tim | Entries tagged with racism

"...Being good will never solve the problem because the problem is not that I am bad." -- Clementine Morrigan

"With the destruction of property, violence can turn from an aspect of self-defense to a useful offensive tactic. Nothing gets the attention of the elite like taking away or destroying what they value above all else: property." -- Raven Rakia, "Black Riot"

"Dear White People,

Please stop explaining that you sympathize with protest but don't condone property damage, loss or lawbreaking.

Firstly. You're not SUPPOSED to like it. That's the point.

Secondly. If you don't get why the rest is necessary, you don't understand the protest." -- absurdistwords (source)

I've been collecting links about the unhelpful dichotomy between "good" or "peaceful" protests and "bad" or "violent" protests, and in particular, the fallacy that by obeying the law (principally: not destroying property), we can persuade a fascist regime to stop terrorizing us. The converse of that is that police violence is a reasonable punishment for being bad (again: principally, destroying property.) I place "peaceful" and "violent" in quotation marks since inevitably, these words are used in a way that obscures power dynamics and the reality that violence is committed principally by the police and other agencies granted a monopoly on violence by the state -- and through delegation, by the state itself.

"Violence is not breaking windows, or pulling down fences, or punching/wrestling/shooting the cops pointing shotguns and tear gas canisters at your face.

Violence is anything, literally *ANYTHING*, that makes the bourgeoisie feel at all threatened." -- Lynnaea Amélia Machuca-Baker

"Optics"

"All disruptive social movements are met with stern warnings from people who think they know better." -- Kevin A. Young, "History Shows That Sustained, Disruptive Protests Work"

Concern about "optics" -- "if you break things, you're giving the Trump regime a reason to crack down further" -- betrays a belief that what the Trump regime does is motivated by principle or justice. They never needed an excuse, but what you're saying is that what's happening is happening for any reason other than that the cruelty is the point.

It's a form of concern trolling: by saying "other people won't support your cause if you [do anything that's disruptive, i.e. effective]", you're really saying you won't support the cause if it threatens your own ill-gotten property and wealth.

"It is easy to dismiss the rock thrower; Attucks himself was accused of throwing sticks. But those who rebuke violent responses to injustice should ask themselves: How should the oppressed respond to their oppressors? How should the nation respond to political dissent? How do the oppressed procure power? Throughout history, black people have employed violence, nonviolence, marches, and boycotts. Only one thing is clear—there is no form of black protest that white supremacy will sanction." -- Kellie Carter Jackson, "The Double Standard of the American Riot" (Emphasis added)

To insist that the form (property destruction) of the protests is responsible for the reaction by the power elite is to fundamentally misunderstand the reason for the protests. Any threat to white wealth will be dealt with violently, because white wealth uses violence to protect itself, and always has, as long as the concept of whiteness has existed.

During the 1950s and the 1960s, civil rights activists used nonviolent resistance as a means for provoking guilt and shame in white viewers. They reasoned that if TV footage showed peaceful protestors being attacked violently, the white majority would side with protestors. That tactic doesn't work anymore, due to decreased trust in the media, the rise of disinformation, and the intensity of racism and white identity politics during the 2010s. Nonviolence was always a tactic for accomplishing a larger goal, not the goal in and of itself.

"Many people are asking if violence is a valid means of producing social change. The hard and historical answer is yes. Riots have a way of magnifying not merely the flaws in the system, but also the strength of those in power. The American Revolution was won with violence. The French Revolution was won with violence. The Haitian Revolution was won with violence. The Civil War was won with violence. A revolution in today’s terms would mean that these nationwide rebellions lead to black people being able to access and exercise the fullness of their freedom and humanity." -- Kellie Carter Jackson, ibid

Property destruction and human lives

Resist the “looter” v “peaceful protesters” narrative.

The power establishment pretends that they’re waiting to see a particular form of protest so that they can understand what racism is.

They already know. That’s why they allow the police to be violent everyday. -- Bree Newsome Bass

And that's the thing. Is there a "correct" form of protest that will not cause the regime and police to escalate their violence? Can an abused child behave in a way that stops their parent from abusing?

2) “Rioting just gives people a reason not to support your cause.”

Only if you equate property damage to human lives, and in that case, were you really supporting our cause anyway? If all it takes is people stealing from Target for you to say “well…now I don’t care about dead Black people” then why are we even speaking? -- Rafi D'Angelo, "How to respond to 'riots never solve anything!'"

And there's the rub: prioritizing the protection of property over human lives, which is what it would mean to decline to use property destruction as the effective protest tactic that it is in order to stop the destruction of human lives, means siding with oppressors. You can't protest the valuing of property over people by valuing property over people.

Where are your priorities?

