friend, is a ludicrous proposal. What whiteness does is impact upon my life in a series of ways. Given those experiences, coupled with what I’ve read about whiteness in other contexts, I can imagine certain things about it. I do not simply, organically UNDERSTAND whiteness.
In other words you understand all to well what it is to be white! You are being disingenuous.
Again, just because people won’t make the effort to understand does not mean that they are constituionally incapable of it.
Of course people are capable of understanding, however many don’t want to, this is obvious.
Are you related to no_slappz?
LikeLike
@Herneith:
Are you related to no_slappz?
It’s interesting you mentioned that, Herneith. I thought the same thing.
LikeLike
Mira:
Most whites have white pride and white privilege, but they take it for granted so much that they do not see it. So those requirements need to be stated in a better way. Or maybe just be left out: if you do not look white, you will lose any future white privilege and, after being at the wrong end of white people long enough your white pride might wear away too.
You know you have white pride if you feel the need to defend white people when someone says something bad about them. You say stuff like, “Black people do it too”, “racism is natural”, etc.
LikeLike
Thaddeus:
I have not read Paul Gilroy. What book of his would you recommend I read?
You said:
“So what it all boils down to is belief in a racial “spirit” or “essence”. This is the only possible thing that would allow people of one group to “understand” a given thing and yet prohibit said understanding for members of other groups. “Experience” doesn’t cut it because as you yourself have pointed out many times, black experience (like white experience) is myriad.”
No two people are alike, of course, but the experience of blacks in the United States of America – at least 80% of them over the age of 25 – is enough alike that they can understand each other on issues of race more easily than white people can. Yes, white ethnocentrism and racist indifference are part of it, but not all of it. Whites are shaped more profoundly by race than that.
LikeLike
Thaddeus:
Leigh, who just commented, is not black. She is Filipina Canadian. But even she understands me more readily than most white people. Not because we have some racial “essence” or “spirit” in common, but because we have certain common experiences of white people.
LikeLike
Thaddeus:
I said:
“But it takes more than mere words: there are the experiences you bring to those words. Like, when I watch “The Cosby Show” now I understand Bill Cosby way more than I did in the 1980s. The words are the same, but I am not.”
What I meant by that example had nothing to do with him being black. What I meant was that he is a father – something I am now but was not in the 1980s. So the common experience of fatherhood allows me to understand him much more than I could then.
LikeLike
I don’t know what is so hard to understand. Yes, Black people have individual experiences, but due to popular stereotypes of Blacks, many Black people will understand and come to an agreement on it affecting or shaping their lives. I don’t think anyone is really saying that White people can’t empathize or have any feelings, but they do not know what it is like to be Black. Sorry if it offends you but it is the truth. Just like me as an heterosexual person, I can empathize with gay people due to me being a human and showing empathy of another person’s pain, but do I know what that feels like to be gay and have people discriminate me because I’m gay? No, I can show empathy all I want but that does not change the status quo of how people treat gay people and my privilege of being heterosexual. Same with White people and people of color. You can show empathy as being human being but to say you know how if feels to be Black is very insulting and trivialize’s Black people or other people of color’s experiences in America. Because you are not recognizing your own privilege.
LikeLike
Herneith asks:
“Where’d you get that impression? Most of the people who respond are anglos, Huh?”
I’m using Abagond’s definition here:
Anglo – anyone whose main language is English. Mainly used when talking about Latinos. I use it for people of any colour but Anglos are mainly thought of as being white (a little over half are).
“In other words you understand all to well what it is to be white! You are being disingenuous.”
Not at all. My experience as white is not THE experience as white. I have no organic (Durkheim would say “mechanical”) idea as to how a southern redneck, brought up to believe in classic segregationalist racist tennets, feels. His “white” and my “white” are very far apart. Just to begin with, the racism he imbibed as a child was based on a completely different basis from the racism I imbibed as a child and those differences are not trivial or simple things. If I understand that gentleman (if we can use such a term) and his feelings at all, this understanding is based on what I have READ and HEARD and not based on shared experiences or organic “feelings” vis-a-vis white supremacy.
The problem here is that you seem to believe that white supremacism is a homogenous and relatively cohesive set of beliefs. It most certainly is not.
“Are you related to no_slappz?”
Huh?
LikeLike
[Technical question. Help me out here, please: what do I need to do to set comments in italics or quotes?]
LikeLike
See the comment policy:
LikeLike
“You know you have white pride if you feel the need to defend white people when someone says something bad about them. You say stuff like, “Black people do it too”, “racism is natural”, etc.”
Zero for me on white pride, then. In fact, I do just the opposite: when I see black people @#$%ing up, I say “White people do that, too”.
Abagond, the book I most enjoy of Paul Gilroy’s is Beyond Camps: Nations, Cultures and the Allure of Race. My wife is currently using it to teach her grad seminar on race and ethnicity. Paul Gilroy’s comments on the “end of race” are particulary useful for those people who wish to breakout of the “there is no more racism / everything comes down to race” debate. Gilroy shows us the way to create a critical language regarding race, racism and white supremacy without incorporating race, racism and white supremacy’s givens, which is what has unfortunately occurred so often in the past.
“No two people are alike, of course, but the experience of blacks in the United States of America – at least 80% of them over the age of 25 – is enough alike that they can understand each other on issues of race more easily than white people can. Yes, white ethnocentrism and racist indifference are part of it, but not all of it. Whites are shaped more profoundly by race than that.”
Let’s take one single issue: ebonics. What’s the “80% black ‘understanding'” on that particular issue?
“Leigh, who just commented, is not black. She is Filipina Canadian. But even she understands me more readily than most white people.”
Now correct me if I’m wrong, Leigh, but “Filipina” and “white” are not necessarily contradictory terms, at least in Filipino eyes. Am I right?
So it seems to me, Abagond, that your notion of “understanding” is, in fact, a political, subjectve and flexible one. People who agree with you understand you and, if they do so, you’ll find some adjective that will slot them in as non-white. I’m sure that if you thought that I agreed with you or “understood” you, I’d be slotted in as “Brazilian” and thus “latino” and “non-white”, even though I’m (as my wife puts it) so white I’m actually moss-green.
“What I meant by that example had nothing to do with him being black. What I meant was that he is a father – something I am now but was not in the 1980s. So the common experience of fatherhood allows me to understand him much more than I could then.”
Understood. But the question still stands. I’m sure we can both agree that Mr. C has been fairly iconic for black people of our generation. So do you think that he’s being “understood” by black people across North America in the same general way? I very much doubt it. I do not think that there is a “black understanding”, singular and exclusive, of Cosby. I think that there are several black readings of the man and that these are extremely accessible to any white person who cares to look. Racism insures that the vast majority of white people WON’T look.
