Some miscommunications in a discussion of race/racism

[justira]

I've stayed out of recent debates about race and gender on the internet— I've read most of the relevant material/discussions, but have not posted anything. I mentioned some reasons in a previous post, which basically boil down to "I've been doing research on rape all year and I kind of can't handle talking about misogyny/racism/homophobia/etc right now."

Recently two people I know here on LJ started a discussion about race. This discussion bothered me a lot. Feelings were hurt on both sides. Also, from what I can tell, both sides were earnestly trying to communicate their points. I'm trying to understand where the miscommunication happened, because I'm convinced there's a lot of it in here. There was some hand-wringing about whether I wanted to jump into the fray or not, but I'm not sure how to work through such issues except by having discussions. So here's a try.

I decided to post this in my own journal rather than attempting to comment in either of the participants' journals. This is in part because I expect this to get long, and in part because I am hesitant to invade either of their spaces. Likewise, if you first heard of this discussion here and wouldn't normally engage with these people, please don't bother any of the participants about it on their journals. Part of this discussion is no longer viewable, as the post (which gave a lot of context and valuable information on the participant's position, both in the post itself and in the comments) was friends-locked after its initially public posting. Also, I admit outright that I am trying to read some intent here. If the actual parties involved want to correct me on any such interpretations, I really hope they do.


bottle_of_shine posted her responses to a meme asking about books you've recently read by minority authors. A couple of people, including kenderlyn [here] and shanaqui [here] brought up some good points about the meme. Both were concerned about judging books based on the colour of the author's skin; both were concerned that categorization such as the one employed in the meme may be divisive or promote simplistic views of race/identity. (All terms from the meme: female, African or African-American, Latino/a, Asian or Asian-American, GLBT, Israeli/Arab/Turk/Persian, 'any other "marginalized" authors'). Likewise, both were concerned that this meme was urging people to read for activism, not for fun; that there was something inferior about reading a book for fun.

I think both of these are valid concerns. I do admit I am somewhat suspicious of the meme's wording, since it does seem to focus more on skin colour than cultural upbringing and other major identity factors. kenderlyn was concerned that reading a book simply because it is by a minority author can be seen as patronizing to the author, because they're being read for their skin colour, not their skill as a writer or the strength of their ideas and imagination. shanaqui expressed similar concerns, saying that the meme does not appear to be concerned with content; that reading books that address issues like race, human rights, and sexism is important and valuable.


shanaqui also expressed concern that focusing on non-white groups as different made them more different and excluded.

It's hard, though. I think that sometimes people focus too much on a certain ethnic group not being properly represented, and that just makes them more clearly not a part of everyone else. But if you ignore them, and there is institutional racism or sexism or whatever, then it gets worse too, in a different way.

To illustrate this, she used the example of Welsh-English relations. shanaqui makes repeated attempts to explain the situation in Wales (some of which are no longer publicly available); she (as far as I can tell) earnestly tries to educate her interlocutors about the situation so she can explain why she is is using it as an example for her concerns. The gist of it, as I gather from her explanations, is that Welsh-English relations have historically been quite hostile, that the English oppressed the Welsh for a long time, and that the Welsh have resented the English for this. Today, however, the Welsh no longer seem to be oppressed and are actually the recipients of many beneficiary programs. Yet, many Welsh people hold onto the grudge and still make a lot of noise about English oppression, and this is divisive and unhelpful to current Welsh-English relations. I would also like to point out that shanaqui elsewhere mentioned that there are still highly unsavoury stereotypes against the Welsh in England.

She wraps up her example like so: "But I worry that all this focus on ~diversity~ means that people will actually forget unity." Later on she says: "I'm not saying diversity is a bad thing, I'm saying it is over-emphasised, because the way to get over racism is not to stick people in a box and say You Are Different."

I think this is a valid point. Race is a social construct, and the more we use it to label people, the more discussions we have that divide people along racial lines, the more we reinforce the reality of this social construct. However, this is a damn powerful social construct, with centuries of grief and history behind it. Right now, we cannot pretend race away. We haven't reached that point yet. I like to believe that some day, we will. But right now, race is a reality of our social world, and we have to address it and discuss it and try to root out all the places where racism hides.

shanaqui also says: "We are all part of the same race: the human race. Our DNA is almost the same. I'm not saying this because I'm white (although I am, as you know) and privileged (although I am, as you can tell), I'm saying this because I believe everyone is equal [...] I guess what I want to say is I wish people would embrace the ways we are the same -- we are all humans, we all have emotions and imaginations, hopes and desires, all of it."

