In an earlier thread, trying to make the case that liberals are racist, Niels Jackson wrote:
If you think that liberals don’t use the term “race traitor,” you haven’t looked very hard. Try reading up on what some liberals say about Clarence Thomas. For example, Manning Marable explicitly says that Thomas (and other conservative blacks) are race traitors. So does a book edited by two Georgetown professors. Use Google, and you’ll find plenty more references. (Such as this Margaret Cho article about none other than Michelle Malkin, or this article about Condi Rice.)
David of the admirable blog The Debate Link (which currently has a good post, quoting an anonymous comment-writer, criticizing left-wing racism) seemed to endorse Niels’ links, as well.
I have to wonder if Niels and David even read the links in question. For instance, as the Daily Howler link Niels provided explained, the book edited by two Georgetown professors (Words That Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech, and the First Amendment) didn’t call Thomas or anyone else a “race traitor”; it objected to that sort of attack. As the Daily Howler – again, in the link Niels himself provided – points out, a Lexis-Nexis search found only one example of Thomas being called a “race traitor” in any mainstream news outlet; clearly, the term was not commonly used.
Although it’s true that Margaret Cho used the term “race traitor,” in context she used it ironically; her point is that it’s a positive thing that Asians and people of color are free to be right-wingers nowadays, even though she finds Malkin’s view odious. Cho writes:
I feel kind of proud, that racial politics have progressed to the point where we can have a young Asian American woman who doesn’t have to live within the constraints of a minority identity, which presumes liberal bias just by nature of the fact that if you are oppressed by the majority, you would want to place yourself against the majority.
Cho’s essay, along with other links Niels provided, shows that what’s going on is more subtle than right-wingers admit. There are liberals who call right-wing blacks “race traitors,” but the liberals in question are disproportionately people of color. More specifically (although Cho is an exception), they’re usually Black. “Race traitor” is not the typical vocabulary used by liberals when talking about non-white conservatives; but it’s sometimes part of the vocabulary used by Blacks when having debates that take place within the Black community.
I don’t find Blacks using the term “race traitor” objectionable the way I’d find the same term used by whites (liberal or not) objectionable. It’s a little like when Chris Rock uses the word “nigger.” I don’t think it’s acceptable for whites to say “nigger,” by and large. But at the same time, it’s not my place, as a white guy, to police the language Blacks use when having debates about Black identity politics within the Black community. That’s none of my business.
Returning to the point, as far as I can tell, Black lefties are the only lefties to use the term “race traitor” with any regularity. It’s ridiculous for conservatives to imply that this is proof of widespread racism among lefties.
Context – that is, what race the speaker is – does matter. It’s clear that when blacks use the word “nigger” or its derivatives, they’re not using it in the anti-black way it’s typically been used by white racists. Similarly, the analogy between right-wing racists who have used “race traitor” (for whites who favored civil rights), and anti-racist Blacks who use the same term, doesn’t hold much water. Read this Manning Marable essay Niels linked to, for example:
This conservative wing of the black middle class during the 1980s and 1990s, in effect, committed “racial suicide,” in the sense that it disavowed any sense of obligation, or “linked fates,” with what happens to the masses of disadvantaged African Americans. There is no sense of personal responsibility or accountability to a political project that is race-based. They wish to be judged as “individuals,” not as part of the larger “black community.” They explicitly reject any notions of the concept that their career advancement was largely a product of a mass, democratic movement to challenge structural racism. So in this limited sense, the reactionary wing of the black political elite has stopped being “black” in terms of its historical function as an oppositional group against racism. They are essentially “race traitors”: dedicated to the destruction of all racial categories, or even for some the collection of data indicating racial discrimination; critical of the liberal integrationist establishment; and enthusiastic boosters of capitalism as we know it.
Would anyone seriously argue that this is no different from a KKK rant?
The bottom line is, blacks who argue about if Clarence Thomas is a “race traitor” are making an argument about solidarity, and trying to hold the line against racism. It’s not our place, as whites against racism, to tell Blacks what language they should or shouldn’t use; whether or not I like the term “race traitor,” in this context, is irrelevant. In contrast, whites who complain about white “race traitors” are hoping to protect the racist status quo (or return to an even more racist past). To claim that the two uses of “race traitor” are equal is to ignore the substance of the two positions, and reduces anti-racism to a fuss about vocabulary. No, thank you.
In mulling over BritGirlSF’s comments last night,
“I see the same thing from misogynistic men, the fear that at some point women will get angry enough to do to men the same kind of bad things that have been done to us. In both cases I think the fearful people are projecting and there’s very little likelihood that they will ever be oppressed in the way that they have oppressed others, but I think the fear is still there.”