"A message for anyone on the fence now:
- You don't have to throw a brick.
- You don't have to cheer on the brick-throwing.
- But if you spend your energy condemning that act instead of the police violence that sparked it, you've already chosen a side, and it's not the right one." -- Antifagator (source)

"Come on. You don’t care about Target or looting. You just want to say “both sides” so you can dismiss the protests without having to think about a system overtly designed to provide you with vast comfort through the murder of others" -- Mike Drucker

Strategy

"John Oliver pointed out last night a 'recurring theme' on his show: should you find yourself in a system which repeatedly demonstrates it values protecting property far more than it values protecting human lives, your only effective bargaining chip is the destruction of property." -- Justin Martin

The condescending idea that protestors somehow don't know what the effects of their actions are is an example of white paternalism.

The struggle is fundamentally about resisting efforts of the white owners to force Black people into serving as a perpetual slave class for the white capitalist economy. Disrupting the economy and damaging property are informed political actions. 1/

I wish the Black bourgeois and professionals would engage with this analysis more instead of so quickly adopting the narrative of the white owner class that property damage accomplishes nothing. -- Bree Newsome Bass

"But if violent unrest isn’t the answer then what is? How exactly do you go about ending police brutality and systemic racism in America? Should protesters go home and write sternly worded letters to their representative? Should they emulate Madonna and post videos of their kids dancing in protest? Should they peacefully take a knee? Should Americans simply vote Trump out and vote Joe Biden in instead? You know, the guy whose 1994 crime bill significantly contributed to mass incarceration in America? Should people patiently wait for incremental change?" -- Arwa Mahdawi, "If violence isn't the way to end racism in America, then what is?"

The folks out here getting angrier about a Starbucks getting busted up than about white supremacy never seem to have an alternative to offer, or at least not an effective one.

"In working to correct the white-supremacist media narrative we can end up reproducing police tactics of isolating the individuals who attack property at protests. Despite the fact that if it were not for those individuals the media might pay no attention at all. If protesters hadn’t looted and burnt down that QuikTrip on the second day of protests, would Ferguson be a point of worldwide attention? It’s impossible to know, but all the non-violent protests against police killings across the country that go unreported seem to indicate the answer is no." -- Vicky Osterweil, "In Defense of Looting (emphasis author's)

"I Support the Right to Protest, So Long as It is Ineffective" -- Dima Kronfeld, Reductress "White Woman Speaks:" headline

The "white anarchists" diversionary tactic

"Erasing black/nonblack indigenous anarchists living their anarchy by crediting outside agitating white anarchists is bullshit. Stop blaming white anarchists for choices we make. Stop trying to control our expressions of anger & joy." -- anarchogoth (source)

"The 'outside agitator' trope simultaneously denies the authenticity of discontent and the possibility of solidarity" -- triofrancos (source)

"To be blunt, blaming 'white anarchists' for violence right now is just a polite way of saying that you’re taking the side of the cops." -- ARPWEL ((source))

These lines aren't new:

"People are really out here parroting white supremacist talking points about 'anarchists,' 'radicals,' and 'outside agitators.' These narratives have been repeatedly regurgitated by the state and the police and many are shamelessly endorsing it. [image: a KKK flyer from the 1930s]

...Black history is filled with violent uprisings, riots, and rebellions that got us where we are today. People either don't know that or they hope to erase it in efforts to quell the anger. Anyone trying to say all Black people must protest one way are misinformed or manipulative."
" -- William C. Anderson

And cross-racial coalitions are essential to effecting change; one of the effects this rhetoric has is to make white people afraid to act in conjunction with Black leadership for fear of being viewed as a counterproductive "white anarchist".

"This 'outside agitator'/'white anarchist' shit from the liberals and the right-wingers is not only meant to discredit the protests but to tell white people, implicitly, that they don’t have a common enemy in capital, in the police, in the state, with black people." -- Samantha Pritchard

"This reflexive tic to associate anarchism with thoughtless discord betrays a profound ignorance of leftist ideology. The problem is that no one seems to understand what anarchism is or what its adherents are seeking to accomplish — and that lack of understanding is going to end up endangering a lot of people. We’re rapidly approaching a point in which dissent is further criminalized, the justified rage and pain fueling these protests is further delegitimized, and anyone who engages in any form of protest outside the preapproved liberal template becomes a target for surveillance, or worse." -- Kim Kelly, "Stop blaming everything bad on anarchists"

Conclusion

If you're white, think twice before you proclaim yourself the expert on how Black and Brown people should liberate themselves from oppression that you benefit from. Interrogate your motivations carefully and ask what you're afraid of: is it really "counterproductive" protest, or are you worried about your property getting destroyed? Asking yourself that question might provoke shame, but it's worth sitting with that feeling rather than reacting unreflectively. Educate yourself about history so you don't make ignorant statements like "violence just gives the police an excuse to crack down harder". But don't stop with just educating yourself. You don't have to throw a brick or get arrested, but doing nothing is not an acceptable option either. There are lots of ways to help that involve varying levels of risk to yourself. But also be aware of your fear and continually ask yourself whether it's based in your physical safety, or your fear of losing your material possessions and/or your dominant place in society.