LikeLike
No Slappz is a commenter, best known for commenting here:
and here:
LikeLike
Let’s cut the Gordian knot here, people, as I feel that perhaps my being too longwinded is leading me to be radically misunderstood. Let’s take one simple statement and look at it:
White people do not know what it is like to be Black.
This statement quite clearly presumes that there is a singular and hegemonic way of “being” black. It cannot be interpreted any other way. If there were different ways of being black (or white), then you would have to learn them by reading, studying, observing and paying attention. You would not have an organic “in” to those ways of being.
Now, am I wrong?
Define then, “like being black”. Show me one single thing that’s “black” to the point that 95% of blacks do it and no more than 5% of whites.
LikeLike
Thanks for the italics help.
LikeLike
[After reading No_Slapz’ posts]
So let me get this straight:
You think that a guy who’s main point seems to be that racism is a figment of black imagination is making the same argument that I am, even though I have gone out of my way, time and again, to point out that racism exists and has very real and negative effects on black people?
That’s really dismaying, because it indicates that a lot of knees are jerking here and that people are either not understanding or (more likely) not even reading my posts.
How, exactly, am I claiming that racism is a figment of the black imagination, Abagond, or that blacks are addicted to victimization and just need to pull their thumbs out and get to work?
How in God’s name did that impression ever come up in anything I’ve written here?
LikeLike
Btw, I’m posting under my given name here and people can see my photo and some of my and Ana Paula’s work at:
http://www.omangueblog.blogspot.com
Hope this is not understood as advertising. Most of our stuff is regarding prostitution and gringo/Brazilian sex relations, but we do a lot of race commentary, too, and we’d be more than happy for people to comment o stuff there.
And if you feel a violent urge to flame me, please do it over there rather than mess up Julian’s excellent site.
LikeLike
You know you have white pride if you feel the need to defend white people when someone says something bad about them. You say stuff like, “Black people do it too”, “racism is natural”, etc.
I never said, as far as I know at least, “black people do it too!” thing. How could I suppose to know? I never met any black person in my life.
However, I do believe ugly things such as xenophobia, racism, etc tend to be more universal than we’d like to think. Some cultures might not be racist if they don’t have “race” as a category in their culture. However, thinking your culture (country, group) is superior and others are, well, “others” and, if enemies, are inferior to you- that kind of thinking tend to be universal.
Like I already explain, I don’t think racism is “natural” in a biological sense of the word. I used the wrong word. In case you didn’t notice, my English isn’t perfect; I make mistakes often.
You know you have white pride if you feel the need to defend white people when someone says something bad about them.
I don’t feel the need to defend white people. I don’t hate white people, but I don’t identify myself as being white. When I say I am white that’s because, well, I am (I do not have any non-white ancestors). Not because that defines me in any way.
If I were a white person living in America then yes, my skin colour would probably mean something. You know this better than I do.
if you do not look white, you will lose any future white privilege and, after being at the wrong end of white people long enough your white pride might wear away too.
I get this and I agree. I just don’t understand what’s “wrong end of white people”. What does it mean?
LikeLike
Hmmm… I think I found where misunderstanding lies (at least with my own posts). When I write “all the cultures do this…” it looks like some people interpret the word “culture” as “race” (black, in this case).
Actually, when I talk about cultures, I talk about what I know best- ancient cultures, such as Egypt or Greece. I also talk about cultures in history, 19th century Europeans, for example. I never said anything even remotely close to “black people do this (too)”. Like I said, I never met a black person in my life. How could I suppose to know what black people do or don’t do? On the other hand, I never met a white American person in my life. I don’t know what they do or don’t do. I do, however, know historical facts about imperialism and slavery. Me being white doesn’t make me understand white Americans. They don’t belong to my culture. If I ever go to America, I doubt I’d have “white privilege”. Maybe… Until I open my mouth and people hear my foreign accent.
@Thaddeus Blanchette
I am an archaeologist (well, soon to be one; I still have to write my paper and graduate). However, we learn a lot of anthropology and my husband is soon to be anthropologist.
LikeLike
Thaddeus Blanchette said re: the statement “White people do not know what it is like to be Black”: This statement quite clearly presumes that there is a singular and hegemonic way of “being” black.
It does not “quite clearly” presume that; at least that certainly wasn’t my presemuption. It’s the exact opposite: despite all the differences between black individuals, there is commonality as well. That’s the great thing about this blog. The commenters include black people from different countries, different ages, different lifestyles, etc., but there’s a sense of commonality and understanding in a deep way – even as we disagree and debate on various topics.
You may be “right” with your anthropological assessments. You may “win” the argument with your debating skills. I’m just wondering why you’re here, and what you’re trying to prove? It’s infuriating that yet again, a white person is on here trying to invalidate black peoples’ reality, life, and existence. Abagond’s posts – and commenters’ feedback – have had a huge impact on me, because of our shared experience, despite our differences. His post “There is absolutely nothing wrong with being black” was relevant and helpful, and quite frankly life-changing for me, because it’s first time I heard that message spelled out so directly (after a lifetime of negative messages.)
Yes, it’s personal for me, and the very fact that you’re arguing based on science and anthropolgy as you say, is the difference between white people and black people in the U.S. (and Canada, where I am) and why you can’t understand: no matter how empathetic you are, you aren’t black. It’s not your life; you don’t go out in the world as a black person with all the related implications – I do. It comes across as typical white arrogonce for you to think your theories, models, and intellect trump the real experiences of real people. You can treat this as solely an intellectual argument, as if intellectual analysis can fully capture the reality of our lives, our feelings, our experiences. But I can assure you, intellectual effort, no matter how well-intentioned, doesn’t lead to full understanding. Sensitivity maybe. Empathy maybe. But not complete understanding.
Ironically, the one white individual I’ve encountered who has totally shocked me with his level of understanding of the black experience – blogger Macon d – never arrogantly states that he can understand what it means to be black. But then, I suspect that a big part of his understanding comes from the fact that he first was willing to relinquish that white pride that Abagond cited.
LikeLike
Of course, one should point out that Mira is in no way a “white person”, at least in the traditional anglo sense of the word, as she is not anglo-saxon, caucasian, or aryan but a slav.
Early 20th century U.S. immigration xenophobes were quite clear on the point that slavs weren’t “really” white people as were, of course, the Nazis under jolly old “Dolfie” Hitler. The Nazis considered slavs to be “the natural slave race of Europe” and killed a couple of tens of millions of them trying to prove their point.
