⚠ 🐲 Sexism/Racism/Otherism Among Marginalized Groups 🐲 ⚠

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Continuing the discussion from Billionaire Peter Thiel secretly funded Hulk Hogan lawsuit against Gawker (Report):

I feel like this is an interesting and separate topic, so I forked.

I think there may be a little more to it than that, I think that the issue of orthogonality that @japhroaig raised really clarified things for me, because I don’t see these things as inherently orthogonal at all. I think that while you cannot blame homosexuality for a particular kind of racism or sexism, it doesn’t change the unique and often pervasive character of racism and sexism among homosexuals (in this case, gay men in particular.) I think that there are wholly different dynamics at play that can’t be reduced to: Gay white people are just as racists, or racist in the same way as other white people.

I’ll give you an example from the Muslim community. I was talking with a Muslim black guy once way back when I was Muslim and living in Atlanta. He was talking about informal racism in the Muslim community, and mainly talking about the racism he got from the Desi community (Indians, Pakistanis, Bengalis, etc.) He said he knew the slurs in Urdu and Hindi and that he recognized their use when people assumed he didn’t. Now, when we’re talking about this breed of racism, we’re talking about something that I consider to be very different from standard American racism. This racism is a function of disapproval of American Afro-American Muslim practice and a perceived theological impurity related to the roots of Nation of Islam and the peculiar manner in which African Americans formed Muslim communities.

However, this racism is also a function of people living with American cultural dominance abroad. If you watch American movies and that’s all you know about African Americans, you’re going to get a terrible impression of the community as a whole. First generation immigrants (of which there are a lot in the Muslim community I’m referring to) learned about African Americans before ever meeting any through American movies and TV shows and then by word of mouth. I have not yet determined if holdover ideas from the Muslim caste system in that region has any influence here. This generates a unique strand of racism in that particular community which is itself marginalized. But that strand of racism, as I think I’ve illustrated, is unique in its particular character and is a function of the subculture in a way that is irreducible to specific race and class dynamics and is systemic within the community.

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While I am well traveled and live in a cosmopolitan area, I am still coming from the perspective of a middle aged white dude raised in poverty with other white people.

I just can’t wrap my head around how sexual orientation, misogyny, and racism can be related is any causal manner. One doesn’t cause the other. Or at least that’s what I believe to be true.

Peter thiel is a piece of work because he is privileged and manipulative. And apparently petty.

When it comes to particular kinds of racism from marginalized groups, I’m here to listen.

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There has been lots of articles about this sort of racism within the gay community.

And I think part of what makes it hard to discuss is the idea that a traditionally oppressed group can a) experience privilege and b) oppress other groups via racism/misogyny etc. And all those things can be true at once.

And part of the issue seems to be an oppressed group simply not recognizing another group as oppressed but while portraying themselves as oppressed. This, this gif, from a reality show, sums up what I mean:


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Thanks for breaking this subtopic off into its own thread. I see where yall are coming from now, and certainly don’t disagree. Racism within a subcommunity can certainly be its own form of racism, just as sexism and other -isms can.

I was mostly just objecting to what I read as one commenters’ implication that “the gay community” (whatever that is) is especially racist, and the further implication that being gay somehow causes racism, without recognition of the overarching de facto white supremacy that causes racism in the first place. Maybe I was just reading too much into that person’s comments.

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I think it depends on how you quantify racism. If racism is about sentiment, then it’s possible for marginalized groups to be very racist. If it’s about the power to make people’s lives more difficult, then it depends on the relative privilege of the groups in question. I don’t like to categorically state that X group has it better than Y group, but I think it’s illustrative that you couldn’t pay me to be a black man in America for the most part, but I’d take that option at an airport. Most racism is situational and depends on the people around you and what kind of power they have over you.

There is an uncomfortable and inconvenient fluidity to power that I think complicates racism. When I travel to the Middle East, I acquire privilege by changing my context. When I get stopped by a police officer, I acquire privilege when they realize that my name isn’t Hispanic, but I don’t have that until they see my ID, and then it may depend on the specific cop. A lot of Iraq vets peg me as Arab very quickly, but I find my identity is more ambiguous among others.