I usually post a bunch of subversive MLK quotes on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, but tomorrow is the first day of school so I'll leave it at this: During his life, King was despised by at least a plurality of white Americans and hounded by the US government; the FBI tried to manipulate him into committing suicide.

King believed that racism in the US was inextricably tied to capitalism. He wrote that racism would never end unless capitalism and imperialism ended as well. Before he died, he was starting to organize people based on both race and class, without reducing racism to classism. Towards the end of his life, he was also developing a more nuanced perspective on violence; for him, nonviolence was a tactic, not a moral precept. And that's why white people killed him.

Or in the words of Boots Riley of The Coup: "MLK took half a pill, procrastinated / Once he took a whole pill, they assassinated him" (from "Ass-Breath Killers")

PS: while it predates a lot of King's most radical views, Letter from Birmingham Jail clearly shows the path for getting there, and today is a good day to re-read it.

I was born in the United States. I am a US citizen. I'm a first-generation American and a child of refugees.

My mother was born in Indonesia; so were her parents and grandparents. Her father's grandparents were refugees; her great-grandfather fought in the Napoleonic Wars and had to get the fuck out of Europe after all of that went down. That part of the story is a bit sordid, not that the rest of it isn't. My mother was three when Japan invaded Indonesia in 1942. I'm not sure exactly what happened to her over the next ten years (she talked about it when I was growing up, but always in a fragmented and fractured kind of way), but I know most if not all of the Dutch population in Indonesia was sent to prison camps or placed under house arrest by the invading forces.

They survived that (somehow), and shortly after Indonesia became independent in 1949, my mother, who was a teenager by then, and her family moved to Amsterdam; a place neither her nor her siblings nor her parents had ever seen before, as far as I know. Along with more or less everybody else of European descent in Indonesia. That was about 300,000 refugees, most of whom were of mixed European and Asian ancestry -- including my mother, though she's white-passing, as am I. I don't know much about her mother's family, except that her mother's father was of European descent and her mother's mother was of Asian descent. They were Indos, a word I didn't learn until I was an adult; my mother taught me that we were "Indonesian Dutch."

Out of curiosity, I ordered a copy of her mother's (my grandmother's) death certificate; she died before I was born, in Australia. Australian death certificates have a space for the deceased's parents' names. Her mother's name is listed as "unknown", although her son (my uncle, who I've never met) reported her death and he presumably knew what it was. There's a whole complicated story here involving racism, xenophobia, colonialism, interracial marriage coexisting with racism (because guess what, anti-racism is not sexually transmitted), co-optation of nationalist movements, and revolution that I won't pretend to know more than the beginning of.

"Nine tenths of the so-called Europeans are the offspring of whites married to native women. These mixed people are called Indo-Europeans… They have formed the backbone of officialdom. In general they feel the same loyalty to the Netherlands as do the white Dutch. They have full rights as Dutch citizens and they are Christians and follow Dutch customs. This group has suffered more than any other during the Japanese occupation.” -- Official US Army publication, 1944 (quoted on Wikipedia)

Those 300,000 refugees of mixed Dutch and Indonesian descent? They weren't welcome in the Netherlands. Where else were they going to go? They couldn't go home.

Short story long, my mother ended up in the US, two of her brothers went to Australia (where I've never been, nor have I met either of them), and her other brother stayed in the Netherlands (I met him once). Except for a second cousin, the rest of her extended family, other than me, remains in Europe and Australia.

My mother was single when she conceived me with an anonymous donor. Thanks to the magic of 23andMe, and the magic of the genetic bottlenecks, I learned when I was an adult that my other biological parent (I hate that phrase, by the way, but I also don't have a second "non-biological" parent) was likely of Ashkenazi Jewish descent. The history of how Ashkenazi Jews ended up in the US is better known.

I'm still not sure how much personal meaning to read into genetic material that didn't bring a familial or cultural component to my life, but I know what meaning the Nazis would have read into that genetic material if I had lived during World War II in Europe: from their point of view, I would have been Jewish enough to be the enemy. So if I choose to think this way, I'm descended from refugees on both sides, in a deep and historically complicated way on both sides, one side that survived multiple genocides and another that survived multiple violent regime changes. Both sides spent time in prison camps, or internment camps, or concentration camps because of their ethnicity (literally on my mother's side; maybe literally on the other side too, or maybe there was just a blood relation to people who did) and because of invading governments with political agendas that required ethnicity-based punishment. This is not to equate the Japanese treatment of Indonesian-Dutch folks with the German treatment of Jews; same war, different events, different reasons, although Google has quite a long list of possibilities for autocompleting "Japanese invasion of".