As I hope these quotes make clear, shanaqui is clearly not racist. I believe she means all of these things in earnest. And I think these are great things — acknowledging our common humanity. No one can reasonably argue with this.


However, in response to these and other statements by shanaqui, several people attempted to explain to her how her discourse was racist. Please for the love of Betsy: no one has called shanaqui a racist. What people DID try to show her is that she was using racist arguments. I think this is step one of the many misunderstandings that cascaded down this discussion. This is a very common problem. I think it's helpful here to remember that racism does not consist of individual acts of meanness. Racism is a system. When you commit racist acts, you participate in the system. When you use racist arguments or tactics, you participate in that system. I believe that it is in this sense that bottle_of_shine, jabbberwocky, and others on the now-locked post attempted to show shanaqui that she was being racist.

I think this initial misapprehension helped escalate feelings and lead to subsequent misapprehensions. shanaqui at one point admits that she is not familiar with RaceFail'09's "required reading" list (much of which she was linked to in this disucssion), but that she had seen a video that described the difference between calling someone racist and telling them they're being racist. However, once shanaqui made clear that she was not familiar with a lot of the assumed background material for this discussion, it may have been helpful of her interlocutors to make this distinction (a racist/acting racist) absolutely clear. It may have helped he subsequent discussion.


As I see it, the second major misapprehension here is about the Wales example. Everyone who engaged shanaqui in this discussion tried to tell her that this example was inappropriate. To those who have done their extensive RaceFail reading, it is probably immediately apparent why. However, I don't think anyone tried to explain to shanaqui exactly why; they only gave her links. I don't think this is unreasonable. But I think a small summary would have helped. It goes something like this: conflicts among white ethnicities are not invalid or somehow less bad than race-based conflicts. However, because the groups involved are white, they still have white privilege. And this will automatically place them and their problems above coloured people and their problems on the global pecking order. And using white-group conflict examples brings the discussion back to white people and their problems. Again. Like history consistently has done.

Now, here is what I think happened. shanaqui, in good faith, tried to use an example she is intimately familiar with and could speak about with informed confidence. She tried to relate the discussion of race to other conflicts that she is familiar with. Her interlocutors reacted to this example by calling it a derailment of the discussion.

However, after the reactions by bottle_of_shine and others, I think the impression she got was that her interlocutors believed that Wales was in no way analogous or relevant — that the issues she brought up were being dismissed.

bottle_of_shine, jabbberwocky, and others, meanwhile, were only trying to tell her that, while her experiences are valid and address real problems, the way she used them was not helpful in a discussion of race. Not that Wales is not one example of oppression, but that it is an example of a different KIND of oppression. In important ways, Wales cannot be compared to racism, and invoking such white-group conflicts is a widespread tactic used by white people in discussions of racism. Such examples, as a whole — as part of a system — rather than clarifying the issues, tend to obfuscate them— and bring the discussion back to white people and their problems.

It is not that shanaqui's example of Wales can never be a good example of oppression; can never be helpful, relevant, or informative. It was certainly informative; I learned a lot from shanaqui's explanations. I think this issue lies at the heart of a lot of hurt feelings. No one, to my knowledge, was trying to dismiss shanaqui's example and experiences. And shanaqui, likewise, was earnestly attempting to use her experiences to provide examples and help her understand the issues in the discussion, and explain the issues she saw to her interlocutors.

But let me bring this back to an important point that seems to have been lost in the fray. Even though shanaqui's example of Wales was a good example in some ways, it was still a racist tactic because it participates in the system of racism. Let me try to spell this out. It is not that every individual use of white-group conflicts as an example/analogy to race-based conflicts is automatically invalid, or a bad example. It is that every time white people use such examples in discussions of race, they are participating in a system that makes more white voices heard than non-white. These individual people, people like shanaqui, are probably not racist. But they are contributing to racism.

There were a lot of other issues brought up in these discussions, including being colour-blind, structural inequalities in the publishing industry, reading for fun, etc. And there were misunderstandings on those issues, too. But this post is already long, and I mostly wanted to address what I saw as the main miscommunications in this discussion.

So.

shanaqui tried, in good faith, to use examples she was familiar with to engage in a discussion about race. Her interlocutors told her that her example was derailing the discussion. I think shanaqui should have read the links provided her before engaging in further discussion. I also think her interlocutors should have stopped to think about why they weren't getting through to her before continuing to engage her. But everyone runs out of teaspoons eventually. I read this as an unfortunate instance of enough explanation to hurt feelings but not enough to change minds, because everyone was tired of explaining things to everyone else.