I don’t know about the gay community, because I’m an outsider to the subculture and the issues they face, but I’ve heard and read gay black men complain about racism in the gay community and so I know there’s something going on there in the abstract. There may indeed be dynamics in the gay community that privilege white gay men in part because it’s a smaller environment in ways that make the community’s racism a special problem. I don’t know enough about the specific issue to declare that the gay community is more or less racist than the population at large, but I wouldn’t discount it as a possibility.

I was at a rally once against YAHAL (Yet Another Homophobic American Law), and one of the speakers took the time to remark that comparing the LGBT struggle to the project for African American civil rights is a bit dismissive of the issues around African American civil rights. I’m not sure about the argument, but what I took from it is that gay people can be born into relative wealth and privilege that black people are less likely to experience. If you’re black, there was systemic prejudice against your entire lineage that affected what environment and resources you were born into. Gay people don’t necessarily have gay parents, or a gay lineage. They don’t have a historically accumulating set of disadvantages. I suspect this is a large part of why we have so many wealthy gay people, but not so many wealthy black people. So I can’t rule out the possibility that you can have a very racially stratified gay community that may be particularly stratified in specific ways relative to the general population.

Taking the Muslim example above, there were a lot of Desi small business owners who doubtless applied their racism to whom they hired and fired. That may be the one peculiar position of power where their racism mattered, but I wouldn’t be surprised if you did the statistics and found them to be less likely to hire African Americans than the population at large, or even just white people. Does this make them “more racist?” I dunno. In other ways they can be very tolerant of African Americans based on economic standing, perhaps more than the general population. How do you interpret that as a quanta of racism?

None of this is inherently dismissive of the role white racism in general has played historically, but rather how it’s not sufficient in any explanation of racism among subcultures and in particular instances. It’s really about how the truth defies simplicity.

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Yeah, that’s an argument I just don’t buy. Mrs. Pants linked to an article outlining some disturbing observations on gay dating websites, but I know with the full weight of one person’s experience it happens in cis dating as well.

When I found web browser scripts specifically to “filter all blacks and mexicans”, I was agog. Overt prejudice is not the sole domain of any one group. Context and power among groups are uneven though.

(I had to explain to my 99% Indian company what a ‘cracker’ was today. They… were amused. Many HR violations occurred :D)

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I miss living in a multicultural environment. :cry:

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Ugh this is such a complicated topic; one that I don’t really want to delve into too deeply, because rhetoric and philosophical introspection aside, it has a real 3D impact on my life every single day. I have no choice in that and it’s not something that I ever have the privilege of forgetting.

Still I feel that I should contribute some input, so here ya go:

  1. In the US, the term ‘racism’ has been run into the ground, especially over the last half century. It’s been bandied about so much that the term has almost ceased to have any effective meaning, and somehow I doubt that’s by accident.

To me, and most of the people I know who have experienced it firsthand, racism is a long-established covert institution that goes well beyond learned personal bias and infiltrates the mentality of an entire society.

To me, at it’s core, it’s about power: the power to get certain laws passed that benefit one group over another… the power to deny an entire culture the basic opportunities to achieve a better quality of life… the power to define someone else’s very existence, and then to have them accept that definition as fact.

To me, racism isn’t about being followed around in a store because of how I look.

It’s not someone locking their car doors or clutching their purses as I walk by.

(And yes, I’ve had all that happen to me at some point.)

It’s not about all the willfully ignorant stereotypes that so many people just glibly buy into.

To me, those are merely annoying symptoms of the real problem: the fallacy that skin color has some kind of inherent value other than the one we’ve been conditioned to believe.

And while some people actively choose to go against such conditioning, in my experience, many people are just too complacent to do so; it’s much easier to just accept the pre-made, cookie cutter labels and preconceived notions that someone else assigned to each culture.

2)Racism is a tool of classism, one used by the elites to keep the masses divided and at each others’ throats, since almost the very beginning of the republic.

And it’s worked amazingly well; just look around.

For all our advancements over the last 200 years, the status quo still hasn’t changed very much:

Most of the wealth and resources are still held by a tiny minority of the populace; one which often passes laws and policy to which they themselves are not beholden.

Our social structures are decaying all around us, and the sentiment of “I already got mine so screw you” is still an albatross around our civilization’s neck.

Corruption runs rampant in nearly every system we have.

And IMO, none of this is by accident.

Now to address the topic at hand, directly:

Hatred and negativity only begets more hatred and more negativity.

People who have been victimized by any ‘ism’ often internalize that trauma, and in turn they often end up victimizing someone else.