We know that Japan imprisoned 300,000 Dutch citizens living in Indonesia, we know that no one stopped them, and we know that most of those Dutch citizens, including my family, were people descended from both Asians and Europeans. Indos were loyal to the Dutch, so to the invading Japanese army, they were European and therefore the enemy. But that loyalty was not reciprocated: Dutch folks in the Netherlands saw Indos as Asian, and therefore as second-class.

Maybe that kind of double bind is why so many of us who are descended from mixed-race people are so acutely aware of the contradictions of racism. We can never be fully loyal to our more privileged ancestors, because we know what they think of us.

Growing up, I never felt like an American. My mother spoke two languages that weren't English, and people constantly asked her where her accent was from. Now that I'm grown, I know that there is no one more American than me, except for indigenous people, Black people brought to the US by slave merchants, and Chicanos/Chicanas. The reason why us refugees and children of refugees are so vocal right now is simple: we're living proof of the best things America aspires to, and know the human cost of the worst things America has always done up till now and is currently intensifying. Listen to us.

"Remember what I told you,
if they hated me, they will hate you."
-- Sinéad O'Connor

Language affects thought, and part of why science isn't objective is that communicating scientific knowledge relies on language, which is always imprecise and governed by politics and culture.

In "The Egg and the Sperm", Emily Martin wrote about how the language used to describe human reproduction distorted the truth. Scientists, mostly cis men, were biased towards seeing sperm as active penetrators of the passive egg. In fact, as Martin detailed, eggs do a lot of active work to reject weak sperm and entice strong sperm. (Of course, even the metaphor of "weak" or "strong" sperm reflects socially mediated beliefs.)

Another example from reproduction is the misunderstanding of the biological function of menstruation that also arose from sociopolitical biases about gender. In a 2012 journal article, Emera, Romero and Wagner posited that the function of menstruation has been misunderstood due to sexist beliefs that bodies coded as female are intrinsically nurturing: the endometrial lining was previously construed as the uterus creating a nurturing environment for a potential embryo, where in fact, it might be more accurate to view it as a hostile environment that only the strongest embryos can survive (there's that "strong/weak" political language again.) I'm not qualified to assess on the accuracy of Emera et al.'s idea, but I am qualified to observe that assessing its validity has been so far hindered by the misapplication of gender stereotypes to biology.

Yet another example is that of same-sex sexual behavior in non-human animals; Bruce Bagemihl's book Biological Exuberance details the history of (again, mostly heterosexual cis male) scientists getting itgrievously wrong about the nature and function of sexual behavior. It would be funny if it wasn't so harmful. Just one example is the publication of a paper, in 1981, entitled "Abnormal Sexual Behavior of Confined Female Hemichienus auritus syriacus [Long-eared Hedgehogs]". It's not objective, rational, or scientific to label hedgehog sex as "abnormal" -- rather, it reflects social and political biases. And in that case (and many similar cases), politics kept scientists from understanding animal behavior.

In all of these cases, bad metaphors kept us from seeing the truth. We used these metaphors not because they helped us understand reality, but because they were lazily borrowed from the society as it was at the time and its prejudices. This is why scientific research can never be fully understood outside the context of the people who produced it and the culture they lived in.

Master/Slave: a Case Study

In computer science and electrical engineering, the term "master/slave" has been used in a variety of loosely related ways. A representative example is that of distributed databases: if you want to implement a database system that can scale up to handling a lot of queries, it might occur to you to put many servers around the world that have copies of the same data, instead of relying on just one server (which could fail, or could become slow if a lot of people start querying it all at once) in one physical location. But then how do you make sure that the data on all of the servers are consistent? Imagine two different whiteboards, one in the computer science building at Berkeley and one in the computer science building at MIT: there's no reason to assume that whatever is written on the two whiteboards is going to be the same unless people adopt a mechanism for communicating with each other so that one whiteboard gets updated every time the other does. In the context of databases, one mechanism for consistency is the "master/slave" paradigm: one copy of the database gets designated as the authoritative one, and all the other copies -- "slaves" -- continuously ask the master for updates that they apply to themselves (or alternately, the master publishes changes to the slaves -- that's an implementation detail).

A lot of the historical background behind the use of "master/slave" in a technical context already got covered by Ron Eglash in his 2007 article "Broken Metaphor: The Master-Slave Analogy in Technical Literature". Unfortunately, you won't be able to read the article (easily) unless you have access to JSTOR. Eglash examined early uses of "master/slave" terminology carefully and pointed out that "master/slave" entered common use in engineering long after the abolition of slavery in the US. Thus it can't be defended as "a product of its time." He also points out that "master/slave" is also an inaccurate metaphor in many of the technical contexts where it's used: for example, for a system with multiple hard drives where the "master" and "slave" drives merely occupy different places in the boot sequence, rather than having a control or power relationship.