And here’s something that’s probably news for many out there: the English word “slave” comes from “Slav”. Up to the 16th century, most Mediterranean slaves came not from Africa, but via Venetian merchants from the area around the Black Sea. The “discovery” of Western Africa was, in fact, at least partially motivated by Ventzian economic interests who were irked that the Turkish capture of Constantinople had cut off their traditional source of slaves.
But let’s fast forward to the late 19th century and North America. In discussing the recent shift in immigrant-sending countries from Western to Eastern Europe, American statesmen Henry Cabot Lodge said:
These Slovaks are not a good acquisition for us to make, since they appear to have so many items in common with the Chinese. Their large numbers interfere with a civilized laborer’s earning a “white” laborer’s wage. They are races most alien to the body of the American people and would be very difficult to assimilate and thus do not promise well for the standard of civilization of the United States.
So there you have it, folks, from the mouth of an arch-racist American pillar of anglo-saxonism: Mira can’t be white.
Now this is my question: does this mean that Mira can now completely understand people of color? 🙂
LikeLike
Re: my statement “I’m just wondering why you’re here”, I’m sorry, I’d like to retract that. It implies that you shouldn’t be here, which I don’t have the right to imply (since it’s not my blog), nor do I want to give that impression.
Yes, I may find the dialogue difficult and frustrating at times. But that doesn’t mean the dialogue should end, and I absolutely don’t want to imply that at all.
LikeLike
Excellent post Susan!
LikeLike
It does not “quite clearly” presume that; at least that certainly wasn’t my presemuption. It’s the exact opposite: despite all the differences between black individuals, there is commonality as well.
So what commonalities are these, Susan, that all black people share, yet no white people share? Can you give me a list of three or so?
You may be “right” with your anthropological assessments. You may “win” the argument with your debating skills.
I wouldn’t bother posting here if I didn’t consider this blog to be one of the neatest things that I’ve found on the internet in a long time. Hey, I could’ve gone to the beach today! I’m posting hoping to enrich a very interesting debate being carried on by smart, educated people: not win it. If I wanted to win debates, I’d heigh my grey ass over to Stormfront’s website and shoot fish by the barrel load. 😉
It’s infuriating that yet again, a white person is on here trying to invalidate black peoples’ reality, life, and existence.
Susan, you show me where I invalidate black peoples’ reality, life and existence and I will send 100 USD to the charity of your choice.
To disagree with someone is not to “invalidate” them and, in any case, the only thing I have disagreed with here is the concept that there is somehow an ineffable, homogenous, unified black understanding of anything. It seems to me that this is not “invalidating” black experience but, in fact, pointing out that it is incredibly rich, diverse and – above all – HUMAN. That is not “invalidating”, not by a longshot.
His post “There is abslutely nothing wrong with being black” was relevant and helpful, and quite frankly life-changing for me, because it’s first time I heard that message spelled out so directly (after a lifetime of negative messages.)
Susan, that’s wonderful, but are you seriously telling me that you’ve never read Malcolm X, Angela Davis, W.E.B. Dubois, or any of a raftload of African American thinkers, authors and poets who made exactly that same point?
It comes across as typical white arrogonce for you to think your theories, models, and intellect trump the real experiences of real people.
I’m 42 and I’ve been a dishwasher, short-order cook, book salesman, cornhusker, tree planter and even erotic dancer for almost all of my life. I only got into academia in a serious way ten years ago, mainly to give a solid intellectual base to the stuff I’d learned THROUGH life – not as a substitute for it. If I mention theories and models, it’s because they help me organize my life experience and that of others. They are not a replacement for it.
For someone who complains of “arrogance” and the “invalidation of people’s lives and experiences”, however, you sure have a pretty dismissive way of dealing with lives and experiences of others.
Ironically, the one white individual I’ve encountered who has totally shocked me with his level of understanding of the black experience – blogger Macon d – never arrogantly states that he can understand what it means to be black.
This is a very infuriating (to use your adjective) comment, given that it implies that I have somewhere claimed that I understand what it means to be black.
Let me state what I feel, once again, in very simple terms:
I DO NOT understand what it feels to be black. Neither do I understand what it feels to be white. I think the very idea that there’s a homogenous, unitary, simple and racial way of feeling is demonstratably false and that one does not need to be a scientist to see this.
I’m just wondering why you’re here, and what you’re trying to prove?
Let me put it to you the clearest way I know how:
Race is a WHITE problem as much as it is a black problem. Probably even more so. So if Julian Abagond wants to dedicate his obvious talents to creating a space where people can openly and frankly discuss race and racism, then I feel my point of view is at least as valid as anyone else’s.
Your mileage obviously varies.
LikeLike
I know it’s not directed at me, I just have to comment here.
That’s the great thing about this blog. The commenters include black people from different countries, different ages, different lifestyles, etc., but there’s a sense of commonality and understanding in a deep way – even as we disagree and debate on various topics.
This is true. However, I don’t think it’s because the commenters are black. It’s not a racial thing, I think. It’s the shared experience in the world dominated by white people.
I don’t think the opposite work, however. I don’t think white people have enough shared experience to feel this kind of union and understanding. Being white doesn’t give you any shared experience. Being white American, however, is another thing. But my point is: not all white people are Americans (most of them aren’t) nor they are western Europeans. I know I am not.
If being white is all what it takes to have the same culture and understanding, than white Americans and Russians would share the same culture and would be full of understanding for each other. After all, they are all white, right? As we all know, it doesn’t work that way.
So perhaps there’s one way you can be black, but many ways to be white.
As a foreigner, I don’t see American people who post here as “Blacks” and “Whites”. I see you as Americans. I understand you don’t belong to same race, but to me, a (white) foreigner, you are Americans first, race comes second.
If I were a black foreigner, I might see American black people as my own group because we’d have enough shared experience and understanding for each other. However, as a white foreigner (a non-western European), I don’t see white Americans as my own group. I don’t see black Americans as my group either. However, Implicit Association test shows I have a stronger preference for black people than I have for white people. That doesn’t mean I hate white people. It could, however, mean I subconsciously favor black Americans over the white ones.
LikeLike
Ok, now I see this sentence doesn’t make sense:
It’s not a racial thing, I think. It’s the shared experience in the world dominated by white people.
What I meant to say, it’s not because people in question are black in biological term of the word. A baby isn’t born with understanding for black or white people. It’s the shared experience that binds people together.
LikeLike
I see you as Americans. I understand you don’t belong to same race, but to me, a (white) foreigner, you are Americans first, race comes second.
Amen. That’s one of the biggest ironies of this whole thing, in my view.
And, by the way Mira: you aren’t white. Not for any of the white groups that engaged in African slavery, in any case.