For instance, I know plenty of Black people who have a problem with Gay people, and I cringe whenever I hear them feeding into the bigotry, often using the same weak rationale that their own haters use.

Reversing the sitch, I’m certain that there’s more than a fair amount of racial bigotry in the Gay community, but that does not mean that the entire Gay community is bigoted. That was someone’s individual perspective likely based upon his or her own personal negative experiences.

Long story short:

Yes we all have bias, but not all of us choose to let it dictate our words and actions.

And being the target of any kind of prejudice or bigotry does not mean that one is automatically ‘exempt’ from being prejudiced against anyone else.

It’s all too easy to hate everyone who looks like the people who hate you; it’s a much more difficult task to resist our baser instincts, and to evaluate each person we encounter on a case by case basis.

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Why would a person of any sexual orientation be less subject to ignorance than another?

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I’m not so sure about that based on my experience with South Asian and Southeast Asian Muslims here and in other countries.

In any case as far as I can tell most of the movies/tv you refer to have very low global penetration.

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I don’t quite grasp. What I was trying to say is if you are an orientation, that doesn’t cause you to be an asshat on another attribute (such as racism).

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It is terrible, but I always enjoyed the casual racism against other Asians displayed by my Japanese friend. Stuff like:

In college we were at the store getting food, and some young Asian teenagers try to chat us up to try and get us to buy them beer.

Teens: "Hey man where are you from?"
Friend: "I’m from Japan."
Teens: "That’s cool man, we’re from Laos. You know where that is?"
Friend: “Pshh, no!”

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After I explained Cracker and Farmers Tan, I was (no, seriously) asked how pale my thighs were.

(Let me show you crossed my mind)

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It doesn’t prevent a person from any of those is my point. Perhaps it just stands out more?

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Because of the irony?

Certainly.

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This is a point made all the time about child abuse: pretty much everyone who abuses a child was themselves abused as a child, but most people who were abused as children do NOT grow up to abuse children.

Some people use the experience to inform themselves of how not to act, and some simply repeat the pattern.

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So true.

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The “sexual racism” that minorities complain about in the gay subculture boils down to one thing only - sexual market place value. There is a sexual hierarchy with asian males at the lowest level. Most of the outrage seems to be triggered by hardcore hook up apps like Grindr where many profiles don’t waste time when it comes to filtering out undesirable traits eg “No Asians, no Fems, no Fats”.

There are two arguments put forward by those who disapprove:

1 While it is ok to have racial, gender and weight preferences it is “harmful” to others to make blunt negative statements about what you are not attracted to in your hookup profile. Instead of using “No Asians” you are encouraged to use “Prefer White” or “Prefer Middle Eastern”.

Preferences are ok but you must express them in a way that is not “offensive”.

2 Racial, gender mannerisms and weight preferences are NOT ok. No matter how diplomatically those preferences are phrased they are still Thought Crimes and cause massive harm to the discriminated group. Those guilty must interrogate themselves as to why they hold these discriminatory preferences and make strenuous efforts to dismantle them.

Argument 1 has some merit. Argument 2 is stupid for fairly obvious reasons, trying to tell gay guys who they should have sex with or be attracted to or what they should be doing in the bedroom. Gays have had to put up with the Church and State doing that since Adam was a little boy. I don’t think they are impressed by busy body gay rights activists trying to do the same.

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The idea that you’re so disgusted by a race that you have to “not waste your time” by stating that you don’t want anyone from the race to proactively contact you is pretty shitty.

It’s not about preferences, its not about thoughtcrimes, it’s about this weird revulsion.

Attitudes like this do a great job illuminating the topic, how entrenched racism is in “supposedly enlightened” marginalized groups.

Similarly, feminism has a lot of similar harrumphing about how people are unfairly targeted for these “overzealous activists”.

Good job at helping describe the problems that exist while attempting to minimize/excuse them.

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You are calling my preferences a “weird revulsion” without any argument as to why you describe it as such.
I do not find asian or black features sexually attractive, why do you refer to this as a “weird revulsion”?

Is not being attracted to individuals a lot shorter than yourself a “weird revulsion”? Is being attracted only to taller individuals a “bizarre attraction”?

Good job at providing an evidence and logic free response!

Its obvious you are in fact trying to dictate to people who and what characteristics they should be sexually attracted to and what goes on in their bedroom, and any transgression is a Thought Crime/“weird revulsion”.