But I think the most interesting point Eglash makes is about the difference between power as embodied in mechanical systems versus electrical systems:

A second issue, closely related, is the difference that electrical signals make. Consider what it meant to drive a car before power steering. You wrestled with the wheel; the vehicle did not slavishly carry out your whims, and steering was more like a negotiation between manager and employee. Hence the appropriateness of terms such as "servo-motor" (coined in 1872) and "servomechanism" (1930s): both suggest "servant," someone subordinate but also in some sense autonomous. These precybernetic systems, often mechanically linked, did not highlight the division of control and power. But electrical systems did. Engineers found that by using an electromagnetic relay or vacuum tube, a powerful mechanical apparatus could be slaved to a tiny electronic signal. Here we have a much sharper disjunction between the informational and material domains. And with the introduction of the transistor in the 1950s and the integrated circuit in the 1960s, the split became even more stark.
This coupling of immense material power with a relatively feeble informational signal became a fundamental aspect of control mechanisms and automation at all scales...

In light of Eglash's observation, it's worth looking harder at why some engineers are so attached to the "master/slave" terminology, aside from fear of change. The "immense material power" of an electronic signal can't be observed directly. Do engineers in a white-male-dominated field like talking about their systems in terms of masters and slaves because they need to feel like they're somebody's master? Does it make them feel powerful? Given that engineering has become increasingly hostile to people who aren't white and male as it has become more dependent on leveraging smaller and smaller amounts of (physical) power to do more and more, I think it's worth asking what work metaphors like "master/slave" do to make white male engineers feel like they're doing a man's job.

Bad Metaphors

"Master/slave" both serves a psychological function and reflects authoritarian politics, even if the person using that term is not an authoritarian. No one needs to consciously be an authoritarian, though, for authoritarianism to distort our thinking. Language derived from societies organized around a few people controlling many others will affect how systems get designed.

A master/slave system has a single point of failure: what if the master fails? Then there's no longer any mechanism for the slaves to keep each other consistent. There are better solutions, which constitute an open research topic in distributed systems -- discussing them is beyond the scope of this blog post, but I just want to point out that the authoritarian imagination behind both societies organized around slavery (we still live in one of those societies, by the way, given the degree to which the economy depends on the prison industry and on labor performed by prisoners) impoverishes our thinking about systems design. It turns out that single points of failure are bad news for both computer systems, and societies.

I conjecture that the master-slave metaphor encourages us to design systems that have single points of failure, and that the metaphor is so compelling because of its relationship with the continued legacy of slavery. I don't claim to be certain. People who design decentralized, peer-to-peer systems may not be any more likely to have egalitarian politics, for all I know. So I'm asking a question, rather than answering one: do fascists, or people who haven't examined their latent fascism, build fragile systems?

Names are important. Lazy evaluation, for example, wasn't too popular when it was only known by the name of "cons should not allocate." So master/slave is worth abandoning not just because the words "master" and "slave" evoke trauma for Black Americans, but also because flawed thinking about societies and flawed thinking about technology are mutually self-reinforcing.

Good metaphors have the power to help us think better, just as bad ones can limit our imagination. Let's be aware of what shapes our imagination. It's not "only words" -- it's all words, and people who write software should understand that as well as anyone. Metaphors are powerful. Let's try to be aware of how they affect us, and not suppose that the power relationship between people and words only goes one way.

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Last night, one of the worst domestic terrorism attacks in recent history happened in Charleston, South Carolina. A man acting in the name of white supremacy murdered nine Black people, most of whom were women, while they prayed at the Emanuel AME Church, the oldest African Methodist Episcopal church in the South.

These are the names of the people who he murdered:

Sharonda Coleman-Singleton

DePayne Middleton Doctor

Cynthia Hurd

Susie Jackson

Ethel Lance

Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney

Tywanza Sanders

Daniel Simmons

Myra Thompson

Please read more about their lives.

If you're a white American and have an income, I strongly suggest donating to organizations that fight white supremacy. Here are some suggestions from Valerie Aurora:

Equal Justice Initiative

Representative John Conyers, who has introduced legislation every year to make reparations for slavery to Black Americans.

We the Protestors

You can also donate directly to the Emanuel AME Church.

"Sweet honey in the rock - Ella's Song" (Watch on YouTube)

Emphasis added.

What astonished me was that no one had asked the churches if they wanted to be stared at like living museums. I wondered what would happen if a group of blue-jeaned blacks were to walk uninvited into a synagogue on Passover or St. Anthony's of Padua during high mass---just to peer, not pray. My feeling is that such activity would be seen as disrespectful, at the very least. Yet the aspect of disrespect, intrusion, seemed irrelevant to this well-educated, affable group of people. They deflected my observation with comments like "We just want to look," "No one will mind," and "There's no harm intended." As well-intentioned as they were, I was left with the impression that no one existed for them who could not be governed by their intentions. While acknowledging the lack of apparent malice in this behavior, I can't help thinking that it is a liability as much as a luxury to live without interaction. To live so completely impervious to one's impact on others is a fragile privilege, which over time relies not simply on the willingness but on the inability of others---in this case blacks---to make their displeasure heard.

