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garranThe second annual International Blog Against Racism Week has just ended (on Sunday, but this took me a little while); all the links to formal participants are being collected at ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
ibarw, but there is (awesomely) a truly daunting number of them. Personally I've dealt with the influx by mostly keeping my reading to the places I lurk anyway, so I thought that I would link to some of the posts I've seen that struck me idiosyncratically the most, for the benefit of other people who might otherwise have been overwhelmed.
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oyceter has a basic definitions post that should probably go first and be read before anything else here by somebody new to these discussions, as well as this post on anger (cf. truepenny on metaphors for voice) and this one on the rhetorical fallacy of bringing up racism in Japan as a counter to discussions of white privilege (plus bonus interesting history of colonialism).
coffeeandink's "Four Cabs" (which, again for possibly idiosyncratic personal reasons (though it's also very well-written), I found especially affecting); she also has roundups of pertinent web recommendations and book recommendations, as well as this post on why she participates in the Week.
She also earlier posted this compact explanation of the shocking stuff going on right now in Jena, Louisiana, with links to more information and ways to help. I linked Rachel (masamage) to that post, and she wrote a column about it for her school newspaper where she's a columnist, even though the last time she wrote about racism a bunch of people yelled at her and made her frightened of doing it again (I am proud).
While I'm linking my friends, Hannah who issynchcola has a brief amusing analysis of tokenism in the US government as related to Star Trek.
elisem has this post about jokes, and a couple of followups in response to one of the comments.
Andyhlee on the idea of 'virtual integration', as well as posts on race and teaching, race and writing, and being asked where one is "from".
Another pertinentyhlee post, somewhat predating the Week proper, is this one containing some excerpts from a book called By The Color Of Our Skin. I was struck by the argument (which hopefully I'll paraphrase okay) that American black people have a cultural tendency to congregate in groups of their own race not, as it is sometimes taken, as a way of being race-conscious, but rather as a way to escape race-consciousness, and create a "nonracial environment" where, at least for a time, these issues don't need to constantly be faced and dealt with. This seems to me like it's actually a pretty common sort of tendency among people of various races, and a lot of what gets called 'white privilege' seems to be in service of, or the result of, white people having an advantage at it; we get to feel like we're in a nonracial space in this sense without having to consciously seek it out, because we are institutionally supported by this system by which most entertainment and politics and workplace demographics reflect and reinforce an idea that our race is an unremarkable default, and others are marginal.
It seems likely that I'm more complicit in this that I realise, though it's hard for me to figure out how much. Certainly I don't consciously choose who to make friends with based on their race (if I did, choosing to read all this IBARW stuff would have been curiously counterproductive); nonetheless, my offline friends and social groups are predominantly white in a way that my city is not. Historically I've thought that this has to do with me being somewhat socially reticent, so that I'm most likely to make new friends of the people who are also comfortable in the spaces I am comfortable, which means friends of other people there, and it just happens (happens) that my friends have mostly white friends.
But it isn't just a function of who I get the chance to meet. When I was about to leave for Japan, Dr. Larry, the guy in charge of the trip, got us all together in a room with men on one side and women on the other and told us to mill about and choose our roommates. I didn't really know anyone, except for Marilee who was of course on the other side of the room; after milling obediantly for a short while, though, I found myself facing two other guys, one of whom said, "How about it?" "We can be the facial hair room," I said.
It was only afterward, looking at the board where the names were up, that I realized that the men's side, at least, had split cleanly in two across racial lines: all the white people were rooming with other white people, and all the asians with other asians. Whatever happened there, as I participated in that communal decision, was not going on in the part of my brain that I ordinarily get to watch as it works.
(When I told this anecdote to Rachel, she asked whether it was possible that what I was actually doing was gravitating to English-speakers. Yes, that's definitely part of what was going on (I don't know whether it's all of it), but perhaps because it was unexamined, even that part was mixed up with race in a way that wasn't really justifiable; I don't remember whether there were foreign-born white people in the room, but there were definitely native-english-speaking asians. For what it's worth, rooming arrangements later in the trip, as we all got to know one another better, became more heterogenous.)
Another part of what's influencing me here is probably a sense I have that there is a cultural gulf between white and asian people in general in Vancouver*, which is probably both somewhat accurate and self-perpetuating. (* Vancouver obviously contains both people and groups who are neither white nor asian. I'm focussing on these particular groups and this particular divide because they're the most prominent and therefore the questions seem most glaring to me there, but I don't mean to minimize the experiences of others.) I also wonder, if there is such a gulf, to what degree I get to feel especially like the onus of crossing it isn't on me, in large part because of my aforementioned white privilege and how that lets me feel at home in my environments regardless. For one example, it's common in my college classes for somewhere between a third and a half of the students to be asian, and sometimes more; when somebody regularly and confidently speaks up in class, though, they're usually white. (Which is another thing that influences who I'm likely to make friends with.) This is something I recognise in retrospect; so far, I haven't particularly noticed it at the time. But I'll bet you that the people of colour notice.