I'm writing about this because I think it's important to think about when/why attempts to have discussions about race fail, among friends, among intelligent, non-racist people.

Comments

[elspethdixon.livejournal.com]

I'm a totally random person off justira's friends-of-friends list, but I second the recommendation for deepad's Dragons essay and any of her/his other essays on cultural appropriation and racism -- they're written from the perspective of an Indian SF fan, and so issues of British colonialism and imperialism and their long-lasting after-effects are entertwined with issues of race.

Without reading all the relevant discussion, I don't know if the Wales/England example was necessarily germain to the discussion, except insofar as the experience helped you to understand the issues at hand (I know the aftermath of California's Proposition 8 was what finally got certain things that come up a lot in these discussions to click in my head, despite that also being a "once more with white people" example), but I can see why people reacted badly -- justira explains it pretty well in this post.

That said, I think there's also really interesting dissertation fodder for someone somewhere in a study/comparison of English treatment of Wales and Ireland and British colonialism & imperialism in Asia and Africa in the 18th/19th/20th century. After all, England essentially learned how to do colonialism in Wales and Ireland before inflicting it on the rest of the world, and some of the issues of erasure of language and culture are common across both situations. It's the kind of thing that probably needs its own post/discussion devoted just to it, though -- bringing discussions of British imperialism on a global scale into a discussion of England's attempts to erase Welsh as a language is an entirely different thing than bringing white vs. white cultural/national conflict into a discussion of race. Unless people are talking about racism and Torchwood, I guess, in which case the discussion involves Wales already.

[shanaqui]

One of the primary problems with this discussion is, on reflection, that everybody thought everybody was talking about something else.

I was talking about "minorities" (largely ethnic, although my thoughts apply to LGBT literature as well), other people were talking (and thought I was talking) about "people with different colour skin". Thus, the Welsh count as an ethnic minority (5% of the population of the UK, 0.2% of the population of the world, according to rough estimates and calculations) while we do not count when you are discussing racism based solely on skin colour. My idea of "minorities" includes groups that the discussion (centering around a meme) did not consider, as far as I'm aware: the Welsh, the Irish, the Scots, British Muslims, Jews, ...

The meme I originally objected to arose out of discussions about race defined in the sense I wasn't referring to and don't, as a rule, use. So in a sense I misunderstood the context of the meme. I still have legitimate objections to it, but now is not the time to discuss that with so many misunderstandings and hurt feelings still clouding the issue!

The reason I brought Wales into the discussion at all was as regards the backlash resentment against the English that continues today, what that caused me (and other Welsh people I know) to do, and how that is divisive and unproductive. I feel it is very possible to go too far the other way and to resent someone who has done nothing to you, simply because of history. I believe that's not justified (with full awareness that I was a part of that and now consciously have to try not to be).

Ultimately, I believe I snarled up too many issues together in the same post so that it wasn't clear what my intentions were. I focused on certain examples over others -- partially because they're close to my heart, and partially because the people who replied did, too. Nobody, for example, brought up the question of LGBT literature after a while: it narrowed down to focus on racism. If they had done, again, I have context for that because I'm not straight, and have faced discrimination because of that. I suspect that context would also have helped.

Part of the problem is that I have not been a part of the discussion on race thus far, and also that I am not American. The issues of racism from a British perspective are different, and I was also raised in a very particular environment within that.

Does that make any sense in helping to explain where I was coming from? I'm trying not to talk too much this time. It's... working better re: this only needs one comment!

[elspethdixon.livejournal.com]

There a lot of in-group speak in lj discussions about racism with can make them difficult to get into for a first-time participant (for one thing, the definition of "racism" used is generally a specialized sociological definition that corrolates more closely with "racial oppression" than with the standard dictionary definition most people are familiar with - it's a narrower category in some ways and a broader one in others). And people really don't like having to stop a discussion to define their terms or explain conversational shorthand to someone who wasn't around for previous rounds of debate.

Bringing up LGTB issue in discussions of race is also a fraught issue, on both sides. It can be just a much a case of derailing as mentioning conflicts between white ethnic groups (i.e. more "let's change the subject to white people and/or me now"). On the other hand, if I had a dollar for every time I've seen someone who's deeply committed to anti-racism and equality and whom I otherwise respect say that LGTB people aren't really discriminated against because they have the option of staying in the closet, I'd be able to buy myself a Dreamwidth account with the cash.