-- Patricia Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights

And that's why whenever someone tells you that you can't feel bad about the way in which they've hurt you, because "they would never hurt you intentionally", that is not a gesture of friendship or, in fact, of any kind of relationship other than one based on fundamentally unfair power dynamics. They are saying "You are governed by my intentions, merely because I have the power to coerce you into being so governed." They are committing an act of discursive violence.

"Whenever I hear some white queer talking about moving to Portland, I assume it’s because they want to be among their white brethren, because there are more white queers in portland than there are people of color. I wish them good luck in their separatist project in getting away from the rest of us. None of you white people INTEND to do this, but it’s what it amounts to and it’s sort of hilarious whenever I hear one of you say that you’re committed to anti-racism, and you also wish you could move to Portland, thus making the blinding whiteness of that city even more pristine.

This is pretty much common knowledge about Portland, isn’t it? When I was growing up, Portland was where the racist skins came to visit from and beat up people. And even Wikipedia says: “While Portland’s diversity was historically comparable to metro Seattle and Salt Lake City, those areas grew more diverse in the late 1990s and 2000s. Portland not only remains white, but migration to Portland is disproportionately white, at least partly because Portland is attractive to young college-educated Americans, a group which is overwhelmingly white.”

IT’S GETTING WHITER ALL THE TIME! I am not surprised you couldn’t find any trans women of color."

-- Coxy Rawr Michael, commenting on PrettyQueer

An equally awesome reply:

"I haven’t ever commented here, but I have to just AMEN this comment about Portland as a white queer haven.

As a queer woman of color, I am consistently astounded by the way that white queers who flock to Portland loooove to talk a good game about their anti-racist credentials, all the while never acknowledging that their voluntary migration to an incredibly white and super racist city that I have NEVER heard a good thing about from my queer POC friends might be part of the problem.

I mean, I get it – people hate to take macro-level responsibility for the potentially oppressive impact of their individual choices, but god damn. Once in my life, I would love to hear from a white queer who claims anti-racist politics what the draw is…"

-- PissyQWOC, ibid

When I say Portland is segregated, this is what I mean. Unfortunately -- and contrary to my intuition -- Boston is only somewhat better. The two cities I'd most like to add as adopted homes, New York and LA are... somewhat better still, I guess that's all I can say. Thanks to

techstep for the link.

"In order to fix what is fundamentally wrong with race in America, those who had a lion's share in making things bad must bear a greater responsibility in making them better. Whites who have benefited, whether explicitly or unconsciously, from racial inequality must now be courageous in rejecting a belief in the moral equivalency of black and white views about race. Instead, they should acknowledge their obligation to give black beliefs the weight and consideration they justly deserve. Thus, when blacks view the criminal justice system with suspicion, when they are wary of white juries, when they believe that innocent blacks can be framed by police---for instance, as many blacks did in responding to the verdicts in the O.J. Simpson murder and civil trials---they are responding to a verifiable history of racial inequality. In such an unjust world, white skepticism about black juries' ability to convict white criminals does not have the same moral gravity as the claims of blacks victimized by a legacy of racial injustice.

To ask whites to understand this is not only counterintuitive; it demands a rejection of the claim to ethical innocence that masks white privilege and supremacy while reinforcing black inequality. That inequality brought into existence broadly differing group perceptions about what is good, what is normal, what is desirable, and what is achievable in regard to race in America." -- Michael Eric Dyson, I May Not Get There With You

International Blog Against Racism Week is over, but hey, why stop at a week?

During a discussion of the Henry Louis Gates arrest, a LiveJournal commenter who I'll call "Alice" wrote the following comment (making an argument along the lines that if Prof. Gates had just been a little more polite to the police officer who eventually arrested him, the whole unpleasantness could have been avoided):( Read more... )

But Alice isn't a racist. Or at least she would say she isn't. Guess what? As far as I know, nobody in history has ever admitted to being a racist.

And perhaps that's because for at least 200 years, nobody in America has ever had to be a racist. The racist decisions got made a long time ago. We perpetuate racism by failing to question the social structures whose original purposes have been forgotten but that quietly keep racial inequality going. We perpetuate racism by telling black people that if they were just a little more polite and less uppity, police brutality would stop. We perpetuate racism by exclaiming "I don't see what that has to do with race!" before giving the nearest person of color or ally a chance to explain what it has to do with race. We perpetuate racism by mocking those awful baggy pants the kids wear these days without recognizing that that particular fashion is how young black men express that their lives feel like prison. We perpetuate racism by chalking up racist actions either to the stupid behavior of individuals or to color-blind abuse of power. We perpetuate racism by arguing that black people themselves need to "address black-on-black violence" as a condition for white people addressing police brutality (as if one has nothing to do with the other). We perpetuate racism by arguing that social inequality is "about class, not race", while pretending not to know why you're far more likely to be poor if you're black than if you're white. We perpetuate racism by feigning concern for the effect of affirmative action on black self-esteem while esteeming ourselves highly despite the perks of a century of affirmative action in favor of white people. We perpetuate racism by cherry-picking black views when they agree with our existing prejudices (whether that means Bill Cosby or Barack Obama) and by relying on what (we believe) our black friends (would) say is OK rather than taking responsibility for our own moral integrity.