Yes, yes, and yes.
It is a consistent theme in our culture that when faced with a minority rights situation that demands remedies, the controlling majority often defines the wrongs and prescribes the remedies, often in the absence of the people being marginalized or to whom the remedy is affecting. Frequently the proposed solutions do not adequately address the issue, do not fully empower or overturn the wrongs, and (go figure) leave the majority in a position of power to thwart any possible chance that they may loose control or become victimized themselves. This is IMO purely fear based reacting, and projecting of those values (or lack of) that others would treat the majority as they have treated the minority. It is entirely possible that some would seek vengeance after suffering for often long periods of time, however it is not always so. The Truth and Reconciliation movement in South Africa has proven that when given the opportunity, most folks just want to be told the truth and treated with respect and get on with things. Most people fighting for rights just want the rights, never wanting the fight. Blessed are the peacemakers… Blessings.
Amanda: “I had a moment of self-doubt about criticizing racial minorities that I see as openly acting on behalf of racist institutions, which is where I’m in a pickle.”
I think you can criticize racial minorities, but (in my experience) it can be very tricky to be taken seriously even if you’re the same race as the person you are criticizing. Notice that Sydney felt constrained to identify herself as a black bisexual woman and that I felt I needed to identify myself as a white woman living in a majority-black area, in our discussions on this thread.
I also think the racist label has become a very popular way to discredit someone on the opposite side of the political aisle for both parties. This frequent misuse is watering down the potency of the term and making it difficut to call out the true racists in this society.
I was thinking about this thread on the way home from work yesterday. In my neighborhood, we have a phrase, “I’m not the right color to talk about this.” It’s our shorthand for saying we need help in dealing with a neighbor who is not the same race as we are. The neighborhood etiquette has evolved a method of interracial relations where if you have a problem with a neighbor who is of a different race, you approach a neutral-party neighbor who is of the same race as that first neighbor and ask them to mediate for you. I was shocked the first time it happened to me – we had just moved into our house, and one of our black neighbors wanted to make sure our yard would look nice for Easter. So he asked one of our white neighbors to explain it to us. (Apparently, the previous owners of our house were Chinese Buddhists and had to be asked to do the yardwork every spring.) On the one hand, I’m glad it’s been worked out over the years as a way to ensure more amicable relations, but on the other hand, I’m sad it’s still necessary.
Neil, people think you are only pretending to be anti racist, because you don’t seem to know anything about racism.
I haven’t even talked about “racism” AT ALL, except to say that the word “racism” is typically used in a broad sense to mean “bad attitudes based on race.”
You must have me confused with the other commenter who has been disputing about the nature and extent of racism.
That wasn’t me.
Thanks for your post BritGirlSF…I think you raised excellent points. It’s an issue I’ve thought about a lot. And I don’t think you’re crazy at all, if so, you’re not the only one.
The thing about Diallo is that if he were White and the suspect was White, they would at most asked him if he saw anything suspicious. He wouldn’t be treated as a suspect just because he was White. I think the police treat Whites as individuals, and not a group, while African-American and Latinos are treated as groups, which everyone belongs to, with the word “suspect” as the label. Suspect, of something if not that specific thing.
A White person can reach into a pocket to pull out something, and the first thought in a cop’s mind is that it could be a wide variety of things. So maybe the cop is not thinking it’s something dangerous to him, or he’s thinking it’s possible, so I’ll be cautious but the gun stays where it is b/c to pull it out would be unreasonable force in the situation. With a Black man or woman, who was not the person they were looking for(a rape suspect), if he reaches for his pocket(in this case, for a wallet), it must be a gun. So they pull out their guns at once, and fire them, and possibly even reloading, as in Diallo’s case and in the case of a young woman killed in my city.
So, it’s fear, but it’s fear based on race and racial perceptions, many based on media stereotyping(as depicted in Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine movie) especially during the first 15 minutes of any news broadcast when the anchors(mostly white) provide you with a listing of the Dangerous Black Men of the moment day after day after day. Then police officers who grow up with that, like everyone else, go into departments where the culture is very insulated, very “us vs them” and very racist.
It’s deadly fear for those who are the target of it, like Diallo. But then again, the NYPD has members in it, who entered racist floats into parades, including one parodying the James Byrd killing in Texas.
http://www.racematters.org/nytarchjb173.htm
And the NYPD had officers take Abner Louima inside a bathroom in a station house, and sodomize him with a broom handle, and nearly get away with it, because more officers than those directly involved knew about it and said nothing. The NYPD’s also had several controversial shootings of Black men in a short time period, shot in the back.