LikeLike
@ Thaddeus Blanchette:
I would identify the following as some commonalities among blacks:
1. Invisibility: for example, limited black presence in the media. Whereas white people are not invisible in Hollywood.
2. Alleged inferiority: for example, the deeply entrenched notion of whites as the civilizers of the black savages. Whites in North America don’t have to deal with an ideology permeating society that states they are sub-human or an inferior race.
3. The race question: for example, did I not get the job because I’m inexperienced or because I’m black? Institutional racism makes this a question for blacks, not whites.
4. Black exclusion: situations where blacks aren’t wanted or allowed in, distinctly because they’re black. Neither money, class, nor celebrity status will trump an individual’s blackness; when the sign says “Whites Only”, ALL blacks are excluded.
LikeLike
@ Thaddeus Blanchette:
Re: invalidating black peoples’ lives, here’s an example of something you said that came across as dismissive to me. You said: ” “I’m X, no one but X can understand me” is pure dogma: it’s belief with no science to back it up. There can be no science when it comes to such a fuzzy concept as “understanding”. What does it mean to “understand”? Does it mean I have to agree with you or does it mean that I just have to see where you’re coming from? Who determines whether or not I in fact “understand”? Is such a determination subject to independent verification? No. It’s political and, in the ultimate instance, accusational. It is not an objective fact which can be independently verified.”
Usually when someone claims that a statement cannot be backed up scientifically, it’s a way of saying that the statement is invalid. And when it comes to the alleged inferiority of blacks and how this is manifest in the U.S., I do think that no-one else can understand this the way another black person can, because it doesn’t have the same implications for anyone else the way it does for another black person. I don’t believe it can be written off as dogma, and I don’t believe it’s a question of science.
LikeLike
@ Thaddeus Blanchette:
With respect to Abagond’s post that impacted me, you asked if I was “seriously” telling you that I hadn’t read the material of others who made the same point. I wasn’t telling you that at all. I’ve read various African-American authors, but I heard the message spelled out more directly in Abagond’s post than I have before. Maybe that’s just me, where I’m at in life now and the way in which many of his posts have impacted me over the past year. Maybe it’s how he presented things, due to the similarities in our ages and cultural backgrounds (based on what he has stated.) Maybe it was the simplicity of how it was written – not in the context of a book, just a short simple post.
You also said: “For someone who complains of ‘arrogance’ and the ‘invalidation of people’s lives and experiences’, however, you sure have a pretty dismissive way of dealing with lives and experiences of others.”
Criticism acknowledged. Definitely not what I want to be doing, so I’ll watch myself. And thank you for responding to my post and elaborating and clarifying various points, it was helpful. I’m not immune to “reading into things”, so that’s another thing I’ll be watching myself for.
LikeLike
Dear Susan,
As Jack the Ripper reputedly said, let’s take this bit by bit…
First of all, on commonalities…
Remember that the point here was to show four experiences that almost all black people understand, but which white people are simply incapable of understanding.
1) Visibility. Many kinds of white experiences are most certainly not on the silver screen, or if they are, are viscious paraodies. Take white trash, for instance. Sure, occasionally we’ll see a heart-warming story of a white trash mom who succeeds despite the odds, but generally the entire point of the story is to show how her friends, family, culture and community were all arrayed against her. Success comes when she turns her back on all of these. But generally white trash is only on the silver screen as stock villains or for comedic relief. But you don’t even need to reach that far. I have seen my birth culture on the screen precisely once: in Fargo. And even then, it was mostly played for yuks. There are a lot of white people who can relate to the invisibility issue.
2) Alleged inferiority. This is where some good, solid studying would do you no harm at all. Classic white racist thought most certainly did not say “if you’re white, you’re alright”. Very specific types of white people were considered superior – certainly not the majority. In fact, many white racists sincerely believed that certain types of whites were WORSE than certain types of people of color. The idea was that all races were “evolving” and that blacks, for example, were somewhere back there down on the ladder. Blacks were unquestionably improving, however, and it’s hard to find a white racist who didn’t agree that “someday” they’d claw their way up to the top. More worrisome to these guys was the spectre of white decadence, which could be brought on by too much inbreeding and isolation. This would cause irreversible decay and, once a race was set on the path to devolution, nothing would ever turn it around. Plenty of white groups were identified by these scientists as “devolved”: the Irish for one. Rural American white trash, for another. Look up the Kallikak Family for a good example fo this sort of thought. (By the way, every time you make a funny about po’ white trash and their sisters, you’re unwittingly repeating these knuckleheads’ ideology.) The fact that Bubba, the Stormfront skinhead, doesn’t realize that classic racists would consider him to be a prime example of a devolved white doesn’t make the fact any less true. Most white people – like most blacks – don’t consciously know about this history, but the epithet “white trash” or “cracker” will bring them to their feet in a hurry because all the emotionality of it is still there. Believe me, presumed inherent “inferiority” is something a lot of whites can relate to.
3) Uncertainty of regard. Any woman, gay or immigrant (just for starters) can most definitely relate to this point. There are plenty of white women, gays and immigrants. This is most certainly not a “blacks only” experience.
4) History of segregation. Do you know what the acronym NINA meant? While blacks did indeed suffer more intense and prolonged segregation than any other group in the U.S., they most certainly weren’t the only ones to be segregated. The Irish, the Jews, the Italians – all were segregated against st one point or another. It most certainly is an experience that’s fresh in the minds of many white ethnic Americans. If you don’t believe me, I can send you a long list of Irish-American folksongs that go on at length about this point. I’m sure you probably have been denied service openly and to your face based on your ethnicity, but so have I, on several occasions. It is DEFINITELY an emotion I can relate to from personal experience.
So there we have it: those four “commonalities” are by no means exclusive to black people. Many white people can easily relate to every one or even all of those points. Will the majority? Probably not, mostly because racism teaches white people that they don’t really have to think about these things, even when they’re directed against them.
Now, regarding “invalidating”…
You say:
Usually when someone claims that a statement cannot be backed up scientifically, it’s a way of saying that the statement is invalid.
No, it means exactly what it says: it can’t be backed up scientifically. And even if you were to take that as meaning “invalid” (and it would take a real bastardization of scientific philosophy to do that), it certainly in no way invalidates your “life and experiences” as you put it.
I mean, come on, Susan: are you REALLY saying that if I think something is lacking proof, I should edit my comments based on a person’s race? That if a white person says “the earth is flat”, I am free to disagree but if a black person says the same thing, I should smile and say nothing so as not to “invalidate” them?
I can’t think of a more racist or patronizing attitude.