We perpetuate racism most of all by loudly asserting "I'm not a racist!" or "I don't see color" or "You're never going to convince people of your point of view by calling them racist."( Read more... )

Does any of this mean that I, as a white person, am obligated to believe everything any person of color says?( Read more... )

It is unproductive to hold a press conference to declare you're not a racist. It is productive to take responsibility for your own actions and to admit that you're not a special, non-conforming snowflake and that social structures influence your behavior.

"There are no sexist decisions to be made.

There are antisexist decisions to be made. And they require tremendous energy and self-scrutiny, as well as moral stamina in the face of the basic embarrassment campaign which is the tactic of those assured of their politically superior position. ('Don't you think you're being rather silly offering your pain as evidence that something I do so automatically and easily is wrong? Why, I bet it doesn't hurt half as much as you say. Perhaps it only hurts because you're struggling...?' This sort of political mystification, turning the logical arrows around inside verbal structures to render them empirically empty, and therefore useless ['It hurts because you don't like it', rather than 'You don't like it because it hurts.'] is just another version of the 'my slave/my master' game.)

There are no sexist decisions to be made: they were all made a long time ago!" -- Samuel R. Delany, "Shadows"

The definitive word on the Gates case

Highlights: (begin quotes)

Badge numbers are assigned for a reason, and Massachusetts requires its cops to carry ID cards for a reason: Cops can lie about their names, making it difficult or impossible for citizens to file complaints about their behavior after they've departed a scene. If every police officer was assumed to be honest and forthright in all instances, those laws wouldn't be on the books. What's more, there are a lot of people in the Boston area named Crowley, and a lot of them are police officers. Gates asked Crowley to comply with Massachusetts law by furnishing his full name and badge number, and all Crowley told him was that he was a sergeant and that his last name was Crowley. In other words, he did not comply with Gates' request.

[snip]

Gates is clearly not a street walker, railer, or brawler. His language may have "accosted or annoyed" someone of the opposite sex—the only female whose presence at the scene was documented is Lucia Whalen, but we don't know how annoyed she was by Gates' comments. Gates was clearly not "idle," though he could be potentially be classified as "disorderly" or "disturbing the peace." The latter charge is dependent on Gates' being outside his house—presuming that his yelling wasn't audible on the street when he was inside—which would have been the case had Crowley not refused to fully identify himself to Gates unless Gates followed him outside. Whether one can be a "disorderly person" in one's own home isn't clear. But we suspect that if one could, then Crowley would simply have arrested Gates in his home.

[snip]

What is clear is that the city of Cambridge has called the arrest "regrettable and unfortunate," and said that dropping the charges was "in the interests of justice." Crowley himself now says that he "regrets that I put the police department and the city in the position where they have to defend something like this." So if Crowley wasn't stupid, then what, exactly, does he regret?

(end of quotes)

As far as I'm concerned, if you're still defending the Cambridge Police here, you really ought to ask yourself why.

Not long ago, I was given the advice (not particularly directed at me, but it justifiably could have been) that it's better to generate more light than heat. And I think that's true most of the time, except maybe when you're trying to burn something down.

When I was a first-year in Bates Hall at Wellesley College, one Friday night I was kept awake in my fourth-floor room by the pounding bass of music from a party that was going on in the basement. Wandering downstairs, I realized the noise was coming from the dining hall and that thus it was an official party. I didn't like being kept awake and I had to be up early the next day in order to leave on a trip, but I knew there wasn't really anything I could do about it because it was before 2:00 AM on a weekend night (the start of quiet hours). Complaining to anyone would have been pointless. In the lobby, there was a free-standing blackboard that people would write on sometimes, sometimes with a message-of-the-day, and so forth. So I wrote, "Does anyone else think that whoever was making that noise should be executed in front of a firing squad?", and went back to my room to try to go back to sleep.

One or two days later, I came back from my trip to find a discussion on the Bates forum on the campus electronic discussion system about what I had written on the board. I learned that the party that had been troubling me was sponsored by the campus chapter of the National Society of Black Engineers. Rather than copping to what I had done, I posted a snippy reply (as one does) saying that it was just silly for somebody to conclude that the comment on the board was racist given that nobody knew who had written it or what they were thinking, or even whether the writer had known the party was sponsored by a black student group. In hindsight, I'm sure this fooled no one, but if anyone did guess it was me, they never confronted me directly about it. And I never admitted to anyone that I was the writer.

