I’m sick of “colorblind” racists
April 17th, 2006(Warning: rhetorical questions ahead!)
How can one honestly and not at all disingenuously say, “color doesn’t matter; we’re all just people” in the same breath as they then proceed to make a horribly racist statement or three?
Do people honestly not think about what they’re saying…like, ever? Do these people even listen to their own blatant hypocrisy as they proceed to spew privilege everywhere?
I mean, damn, obviously you do think race matters — namely, that you’re entitled to all kinds of special benefits that other people aren’t because you’re white. Don’t pretend you feel otherwise. Racism is only bad when its side-effects or attempts to eradicate it negatively impact you, huh? Otherwise the benefits you get are clearly only because of your naturally superior personality…
April 17th, 2006 at 4:06 pm
Do people honestly not think about what they’re saying…like, ever? Do these people even listen to their own blatant hypocrisy as they proceed to spew privilege everywhere?
One of the wonderfully awful things about being born with privilege is that, unless you’ve ever been able to be the victim of someone else’s privilege, you’re completely unaware of it. Without that viewpoint, your privilege appears to something you earned or something meritorious like ability, apptitude, or any of a hundred randian buzzwords for the ubermensch.
For me, it was early when I was publically mocked, ridiculed and subjected to discrimination at the hands of school administrators for being Jewish in the Deep South. I mean, how hard it is to understand that Hannukah isn’t just “the Jewish Christmas” and Jews aren’t just “misled?” The lack of any real response by my Christian peers (who were just happy that the abuse wasn’t being aimed at them, but still couldn’t understand the privilege they had in not being “the other”) was most telling. My schoolmate Matt was, perhaps, the most honest and telling when he asked me “why do you have to be different?” It was then that I realized that I had a way to fake privilege, unlike the black, latino, asian, disabled, poor, or otherwise different children who could not deny their lack of privilege in white America so easily.
April 18th, 2006 at 8:46 am
Without that viewpoint, your privilege appears to something you earned or something meritorious like ability, apptitude, or any of a hundred randian buzzwords for the ubermensch.
I think I just fell in love with that sentence.
re: “why do you have to be different?”
Your experiences remind me of straight people who wonder why I can’t just be straight. My mother about bisexuals: “I just don’t see why, if you can be with either a man or a woman, you wouldn’t just chose someone of the opposite sex” (because then you don’t have to deal with homophobia). How about…it doesn’t work that way? If I meet the woman of my dreams I should just pass her up because other people have a problem with who I’m attracted to? Yeah, I can pretend to be something I’m not so that I won’t be harassed or discriminated against, but who would want to?
It’s easy for those with privilege to tell the rest of us how easy it is to pretend we’re one of them, rather than acknowledging that that’s not the real issue. We shouldn’t have to deny who we are to be acceptable.
April 19th, 2006 at 8:51 am
In full agreement with everything you said, but…
We shouldn’t have to deny who we are to be acceptable.
Unless “who we are” is prone to violence, lacks respect for other people and does not understand the concept of consent. Sociopaths? Not acceptable. Pedophilles? Nope. Rapists? Hey, we’re trying to have a civilization here!
Other than that…yeah, you get the idea.
I think a lot of the “why do you have to be different” mentality of privilege is a denial of the fact that they have no control over their own privilege. I mean, for much of the world, privilege is what you get from entering the world after coming out of the right vagina and nothing more. It’s basically a crapshoot and that kind of randomness terrifies people, much like stranger-rape truly terrifies people. So, rather than confront the situation head on and aspire to even out or erase privilege, they choose instead to assign merit to their privilege and blame others for their lack thereof (and, hence, their rapes or abuses).
April 22nd, 2006 at 9:26 am
Unless “who we are” is prone to violence, lacks respect for other people and does not understand the concept of consent. Sociopaths? Not acceptable. Pedophilles? Nope. Rapists? Hey, we’re trying to have a civilization here!
I don’t think that being gay or Jewish are really comperable to being a serial killer or rapist. I’m sure you understood what I meant.
April 28th, 2006 at 3:40 am
Wondering what you think of the attempts to return to “racial science” in the wake of the human genome project and the successes of sociobiology. Is this the new “new racism”? I’m asking in particular b/c I’m debating a colleague who I believe provides evidence that the answer is “yes,” over at Objectivist v. Constructivist. I’m more used to attacking what I refer to as “white-blindness” in a published essay that’s based on the web essay, and probably better at it, so I’d be very interested in comments on my critique of recent attempts to reassert the biological reality of race.