LikeLike
This is a very interesting discussion! I think I have points of agreement and disagreement on both sides:
I agree with Thaddeus Blanchette’s comments in that I don’t like when people uphold “the shared Black understanding/essence” for a couple of reasons:
1. I think it’s important to keep in mind (and I will blog about this when I get the chance) that most of these discussions fall into a category I call “the intellectualization of race”. By that I mean that we are all obviously educated people, not “average Joes” when it comes to knowledge of racial significance, and a biased group in that we sought out and maintain contact with the blog owner and fellow commenters. Thus, the discussions of race we have not only don’t take place on street corners, they can’t take place on these corners, because certain traits we’ve brought to the table are essential to the civility/productivity of the discussion at the start. Just like scientific research findings must be translated to “plain English” in order to have an effect on the public, the problems and solutions (if there are any) to racism have to be given in layman’s terms.
2. That being said, obviously these educated and open people I mentioned realize that saying that “Black people understand each other” does not translate to “All Black people are the same.” However, in “real life” that’s exactly how we’ve seen this sentiment manifest itself. I would bet that if polled, many of the regular non-White commenters would attest to having been accused of “acting White” at some point in their lives. It’s even been documented by research: Black children equate acting White with “getting good grades” and “not acting ghetto” (among other things). You even see this in allegedly “enlightened” discussions of race: someone says something against the general sentiment and is often immediately labelled as “White” (meaning racist). The idea that one’s ethncity can be determined by a set of behaviors and thoughts is harmful, because it is fundamentally hurtful, not to mention racist, to have one’s ethnicity brought into question. (Even the Clarence Thomas’ of the world have experienced racism, by virtue of being Black in America, and their interpretation of those instances doesn’t invalidate them, no matter how unpopular their worldviews are.) Thus, although we can have a stimulating and thought-provoking discussion about shared experiences and their significance, popular culture bastardizes that into yet another racist stereotype of Black people. Unfortunate, but true.
On the other hand, I agree there is a “shared Black understanding” of sorts:
1. By virtue of having gone through similar experiences, especially immutable ones (most Black people will never be mistaken for anything other than Black in the United States), Black people can have a better grasp on the general experience than non-Black people. I think the birth example is a good one: women who’ve given birth know what the general process is like (water breaks, contractions, pushing, etc.), but that doesn’t mean that their can’t be individual differences (C-sections, complications, etc.).
2. Non-Black people can educate themselves and get an even more general grasp on the situation, but they never have to face the situation in anything greater than hypothetical terms, which is very significant. Example: discrimination research is a big area of Psychology right now, and White people are just as qualified to do this research as Black people are, because it’s all standardized. However, when the results are gleaned from studies, White people won’t be able to say, “This has happened to me too.” It doesn’t mean any/all Black people will be able to say that, but it’s certainly more likely. Also, life itself is unstandardized, so even though scientific ways do a lot to help us understand the widespread effects of social phenomena related to discrimination (and I say this as a Psychology major), the research would be nothing without the individual voices behind it, namely Black individuals.
Whew, if you’ve read this far, thanks for not falling asleep! I apologize if I’ve offended anyone by solely referring to Black people. I consider myself Black, not really a “person of color”, so that’s what I talk about during discussions like this. 🙂
LikeLike
Jasmin sez:
That being said, obviously these educated and open people I mentioned realize that saying that “Black people understand each other” does not translate to “All Black people are the same.” However, in “real life” that’s exactly how we’ve seen this sentiment manifest itself.
This is Paul Gilroy`s main point. He says that the day-to-day struggle for black unity is necessary for black survival but that, more often than not, it borrows much of its philosophical roots and certainly its quotidian style from some very dodgy ideas which, if taken seriously and to their roots, ultimately end up reinforcing white supremacy and racism.
By virtue of having gone through similar experiences, especially immutable ones (most Black people will never be mistaken for anything other than Black in the United States), Black people can have a better grasp on the general experience than non-Black people.
Oh, no doubt at all about that in my mind. It’s the absolutism of the title and the presumption of a cohesive black spirit or essence that bothers me, not the proposition that most black people have a much better grasp on black experience (plural) than most white people have.
Non-Black people can educate themselves and get an even more general grasp on the situation, but they never have to face the situation in anything greater than hypothetical terms, which is very significant. Example: discrimination research is a big area of Psychology right now, and White people are just as qualified to do this research as Black people are, because it’s all standardized. However, when the results are gleaned from studies, White people won’t be able to say, “This has happened to me too.” It doesn’t mean any/all Black people will be able to say that, but it’s certainly more likely.
Well, I`m not so sure about that. I can’t think of one discriminatory experience that’s been applied to blacks that hasn’t also been applied to some group of whites, somewhere. So where not all whites could say “This has happened to me, too,” there will always be some who can. And there will always be blacks who can’t.
Now, will whites – even the ones who’ve encountered these experiences – actually make the connection between those experiences and black experiences? Most probably won’t, due to racism. But “won’t”, to me, is a wholey different affair from “can’t”.
Btw, I’ve also always thought that the term “people of color” was problematic for two reasons. First, it conflates a series of really diverse experiences in the face of white supremacy, setting them up as if they were functionally interchangeable, which they aren’t. Second, like Jim Goad, I never could get over how “people of color” was supposedly correct and respectable but “colored people” a grievous insult. The English teacher in me just rebelled at that point. 🙂
LikeLike
People of colour are wildly different but in North America they have one thing in common: white people and how white people act towards them.
Whites do not treat Asians in quite the same way they treat blacks, for instance, but there is enough in common between the two that the term becomes useful.
LikeLike
Thaddeus says:
“Now, will whites – even the ones who’ve encountered these experiences – actually make the connection between those experiences and black experiences? Most probably won’t, due to racism. But “won’t”, to me, is a wholey different affair from “can’t”.”
This does not wash. It is like saying I can know what it is like to live in China because I have eaten Chinese food, can speak Chinese and have Chinese friends.
LikeLike
Abagond, if you do that for 20 years, then I submit to you that you DO what it’s like to live in China. Do you know what “the Chinese experience is”? Hell, no. But then again, neither does any Chinese person, either. But YOUR Chinese experience is just as legitimately Chinese as anyone else’s. Whether or not other Chinese recognize your experience is another thing entirely, but you certainly have it.
This is a very difficult point for Americans (of any color) to get, for some reason. Deep down, I really think that most of you do indeed believe in biologically-transmitted “essences” of peopleness. It’s been drilled into since childhood the way “Brazilians are mixed” has been drilled into Brazilians to the point where it has become dogma.
But it is a provable fact: there simply is no “X experience” which all members of group X share and which is ineffable to all non-members.
People of colour are wildly different but in North America they have one thing in common: white people and how white people act towards them.