Was it racist for me to write that on the blackboard? I don't think it was, because I didn't know who was sponsoring the party. It was certainly passive-aggressive and douchey of me. It's true, it's possible that I reacted differently to loud hip-hop than I would have to loud '80s pop, though at the time I really wasn't conversant with very much music that was produced after about 1970. Was it racist for me to read the replies online and conclude that their authors were just being silly and oversensitive? Yes. Yes, it was. I failed to appreciate the significance that my hastily chalked remark would have to someone who might have been labelled "loud and tumultuous" a few too many times, and even worse, I retreated into thoughts that would preserve my self-image as a tolerant person rather than really hearing what people who perceived things differently had to say.

I was 17 at the time, but I don't think that excuses my behavior, because I'm seeing people four times that age fall for the same fallacies. I won't give them a pass, nor do I give myself a pass.

That was eleven years ago. The last four, maybe five times I thought about the incident (in, probably, as many years), I thought that maybe my reaction really possibly could have been wrong, but pushed the thought away. This is the first time I'm admitting to myself that I really did something wrong; not by writing on the board (sure, it was pissy of me, but I didn't know), but by refusing to listen to what my dorm-mates said about it afterward and to admit to what I had done at the cost of possibly being (fairly or unfairly) characterized as racist.

I was getting frustrated over the past few days arguing with people online about the strange case of Professor Gates and the unfortunate Cambridge police officers, and how difficult it seems to be to convince some people to be more concerned about calling out racism where it exists than about being careful not to imply that a white person could be racist, until I realized: If it took me eleven years just to admit I'd made one mistake, how long will it take everyone else? How long will the next mistake take me? God help us all.

Of all of the comments I've read on the intertubes about the Gates arrest, this one more or less summarizes it:

there is a non-trivial possibility that the situation was not racist. [at the end of a six-paragraph comment where the author was trying their hardest to find evidence that arresting a black man for calling a cop a racist isn't racist]

You know, I don't think of myself as an exceptionally enlightened white man. But this is bullshit. And if you are more inclined to lecture the world in a calm, detached fashion about the proper way for a black man to interact with law enforcement (from your position of expertise as, say, a white West Coaster) than to feel outrage at how your country still enforces the second-class citizenship of black and brown people, then you are not my friend.

Updates:

The charges against Prof. Gates have been dropped; "This incident should not be viewed as one that demeans the character and reputation of professor Gates or the character of the Cambridge Police Department..."
Statement from Charles Ogletree, Gates's lawyer, about the incident.
Jimi Izrael says it way better than me:
"The arrest of Harvard Professor Henry Louis 'Skip' Gates Jr., at a minimum, quashes any talk of a post-racial America. It may not be the best example of racial injustice I've ever seen, but it's a great example of how life for black people is often complicated by class and race. If a mild-mannered, bespectacled Ivy League professor who walks with a cane can be pulled from his own home and arrested on a minor charge, the rest of us don't stand a chance.

We all fit a description. We are all suspects."

and

"In most states, the parameters for disorderly conduct are set as 'any person who could cause inconvenience, alarm or annoyance to others.' Disorderly conduct could include anything from a ferocious cough, the use of profanity (at any volume, in any context) to break-dancing in your front yard or talking loudly to yourself. Normally, it's the kind of thing you get a ticket for, if that, because cops love donuts, but they hate paperwork. Mostly, you'll get a warning. But the rub is that it falls to the discretion of the responding officer to decide whether or not to throw you in the car. Depending on the officer's mood, you could get a warning, a ticket or a night in jail. According to the police officer's report, Gates 'exhibited loud and tumultuous behavior.' That's a pretty subjective assessment, by any definition. But it never seems to take much provocation for the rollers to put a man of color in handcuffs, no matter who he is."

It's amazing how many people seem to know how to apply the argument tactics listed at "Derailing for Dummies" without even having read the site. Worth a read if you've ever been told that you were taking things too personally, that you were damaging your cause by being angry, or that your experience was unrepresentative. Or if you've ever told anyone those things.

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Tim's journal

Taking metaphors too far since 1995

Property destruction and the failure of white liberalism

"Optics"

Property destruction and human lives

Strategy

The "white anarchists" diversionary tactic

Conclusion

Further reading

MLK Day; xposted from Facebook

"If they hated me, they will hate you"

Broken Metaphors, Flawed Technology

Master/Slave: a Case Study

Bad Metaphors

"We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes"

Patricia Williams on "intent is fucking magic"

Quoting a comment in almost its entirety, because it's awesome

Race and ethnicity mapped by block

This one's for the white people.

That's a Stupid Thing to Say, and You're a Stupid Person for Saying It

My own [no-longer-so-]private racism

baby-punching mad

Derailing for Dummies

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November 2021

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