So if there’s fear there, there’s a great deal of hatred mixed in with it. Also, ignorance and fear that comes to lack of experience with people of different races and cultures. Many LE agencies hire White officers who grew up in small or medium size towns and cities with little racial diversity or there was defacto segregation. Jeremy Morse, the Inglewood PD officer who beat 13-year-old Donovan Jackson came from that background, but he had a host of problems including 12 excessive force incidents in three years. One of the issues is why he was allowed to remain employeed for so long(and for all the fallout from the Jackson incident, Morse is now a millionaire cop)
That fear and resentment also extends to Black officers, who not only face discrimination on the job but they are pulled over on DWBs when they are not working and in many cases, injured or killed by White police officers as happened in LA, Oakland and Providence, RI in recent years.
Studies of both the LAPD and NYPD showed dozens of cases where White officers shot Black officers(usually off-duty or plain-clothed operatives) and killed or wounded them, yet there was not even one case where a Black officer killed a White officer. Black officers who work in narcotics or other undercover assignments are often scared that they will be hit by one of their own. That’s fear, but then since Black officers have a hard time working in predominantly White and racist police agencies, it’s not just fear at work.
That’s an issue that has been discussed in my city a lot as well, especially since the agency can’t find a Black officer candidate any where in the country who wants to work here(despite being very competitive on the pay scale).
I asked several police officers on a special task force(in charge of implementing court-mandated reforms) two weeks ago at a meeting where all that fear came from. I told them I could be a block away, see an officer do a traffic stop, not see the driver, but be able to figure out just from the officer’s body language what the race of the motorist was.
The lieutenant got defensive, first tried to seem like he didn’t get what I was saying, but then he said something interesting. First he said that officers don’t know the race of the person they are pulling over, because they can’t see them clearly. I doubted that in all cases or most cases they didn’t know the race, but I listened and he said that an officer carries a certain amount of fear when they first walk up to the car window, for anyone. Which in some way if applied across the board for all motorists makes some sense b/c that’s the most dangerous moment of an officer’s job(well that, and DV calls) when quite a few have been injured or killed. But then he said, that after the “initial contact” based on that, the level of fear for an officer goes up and down. So I asked what that was based on, and could that in part be based on the person’s race(since according to the officer that’s when they first allegedly know the motorist’s race). He didn’t respond. Whether because he couldn’t or didn’t want to, he knows the answer to that.
In LE, the degree of fear is tricky to address. Obviously, LE officers are more fearful of African-Americans, but other times, they use this fear to prevent themselves from being prosecuted for use of excessive force or lethal force against African-Americans. The defense every officer uses when investigated by the DA’s office for particularly lethal force incidents, consists of five words: “I feared for my life.”
For example, here when a Black woman was shot 12 times while in medical distress in her car, the officers wrote in their statements for the DA investigation, how scared they were. One officer said his leg was shaking so hard when he saw her two female cousins(who had called 9-11 for help) walk up to him, he couldn’t stop it, and so forth…The DA didn’t file charges, but I was skeptical about the level of fear involved in this case for two reasons:
1) the fact that after the DA declined to file charges and two of the officers were later deposed for a civil suit, in their statements, the fear was gone. No legs shaking. No nervous sweat. It became all about having to do something, and getting it done. They no longer needed to be scared, b/c self-defense was only necessarily to thwart criminal charges of murder.
2) Post-shooting, there was so much hi-fiving, laughing and celebrating going around and racist and gender slurs being used, they obviously weren’t afraid. They were happy, and that happiness came from their belief that they had not even killed a human being.
And the officers who reported this behavior which led to the officers’ who did the shooting and their sergeant’s termination, were reviled by the rest of the agency, which reacted to the firings by engaging in a massive head shaving campaign.
I think that was fear, of what happened to the officers happening to them, and hate that five perfectly good White officers lost jobs because they shot an n—–. Adopting what was viewed by African-Americans as a skinhead symbol, enmass just put more fear into the city.
“From all of Thomas’s opinions, I conclude that (1) he is incredibly sympathetic to the problems of the black community, but at the same time (2) he does his best to call it as he sees it. In other words, he does the most that he can, within his own constitutional philosophy, but if in looking at the actual Constitution and its history he is forced to come to a particular conclusion, then that’s how he votes. I respect that kind of intellectual integrity. ”
—————————————————
Sympathetic in words, or in actions? Actions matter. Words, are words. Walk the talk.