That’s true, but white behavior is not homogenous, either. There is no “one way” all whites treat blacks or Asians or even other whites. There are a series of ways. There are patterns. Off the top of my head, I can think of two qualitatively different expressions of white supremacy that will have radically different consequences for black people: segregationism and assimilationism.
The problem Abagond, is that your trying to portray hegemony as something that is determinist, absolute and reductionist. You see patterns and seem to want to inscribe them as part of Mother Nature instead of as the human creations they are. The irony of this position is that it is very, very American and rooted, ultimately, in anglo-saxonism.
LikeLike
Looking back on what I wrote above, I think you mean that the experience of actually living in China somehow validates one’s understanding of Chinese as “authentic”.
Is that what you’re saying?
LikeLike
I was thinking of “living in China” – even as a foreigner – not “being Chinese”.
Suppose I told you my wife was Brazilian, that all my friends are Brazilian, that I speak Brazilian Portuguese, that I only eat Brazilian food and listen to Brazilian music but I have never been to Brazil. Would you say I know what it is like to live in Brazil?
There are Americans who grow up overseas. You might know some. They speak English and “know” American culture, but when they come to America they go through culture shock as if they were a foreigner. They feel like a fish out of water. And even if they had lived in America five or ten years before, when they come back they find the country has changed, often in subtle ways.
LikeLike
Thaddeus said:
“The problem Abagond, is that your trying to portray hegemony as something that is determinist, absolute and reductionist. You see patterns and seem to want to inscribe them as part of Mother Nature instead of as the human creations they are. The irony of this position is that it is very, very American and rooted, ultimately, in anglo-saxonism.”
Nothing I said supposes anything biological. Race in America is social, not biological.
Barack Obama, for example, was brought up mostly by his white grandparents and went to a private school that was mostly white. Much of what he knew about Black America came from television – there were few blacks in Hawaii in those days. But he is still black. Why? Because he knows what it is like to live in America with a black skin. In high school the white and Asian girls would not dance with him. The basketball coach would favour less talented white players over him. The police would stop him for no good reason. He felt a gulf of understanding between himself and his white grandparents even though they loved him dearly.
Why? Not because he was born with some essence, but because of how he looked and how whites reacted to him because of it.
LikeLike
Thaddeus said:
“That’s true, but white behavior is not homogenous, either. There is no “one way” all whites treat blacks or Asians or even other whites. There are a series of ways. There are patterns. Off the top of my head, I can think of two qualitatively different expressions of white supremacy that will have radically different consequences for black people: segregationism and assimilationism.”
Well, white American behaviour is homogenous enough that I can write posts about it and people from other parts of the country whom I have never met know just what I mean.
Whites are individuals, yes, they are not cultural robots, yes, but they act enough alike that general statements can be made about at least 60% of them.
LikeLike
I was thinking of “living in China” – even as a foreigner – not “being Chinese”.
What is “being Chinese”, Abagond? Chinese is a citizenship, not a race. There are Chinese people of many different races. There is no one “Chinese” or even a “typical” Chinese.
So what’s “really Chinese”? It seems to me that you are presuming precisely the racial or national essence which the author of Restructured! went out of their way to claim didn’t exist. Worse, you’re doing this without even being able to define this essence. We might as well be talking about Elvis’ ghost here when you say “really Chinese”.
There ain’t no “real” anything in human culture: there are open-ended debates and fields of play in which the limits of being are debated and discussed.
Suppose I told you my wife was Brazilian, that all my friends are Brazilian, that I speak Brazilian Portuguese, that I only eat Brazilian food and listen to Brazilian music but I have never been to Brazil. Would you say I know what it is like to live in Brazil?
I would say that you have a certain understanding of Brazil, yes. Deeper than some folks, shallower than others perhaps. Speaking Brazilian Portuguese, for me, would be much more important than actually having been to Brazil. Going to Brazil, in and of itself, means little as tourism is a notoriously shallow way of dealing with a culture. But hell, if you’re speaking, reading, writing Brazilian Portuguese, engaging with the country’s lit, music, poetry and politics and have been doing this for 20 years, then I’d say you’d probably have a better grasp of the country, its possibilities and beliefs, than most of my native-born Brazilian college freshman students – independent of whether you live here or not.
There are Americans who grow up overseas. You might know some. They speak English and “know” American culture, but when they come to America they go through culture shock as if they were a foreigner. They feel like a fish out of water. And even if they had lived in America five or ten years before, when they come back they find the country has changed, often in subtle ways.
And I also know American who live overseas and who rarely if ever visit the country of their birth and yet have a much better grasp of what’s going on there than most Americans living in the country precisely BECAUSE they are removed from such bafafá as the Tiger Woods scandal and can thus concentrate on looking at longer duration phenomena. They see the forest better because they aren’t distracted by the trees.
Nothing I said supposes anything biological. Race in America is social, not biological.
Well, the implications of something very like biological race are there. Think about it: if the only way to understand a group is to be born into the group and if every member of a group instinctively understands it, then said understanding is effectively transmitted by blood relation, is it not? This has been the number one non-American criticism of pop American identity philosophy: when you boil it down to operational terms, “heritage” looks suspiciously like biological transmittence.
Well, white American behaviour is homogenous enough that I can write posts about it and people from other parts of the country whom I have never met know just what I mean.
With all due respect, Abagond, and seriously not wanting to compare your writings with those of a bunch of feckwits, the nutters over on Stormfront.com can say exactly the same thing. ANY politicized member of an identity group can say the same exact thing.
Political agreement does not for proof make. You have folks who agree with you because you ascribe to much the same dogmas which have been culturally inculcated from birth on.
And even if that weren’t the case, my argument has never been that one can’t describe patterns in white behavior. My argument is – and your writings themselves show this to be the case – white behavior is not homogenous.
A white guy who believes in white supremacy from an assimilationist viewpoint (i.e. “Everyone can and should act just like me”) manifestly DOES NOT act the same way as a white person who takes a segregationist stance (i.e. “My people are pure and superior and no one on earth can ever be like us”). The first white racist funds black universities. The second feels black people need no education at all because they are essentially beats of the field.
I submit to you that the consequences for black people of those two positions are quite different, though I wouldn’t want to classify one as “better” than the other.
In Brazil, we have to deal far more with the first type of racism and it changes EVERYTHING in terms of how we conduct or political struggles and couch our positions. These sorts of differences create real world differences in how people think and perceive themselves and the world. About all you can say that blackness creates in common, in this context, is a belief that whites are, fundamentally, screwed up.
But hell, millions of whites would agree with that sentiment, so that’s no ineffable “black thing” understandable only to blacks. 🙂
Whites are individuals, yes, they are not cultural robots, yes, but they act enough alike that general statements can be made about at least 60% of them.
