When you are saying that racism is prejudice + power, you are absolutely describing institutional racism, and I don’t quibble with that definition. But that is not the only kind of racism. (I’m not attacking this from the right, even my sociology textbook addressed interpersonal vs. institutional/structural racism.)
Racism is related to action, and prejudice is related to beliefs. Prejudice only lives in the mind; acting on prejudice is what is racist. But by saying POC can’t be racist, only prejudiced, you are defining away their agency and any responsibility they may have for their own behavior. Why is it so important to redefine racism in this way?
People of color can be racist as hell, both towards white people and towards other people of color. I have met Hispanics that are racist toward Filipinos, black people that are racist against Hispanic people, and Asians that are racist toward black people. None of that is racism? Really?
POC acting racist may be historically justified, it may even be expected given the institutional racism that they may have experienced for years… but relabeling that as something besides racism rings hollow to me.
That just doesn’t sound right to me. You can be prejudiced towards an entire race. If you ACT on it, it’s racism.
My point is that if you’re making a feminist critique, your audience is women and patriarchy works as a term for that audience. That’s cool, for that audience.
If your audience has a significantly male component with minimal exposure to feminist critique, the least result is that their eyes will glaze and you’ve lost your opportunity to make your point — because to them the term undefined doesn’t mean anything (at best) or (at worst) is outright offensive to those who’ve been exposed to “women encouraging patriarchal norms within a patriarchy” in childhood and/or in working low-end jobs in a female dominated industry.
Agreed. In my experience, most feminists know that if clueless men (and women) are to be swayed, they should be talked to differently.
It does get frustrating, though, when the clueless ones continue to insist that their terms, and worse yet, their understandings, are the ones that should be followed.
People can use differing definitions in the same discussion - they just need to be aware of what they are. I agree with Korzybski on this, that people interested in communicating as equals need to define their terms first.
Agreed, but despite that, it still has real world effects. Just saying “race isn’t real” just isn’t enough to improve the quality of people’s lives affected by racism that still pervades American society (and global society, really).
Yet here we are, talking on a shared infrastructure, in a shared language, debated ideas familiar to both of us, even if we disagree.
This isn’t about political affiliations. it’s about a shared construct that we all live within.
As a woman, I can’t choose to have people see me differently. At a traffic stop, a black man can’t choose to have a cop not see him as a black man, and all the implications that may carry with it. That’s ideology and it may not affect you or think that it does, but the only way we get through that is together. Hence, we.
Being neutral on the question of race or gender in our society doesn’t help the people affected by it.
This contrasts weirdly with the constant reminders here that “everything is political!”, it seems like a convenient gloss to then fall back upon some “shared construct” which somehow defies political involvement.
It doesn’t matter if you identify with something or not. I assume you have a skin color and a gender that you present in public. The public will give you privileges and treat you a specific way because of this perceived skin color and gender, whether you “identify” with it or not. Other people are treated in other ways for the same reason.
If we sit on the edges of a discussion (about any topic) and listen to two parties arguing, when each party is insisting that their own understanding of the topic is the only one, and that their own terms are the only ones it can be phrased in and no-one budges from their position, then both groups just sound clueless. They are talking past each other, not discussing. And once it becomes apparent to one group that the other actually believes them to be clueless, it’s naturally going to descend into something more unpleasant …
Not to mention that I’m going to go out on a limb here and assume @popobawa4u is a 20-something educated heterosexual white dude based on his posts here.
As I’ve discussed with others, I think people constantly miss the point and dwell upon superficial differences, which only address the arbitrary surfaces of inequity instead of the fundamental causes. You sound like you understand why these things happen. People just seem to be averse to creating social structures - even when they hate the ones they have. I suppose it is tempting to still discuss such things here because many seem to understand, in a way. Somebody might learn something!
No offense but I live in Oakland. When the local cops are beating the shit out of black guys when they think no one is looking (or even when they are), I don’t think the black dudes are getting a choice on creating the social structures of their beating. They’re just getting beat.
I don’t live in an airy fairy world where we all get to make up utopian social structures and have the world magically conform to them. I live in the world with a pretty big legacy of culture and history which reifies oppression of various groups within its structures and, guess what, you don’t get to opt out of the system. You’re in the system, just like me and everyone else. So you either get to pitch in and actively try to do something about it or, if you have a lot of privilege and like theories more than reality, you can stand back and talk about it a lot while resting in your privilege, knowing that you don’t be the one getting the stick from those cops.
By that token, why hide your identity in the first place? My name, stuff about me, and a link to my website are right in my profile. I somehow doubt your name is “Popo Bawa” when your mom calls you.
Or they can call into question the motives (“that’s racist!”; “they should be more inclusive!” ad nauseum) of young women of colour as they eek out a space for themselves free of that oppression for a short while.
Very probably crickets. It doesn’t spoil the example though. I lived in the PRC for a year and it was an interesting experience. In China the “default humanity” is Han Chinese. So I got to feel what it’s like to be a minority in a majority culture that barely recognises any other way of doing or being; that makes little or no allowance for other cultures or even actively suppresses them. Which is often the experience being a POC in a society dominated by white people, I’m told?
It’s a useful experience to step outside your own country and culture and look back at it from the outside for a bit.
I don’t think anyone would disagree that it is a useful experience.
That said, a couple of centuries of colonialism does say that “straight white male” is the “default” assumption of humanity when it comes to power. What percentage of the world’s resources do Europe and the United States us? What is the ratio of their use per person when compared to India and/or China?
Oakland sounds quite rough from what I’ve heard. Are 5lowershop still out there? I am on the East Coast. Mostly in Boston and NYC before, currently squatting in a conservative suburban hellscape.
It’s your agency as a person to create social structures, you are fueling the process whether you choose to or not, merely by living amongst people. But no, the world doesn’t conform to them - nor should it, others have their own relationships to manage. I don’t understand how people keep telling me that it is theoretical or easy to deal directly with others, even with the oppressors. It’s only easy or theoretical if you don’t do it. I’ve been out there, arguing with politicians, arguing with gangsters, disarming police at times to get them off somebody’s case, putting people up, fixing tech for kids. Not on my leisure time, as my “job”, which I don’t get paid for. Sometimes people get involved a bit informally, but typically they’ll do anything but organize.
FWIW what if I was a fourtysomething, self-taught, mixed-race, genderqueer militant tinkerer who boycotts the dollar? But I don’t consider that my identity, I don’t even like identity or find it useful, I think of myself as just a process. I don’t have a website. And I was never ok with my parents having named me.