April 29th, 2006 at 7:50 pm
I essentially agree with the analysis in the linked essay on “white-blindness”. It would be wonderful if race didn’t matter, but it does, so “colorblindness” is an excuse for apathy on the part of white people, as far as I can tell. (Speaking of which, that term has always irritated me, seeing as how it’s redefining AND misunderstanding a medical term, which just confuses everybody… I’m red-green colorblind, too, by the way! Neat!)
I think that genetic variation is there, but the categories into which we group certain “races” are socially constructed. Obviously, some people have dark skin, differently shaped eyes, etc., but that doesn’t necessarily mean much. I think our construction of “race” is mostly rooted in people’s culture of origin, rather than a set of physical characteristics, since there are plenty of people who “look” like a different race than they actually are. I wish I could find it, but there is a page which has a bunch of pictures and you have to group the photos by what race you think the subject is…and the results are surprising because these people don’t look like “typical” examples of their race. Then you can read what these people have to say on how people are always trying (and failing) to correctly guess their race. I think it’s really eye-opening. I’ll look for it and post the link here when I find it.
I thought there was a good post detailing how racial categories have changed in the US throughout its history. (Obviously not new information, but it has numbers and statistics.) The Irish and Italians are considered white now, but they used to be considered different races. Hispanics used to be considered white but now the latino population is basically considered its own racial category (despite the fact that, historically, Latin America has had an extremely complex racial caste system which I think puts colonial American racism to shame — sometimes up to 16 different levels depending on how much Native/Black/Spanish blood you had and how long ago your family immigrated from Europe — it’s really historically and culturally ignorant to lump all people from Latin America together). If race were a concrete objective reality, this wouldn’t happen. These categories wouldn’t shift.
Socially, I think race is very important, and I think that there are a lot of well-meaning white people who want to pretend that racial differences don’t matter — and in an ideal world, they shouldn’t — but this ignores the reality for people of color that they experience racism on a daily basis, so ignoring the social impact of racial categories is not very helpful in anti-racist activism.
The Objectivist’s part of your debate really bothered me, because the argument that people of certain races score lower on certain tests doesn’t prove it’s innate. We’d have to look at where the tests were taken, what sort of education the participants received, etc. Low-income people, in the US, at least, tend to do poorly on a lot of standarized tests because they aren’t given a very good education (and having attended some low-income, predominantly latino but very racially mixed public schools, I can attest to this). Asian students are under a lot of pressure because they come from cultures that highly value acheivement. There’s also the fact that American society tends to value only certain skills (like rote memorization) as markers of “true” intelligence, when people have different interests and skills. I don’t have good memorization skills but I like to think I’m a critical thinker. I think artistic genius is undervalued in favor of, say, math skills. This also harkens back to the idea that women are intellectually inferior to men, when historically women have been denied education and female genius goes largely ignored by history. (There are people who honestly can’t name one female genius in history and use this as proof that men are superior. They obviously don’t know much about the subject, since if they bothered to research it they’d find at there have been as many brilliant women as men throughout time. THEIR ignorance on the subject somehow proves I’m not intelligent? Er…) The list of factors which could influence those statistics goes on and on, so I don’t think that without further investigation anyone can prove anything one way or another.
April 29th, 2006 at 7:54 pm
Found it. Sorting People.
May 2nd, 2006 at 3:42 pm
eponymous: The only reason I can think of that you would postulate that earlbecke was implying something like that is that you felt like you had to show the “other side” of the argument. Sometimes the reason that the “other side” — such as your example of pedos and rapists — is not presented is because, well, it’s not what’s being talked about. At all.
And I hardly think you’re so stupid that you couldn’t understand the distinction being made in the post, which leaves, as I said, you being intentionally obtuse, probably in the name of some kind of “fairness”. But, please understand that you’re doing no one any favours by shucking context to the wind and drawing attention to this supposed “inconsistency”. You’re actually just coming off as a bad ally — one who, despite your stated agreement with earlbecke, looks like you’re doing your damnest to discredit her — which I’m sure wasn’t your intention at all.