Yeah. So? As an anthropologist, I’d be pretty stupid to argue that one can’t descry patterns in human behavior, wouldn’t I?
Let’s bring this back to my original point: it is fuzzy thinking to believe that there is simultaneously no such thing as “black essence” and yet to say, at the same time, that there is some sort of sublime component to blackness that only black people can “truly understand”.
THAT’s the point being discussed here. Not whether or not you can predict most white people’s behavior most of the time.
LikeLike
Thaddeus said:
“Well, the implications of something very like biological race are there. Think about it: if the only way to understand a group is to be born into the group and if every member of a group instinctively understands it, then said understanding is effectively transmitted by blood relation, is it not? This has been the number one non-American criticism of pop American identity philosophy: when you boil it down to operational terms, “heritage” looks suspiciously like biological transmittence.”
It does not come from biology – it comes from a certain experience of American society. It seems to track biology because the root cause is white racism.
LikeLike
Thaddeus:
Those who understand my posts best tend to be people of colour who, regardless of where they or their parents were born, live or have lived in one of five countries: America, Canada, Britain, Australia and South Africa. Not all are black, so it is not genetic, it is not some inborn essence.
I get comments from black Africans, but the only ones who “get” the posts on race live in one of those five countries. The same is true of West Indians. So simply being born black is not enough.
LikeLike
I get comments from black Africans, but the only ones who “get” the posts on race live in one of those five countries.
Abagond, people can “get” your posts and not agree with them. You seem to define “understand” as “agree with me”. “Understanding” and “agreement” are not synonyms.
Regarding the biologism inherent in the idea that “only X people can understand X people and all X people share a sublime understanding”, you are quite correct when you claim that this concept is not necessarily rooted in biology. In fact, that is one of its greatest assets to post-modern racists. The real problem here is properly essentialism.
Even most white supremacists don’t subscribe to the notion of biological race these days, man. Last I looked, even the Klan was claiming that they no longer believed in inherent black biological inferiority: they were making an argument quite similar to yours: that there’s an ineffable quality of “peopleness” to whiteness which allow white folks a special “in” with one another.
Whether or not you ultimately root this ineffable feeling of unique peopleness in biology, culture, or history, Abagond, it functions AS IF it were a biological trait, as your presumption is, effectively, that it is passed from parent to child and that it is INEVITABLY passed from parent to child.
Human culture quite simply – provably – doesn’t work in an essential manner, nor does historical experience. So ultimately, if you’re claiming that “all x people understand the ‘x’ experience and no non-x person does”, there can only be one thing you are refering to: the transmission of essence. And, frankly, whether this essence is biological or spirtual is of no nevermind. Once you postulate that it’s a mysterious “essence” that people can feel but which you can’t measure or even accurately describe (and note that no one here has yet been able to provide us with ONE thing – let alone three – that all blacks and no whites “understand”), we have effectively transported ourselves into the realm of cloud-cuckoo land. We are then talking astrology, my friend, not history or sociology.
Now, the question that Paul Gilroy poses is “why would you want to buy into that essentially fascist and fantasmagoric position when you don’t have to to argue against white supremacy and racism?”
LikeLike
Again I disagree. I gave you two examples above how YOU TOO can know what it is like to be a person of colour despite having two white parents: the Griffinesque “Black Like Me” scenario and the Muslim Like Me scenario.
The line of transmission is not from parent to child but from white racist jerk to the person of colour.
If aliens zapped the minds of white people to cure them of their racism, then in time the black race would disappear – there would just be people with dark skin, just like there are people with red hair.
The black race as we know it in America is utterly the creation of white racists. One easy way to tell: you can be 90% European by blood and still be “black”. There is absolutely nothing “natural” in that – especially when you consider that in the old days it meant that white men were condemning their own sons and daughters to slavery if they had children by black women (as some did, like Thomas Jefferson).
There are no racial essences – just racist douchebags.
LikeLike
These posts might help you to understand where I am coming from:
LikeLike
Reading the Tatum, it seems to me that she’s just cutting Goffman’s views on stigma to the black experience. Now that’s fine, but again, it means that this is not a “black thing” and thus unimagineable to any white person.
Regarding wiggers, the discussion isn’t whether one can “be” black but whether one can, within the reasonable bounds of understanding imposed by our subjective natures, understand what it feels like to be black.
As for the “X like me” scenario, all that is well and good, but it’s really not what I asked for. I asked if anyone could come up with three things that all black people understand but no white person could?
By the way, I agree that disguisng oneself as the Other can give one insight into how the Other sees the world, but said practical experience by itself is not necessarily any more valuable than other ways of achieving understanding.
LikeLike
The links were meant only as background to help you understand. They were not meant as direct commentary on this thread.
LikeLike
Ahn.
Ahn.
Well, I understand.
The problem, Abagond, is the myth of fingerprints: the presumption that there’s some sort of essential experience to race.
There ain’t.
I’ll cheerfully admit that my understanding of how black people feel is incomplete and never will be complete. But then again, so is my understanding of how white people feel. And, for that matter, so is your understanding of how black people feel…
So I’m back to step one: to claim that there’s no essential black experience and yet to simultaneously imply that black people all understand each other in a way that white people never, ever will is fuzzy thinking.
LikeLike
Thaddeus said:
“By the way, I agree that disguisng oneself as the Other can give one insight into how the Other sees the world, but said practical experience by itself is not necessarily any more valuable than other ways of achieving understanding.”
And what other ways would those be?
As far as I can see, being X Like Me for a long enough period of time is the only way you will be able to break through your own white upbringing and white pride.
White Americans like to think they are “neutral” but they are not. Because of their power in society and in the world as a whole their delusions are stronger and more warped than most people’s – which is in addition to the ordinary sort of ethnocentrism that everyone suffers from.
LikeLike
And what other ways would those be?
Reading, listening, paying attention, observing, exchanging information and mixing with others, watching what others go through…
As far as I can see, being X Like Me for a long enough period of time is the only way you will be able to break through your own white upbringing and white pride.
The only way…? Abagond, you wouldn’t even know how to process that experience without a lot of study on the side – study which Griffen engaged in. It’s one of America’s number one myths that practical experience beats “book learnin'” hands down every time. Experience without a proper intellectual framework to understand it with is essentially useless.
Furthermore, going through said experience wouldn’t give you a complete understanding of anything, just a further or better understanding.
As for “white pride”, I’ve looked over your checklist on that and don’t see it in me, so apparently there must be other ways to get rid of that particular beast.
I’d say that experiencing intense prejudice should give you a good ground on which to sympathize with anyone. Completely understand them? No, but then again there is no complete understanding.