I'm pretty nervous about thinking and talking about this stuff in public; due to lack of practise, I'm probably not very good at it. But it seems worth trying to do anyway, even if I get here a little late.
ibarw, but there is (awesomely) a truly daunting number of them. Personally I've dealt with the influx by mostly keeping my reading to the places I lurk anyway, so I thought that I would link to some of the posts I've seen that struck me idiosyncratically the most, for the benefit of other people who might otherwise have been overwhelmed.oyceter has a basic definitions post that should probably go first and be read before anything else here by somebody new to these discussions, as well as this post on anger (cf. truepenny on metaphors for voice) and this one on the rhetorical fallacy of bringing up racism in Japan as a counter to discussions of white privilege (plus bonus interesting history of colonialism).coffeeandink's "Four Cabs" (which, again for possibly idiosyncratic personal reasons (though it's also very well-written), I found especially affecting); she also has roundups of pertinent web recommendations and book recommendations, as well as this post on why she participates in the Week.She also earlier posted this compact explanation of the shocking stuff going on right now in Jena, Louisiana, with links to more information and ways to help. I linked Rachel (
masamage) to that post, and she wrote a column about it for her school newspaper where she's a columnist, even though the last time she wrote about racism a bunch of people yelled at her and made her frightened of doing it again (I am proud).While I'm linking my friends, Hannah who is
synchcola has a brief amusing analysis of tokenism in the US government as related to Star Trek.elisem has this post about jokes, and a couple of followups in response to one of the comments.And
yhlee on the idea of 'virtual integration', as well as posts on race and teaching, race and writing, and being asked where one is "from".Another pertinent
yhlee post, somewhat predating the Week proper, is this one containing some excerpts from a book called By The Color Of Our Skin. I was struck by the argument (which hopefully I'll paraphrase okay) that American black people have a cultural tendency to congregate in groups of their own race not, as it is sometimes taken, as a way of being race-conscious, but rather as a way to escape race-consciousness, and create a "nonracial environment" where, at least for a time, these issues don't need to constantly be faced and dealt with. This seems to me like it's actually a pretty common sort of tendency among people of various races, and a lot of what gets called 'white privilege' seems to be in service of, or the result of, white people having an advantage at it; we get to feel like we're in a nonracial space in this sense without having to consciously seek it out, because we are institutionally supported by this system by which most entertainment and politics and workplace demographics reflect and reinforce an idea that our race is an unremarkable default, and others are marginal.It seems likely that I'm more complicit in this that I realise, though it's hard for me to figure out how much. Certainly I don't consciously choose who to make friends with based on their race (if I did, choosing to read all this IBARW stuff would have been curiously counterproductive); nonetheless, my offline friends and social groups are predominantly white in a way that my city is not. Historically I've thought that this has to do with me being somewhat socially reticent, so that I'm most likely to make new friends of the people who are also comfortable in the spaces I am comfortable, which means friends of other people there, and it just happens (happens) that my friends have mostly white friends.
But it isn't just a function of who I get the chance to meet. When I was about to leave for Japan, Dr. Larry, the guy in charge of the trip, got us all together in a room with men on one side and women on the other and told us to mill about and choose our roommates. I didn't really know anyone, except for Marilee who was of course on the other side of the room; after milling obediantly for a short while, though, I found myself facing two other guys, one of whom said, "How about it?" "We can be the facial hair room," I said.
It was only afterward, looking at the board where the names were up, that I realized that the men's side, at least, had split cleanly in two across racial lines: all the white people were rooming with other white people, and all the asians with other asians. Whatever happened there, as I participated in that communal decision, was not going on in the part of my brain that I ordinarily get to watch as it works.
(When I told this anecdote to Rachel, she asked whether it was possible that what I was actually doing was gravitating to English-speakers. Yes, that's definitely part of what was going on (I don't know whether it's all of it), but perhaps because it was unexamined, even that part was mixed up with race in a way that wasn't really justifiable; I don't remember whether there were foreign-born white people in the room, but there were definitely native-english-speaking asians. For what it's worth, rooming arrangements later in the trip, as we all got to know one another better, became more heterogenous.)
Another part of what's influencing me here is probably a sense I have that there is a cultural gulf between white and asian people in general in Vancouver*, which is probably both somewhat accurate and self-perpetuating. (* Vancouver obviously contains both people and groups who are neither white nor asian. I'm focussing on these particular groups and this particular divide because they're the most prominent and therefore the questions seem most glaring to me there, but I don't mean to minimize the experiences of others.) I also wonder, if there is such a gulf, to what degree I get to feel especially like the onus of crossing it isn't on me, in large part because of my aforementioned white privilege and how that lets me feel at home in my environments regardless. For one example, it's common in my college classes for somewhere between a third and a half of the students to be asian, and sometimes more; when somebody regularly and confidently speaks up in class, though, they're usually white. (Which is another thing that influences who I'm likely to make friends with.) This is something I recognise in retrospect; so far, I haven't particularly noticed it at the time. But I'll bet you that the people of colour notice.
I'm pretty nervous about thinking and talking about this stuff in public; due to lack of practise, I'm probably not very good at it. But it seems worth trying to do anyway, even if I get here a little late.