[shanaqui]

The definition of racism I use is "prejudice against a specific group based on skin colour and/or culture and/or religion" (I may be missing something out in that).

The LGBT issue was already there. The original meme was not solely about race, and nor was my post. It became solely about race.

[elspethdixon.livejournal.com]

I suspect the definition they were using is power + (white) priviledge = racism. By that definition, racism is the systemic oppression of members of other races by members of a culturally dominant one. IMO, there are some problems with the definition, if nothing else in that the definition has no room for racism between different minority groups, but it's the definition that's preferred, and it does bring a systemic/societal aspect to the table that the normal definition doesn't. It doesn't really deal with prejudice as much as it does with who has the power (intent is actually largely unimportant according to this definition).

[shanaqui]

Yes, their definition was different to mine, which as I said, was a part of the misunderstanding in the discussion.

"racism is the systemic oppression of members of other races by members of a culturally dominant one" -- that doesn't work, because England vs. Wales didn't count as an example, but it was certainly the case that England was culturally dominant and oppressed the Welsh.

[elspethdixon.livejournal.com]

England vs. Wales didn't count as an example, but it was certainly the case that England was culturally dominant and oppressed the Welsh.


That's where the power + priviledge definition starts to break down, because it's used specifically for racism but technically could be applied to any kind of oppression if you're going by the literal definition.

I suspect part of it is that while the English and the Welsh definitely considered one another to be seperate races in the past (back when race as a concept was as much about nationality as anything else and people talked about things like "the English race" or "the Anglo-Saxon race and the celtic races"), they're not considered to be different races by modern standards. They're both just thought of as white, and therefore they'd both have white priviledge compared to groups who aren't white. (It does make it tricky to figure out how people ought to define things like ethnic conflicts in former Soviet bloc countries, though, because Serbs and Croatians, for example, are both white, yet there's also clearly a racial/ethnic element to the conflict)

[shanaqui]

I think the Welsh (and Irish, and Scottish) to some extent still do consider themselves different races to the English, while the English do not.

I think the issue was -- someone involved can correct me if I'm wrong -- that the assumption was the discussion was about non-white groups, and that I was bringing a white group into it, which suggests a continuing perception that the problems of white groups are more important than the problems of non-white groups. That's not the intention with me -- in fact, examples I gave intended to portray the case of the Welsh as less important, and more as an example of historic oppression. Admittedly not because we are white, but because it is largely an issue of history. However, it was seen as that because I was talking about minorities and racism in one way, and other people were not.

I feel like that got convoluted... hopefully that's not unclear.

Edit: I can speak English. Honest.

[cap.livejournal.com]

I am not intimately familiar with concepts of race in Serbia and Croatia, but in much of the former Soviet Union the conflicts are understood by the participants in racial terms. To use an example I am more familiar with, Romania historically (up through the end of the last century anyway, I don't know about the last few years) seen itself as a bastion of Roman culture surrounded by Slavs. Similarly, the Romanians have seen themselves as innately superior to the Romani, justifying centuries of oppression. Both of these conflicts are understood in local terms as questions of racial difference, of genetic determination. While Romanians, Hungarians, and Romani have relatively similar coloring and would all be called "white," the situation -- particularly in the case of the Romani -- is far more complicated.

On that note, as far as the terms of discussion for RaceFail, how does one discuss the position of the Romani in Europe?

[elspethdixon.livejournal.com]

as far as the terms of discussion for RaceFail, how does one discuss the position of the Romani in Europe?

I have no idea, honestly. I mean, on the one hand, technically white, but on the other hand, obviously racial discrimination as far as the Nazis were concerned.

[cap.livejournal.com]

Racial discrimination against the Romani is not limited to the Nazis. It has been a problem continuously as long as we have historical records. Romani children are still banned from most schools, jobs are unavailable to adults, healthcare is almost non-existant, and prejudice is nigh on unquestioned. (The Romani are, according to "common knowledge," genetically incapable of anything but anti-social behavior.) As frequently happens in such marginalized communities, crime, alcohol and drug use, and internal exploitation (such as of children -- child brides still exist even though the practice is illigal) is disturbingly commonplace. The skintone of the Romani is relatively light (darker than most Europeans), but apart from that everything points to understanding the situation in terms of racial descrimination. Does the fact that the Romani can be traced to India about 800-ish years ago make it "count." (I am not trying to dismiss what RaceFail are trying to achieve, I just am trying to understand the borders of their model, as this seems to have been the source of the conflict Ira's post addresses.)