LikeLike
Thaddeus said:
“The only way…? Abagond, you wouldn’t even know how to process that experience without a lot of study on the side – study which Griffen engaged in. It’s one of America’s number one myths that practical experience beats “book learnin’” hands down every time. Experience without a proper intellectual framework to understand it with is essentially useless.”
Sorry: I assume that people naturally seek to understand their experience.
Part of the point of the X Like Me exercise is not simply to provide new data, new experiences, but to break down your old understandings and build up new ones.
The X Like Me experience will not be complete, of course, but you will be leagues ahead of anyone who merely reads this stuff in a book.
LikeLike
Sorry: I assume that people naturally seek to understand their experience.
You believe that and yet simultaneously believe that white people are absolutely unreflective, huh?
I believe that, unfortunately, most people float through life and put little to no effort in examining their experiences.
Part of the point of the X Like Me exercise is not simply to provide new data, new experiences, but to break down your old understandings and build up new ones.
So what “new understanding” are you going to get there that you couldn’t possibly get any other way?
As for this sort of experience, Abagond, I’ve actually done it. It didn’t give me new understandings: it brought old ones home in a more visceral way. But it didn’t bring me anything new at all.
LikeLike
If you want to tell the World Wide Web more about that experience, I would be interested to hear it. But if it is too personal, I understand.
LikeLike
Well, yes, I think whites in America are in general less reflective than blacks. I know that sounds racist but consider that whites have less need to be reflective since the mainstream culture is set up for the White Like Me experience. I would argue that even BET is set up for White Like Me since it seems to suit whites better than blacks.
LikeLike
I wrote an article about one of these experiences that I should publish some day in the meat world, somewhere.
For awhile Ana and I were messing with our appearances to see how people’s reactions to us changed. This is much easier to do in Brazil than in the States, one should note, because of the national prevailing ideology os mestiçagem.
Now, normally Ana and I look like what cariocas classify as a “typical sexual tourism couple” (there’s a photo of us up on our website at http://www.omangueblog@blogspot.com). She’s small, black and young looking. I’m white, blue-eyed and gringo looking. So we’re always getting pegged out by people around us as a prostitute and a gringo fresh off the boat.
The odd thing about it is this: until we started dating, we’d never had this trouble. Ana was universally recognized as a middleclass, college-educated carioca and I was generally glossed as a German-Brazilian up from the south or maybe a paulista (e.g. someone from São Paulo state). When we got together, though, as Ana puts it, “our physical combination increased each of our alterities).
So we started to mess with this. We wanted to see how “dark” I needed to go before Brazilians started classifying me as Brazilian again. We also wanted to see if we could flip Ana from the “Brazilian” category into the “gringa” category. Turns out the second operation was a lot easier than the first.
In my case, I died my hair black, tanned my ass off and started wearing “typical” middle class Brazilian clothes. Then I hit tha major roadblock: my eyes.
You want to talk The Bluest Eye?” Listen to this story…
I decided to buy a pair of dark brown contact lenses and start wearing them daily.for daily wear. I thought that this wouldn’t be a problem because colored contact lens are now all the rage in Brazil. But – and you can chalk this down to unconscious racism – it never occurred to me that BROWN lenses would be impossible to find.
I literally looked all over town. No one had brown lenses. And as I looked, I was bombarded with questions by a series of mostly young female optricians’ assistants. These girls were generally light to dark brown in color and most had bleach blonde, artificially straightened hair. Almost to a woman, they’d taken advantage of employee discounts and had bought blue lenses for themselves.
Everyone of these girls was aghast at the idea that I wanted to cover up my blue peepers. “Oh no, you can’t do that!” many fo them said. “They’re so beautiful!” One of them told me that even if she had brown lenses, whe’d refuse to sell them to me: “We only stock those for people who have serious defects which disfigure their pupil.”
Now think about that for a moment: brown lenses are only good for sick people in Brazil…
Well, this went on and on. It was literally impossible to find brown contact lenses anywhere in Rio de Janeiro. I eventually found some “honey colored” lenses, but they were too clear to do the job properly.
Then I went to the U.S. In my first day in NYC I bought a pair of brown contact lenses in literally the first opticians I dropped into.
The actual “color changing” experiment in this case taught me less than just trying to prepare for it.
LikeLike
Whoops. Change that address to http://www.omangueblog.blogspot.com
Our photo is at the foot of the page.
LikeLike
This is really interesting (I’m reading your blog as we speak, btw). The image is too small, though.
Anyway, my friend had a “strange” problem in America. She spent one year in Texas and it was almost imporssible for her to find black hair dye. It looked like nobody wanted to have black hair, unless it’s natural.
LikeLike
Just looking at the pic at the top of the post. Those East Indian women are gorgeous! Model Gemma Ward has nothing on these women. Nothing.
LikeLike
it actually a proven fact that most racism in america is equal in every race. no race is more racist then any other race. and that is a proven fact
racism is an individual attitude therfore anyone can be racist it is not a mass system
and facts are facts. there are more wealthy black individuals in america then there are whites. just because the top 1 is predominatly white doesnt mean that we live in a system controled soley by whites. and just because your personal experience leads you to believe that whites are more privileged then blacks doesnt make that so.
90% of people who claim the white privilage card live in a predominatly white racist area. and therfore can not attribute. racism to just whites.
for the same reason that if i lived in south central LA i would be met with black racism on a large scale being that it is a predominatly black neighboor hood. being that i have a white appearance.
and you can not possibly know what its like to have a white appearance in a black neighboorhood. which i can attest to
i get dirty looks i get treated just the way you say blacks get treated.
racism is not a white centered attitude.
racism is proven to exist in all races equally
LikeLike
“There are more wealthy black individuals in america then there are whites.”
Clearly you are joking.
LikeLike
@ King
Why of Corse, randell was joking. Why else would nobody have responded “seriously” to his comment in over a year? ^_^
LikeLike
^ Good point.
I was just so shocked by his statements that I felt compelled to ask the question, if only to hear my own echo.
LikeLike
So how can enough empathy be had for a “white” person to be able to _truly_ care about racism and do something to stop it?
LikeLike
Have people heard about “empaths”? People who say they are able to psychically feel others’ feelings and even “merge” with others? I’ve had these people throw the typical white derailing fit when I bring up white privilege, even while insisting that they feel people of color’s pain about racism.
LikeLike
I’ve had these people throw the typical white derailing fit when I bring up white privilege, even while insisting that they feel people of color’s pain about racism.
The only pain these white people are feeling is in the buttocks. They consider our views and or concerns as a pain in the arse. They are full of sh*t. Unless they bring up racism/white supremacy, you, yes you, are upsetting their feelings.
LikeLike