I think he does his best to please and propogate the continuation of the white supremacist patriarchal system, which he has proven his loyalty to during his career. He was appointed after Thurgood Marshall retired, and the adage took affect which states that a) only one person of color can serve on the USSC at one time, and b) a person of color can only be put on the case to replace another person of color. There weren’t very many Black conservative judges and Thomas had only one year on the federal court of appeals when he was appointed, though he did a stint under Reagan on the EEO. He had been criticized a lot for changes he made in the EEO, as director by civil rights organizations. But that was a strategic appointment by Reagan. After all, in a white supremacist patriarchal society, like the U.S., who makes the decisions?
Now, do you think Reagan would put someone in charge of the EEO who would weaken it, or empower it? Civil rights organizations say that Thomas weakened it by his actions against class-action law suits, for example.
To maintain white supremacism, it is useful to have one or a handful of people of color from different racial groups to act on your behalf to maintain your system, and to hide behind when you get criticized on racism. How can we be racists, so-and-so(insert name) is PROOF that we are not racist against(insert racial or ethnic group).
Some people like Thomas, I think, want to be viewed as successful, and as ambitious(and I think you could say any USSC justice was ambitious) and who is going to be able to navigate their way up the judicial(or any other)laddar more quickly? The Black man who supports the racist system, or the one who challenges or fights against it?
They know race and politics go together, and they kind of go with it to get power and respect within society.
And when conservative leaders of any governmental entity are challenged on their practices being racist(i.e. employment), they will always head off the challenges aggressively as unmerited after the required “investigation” and that charge will always be lead by a person of color to put a stamp of what they believe is authenticity on that investigation. Because again, how can we be racist, if he or she is front and center on our side? And the vast majority of the time, their opponants, and this is especially true of liberals go silent, for fear of being labelled racists on the basis of the assertion above, because I think they have a difficult time rationalizing that an action can be done to defend and perpetuate racism with a person of color in the mix.
This applies to conservatives, I think, but also liberals, because even liberals get uncomfortable around people of color who include White liberals o the “wrong side” in their discussions of racism. Some times, efforts are made to divert those discussions towards “it’s all about classism, or sexism” Not that those aren’t important but they’ve also been used as diversions. Or if we eliminate(oppression of choice, usually classism, but always excluding racism) racism(and sometimes sexism is mentioned) will go away. Don’t count on it. The classism, sexism and racism in many liberal and progressive movements says otherwise. Not to pick on them, but they’re and we’re not immune.
Thomas also said once that he was puzzled why he was steered by the conversatives including the Reagan administration into civil rights with the EEO because he had no interest in civil rights, but was interested in tax law. He wondered why he was not encouraged to work in that area. Hmmmm….so why be pigeonholed by conservatives into civil rights, heading the EEO, and not “allowed” to pursue his preferred course into tax law? Where would a White Yale-trained lawyer be prodded towards, by the leadership?
And FTR, I often do scrutinize positions taken by Ginsburg and O’Conner, as the only two women who are and who have ever served on the USSC, more carefully than the men. I try to see what they bring into the decision making process on cases that impact women, i.e racial/gender discrimination, AA, abortion, etc. How do the decisions they make as women on the highest court in the judicial branch, impact women? Though even O’Conner doesn’t step on the fingers of the women coming up the ladder behind her, quite as often as Thomas has done with Black men and women.
Maybe if the USSC were packed by women, rather than White men, I wouldn’t scrutinize the few individuals too much(and white women it appears have broken the “no more than one” rule). Maybe it’s just that so many of them historically and present are White men that they can be viewed more easily as as individuals rather than as a group.
“Context – that is, what race the speaker is – does matter. It’s clear that when blacks use the word “nigger” or its derivatives, they’re not using it in the anti-black way it’s typically been used by white racists.”
I disagree. You cited Chris Rock(ATM skit), who clearly draws a distinction…as do other members of the community, although in more subtle ways.
I hate to be Mr. Moderation here, but it seems to me that both of the dominant narratives about racism and racial power are fairy tales, rather than historical fiction.
Racism, although manifested in the actions and attitudes of individual people, is not primarily an individual phenomenon. The right-wing description of it as such is wrong. There is social power that inheres in group identities, and the arrangements of this social power flow from historical contingencies that simply are not under individual control. Chris Rock can have all the money and fame in the world but there are always social structures that are going to put them at a structural disadvantage vis a vis members of more dominant groups.
On the left-hand side of the spectrum, we have the bizarrely indefensible proposition that all social arrangements are controlled by these histories – as if power accrued to a particular favored group at all times and in all circumstances, with no reversals or exceptions. A view of historical contingency so powerful that it precludes the making of any new history. The hothouse nature of this idea is manifest in its utter failure to make conversions outside of the academic setting, in striking contrast to most other liberal notions which have made huge memetic inroads or outright conversions of entire societies.
The individual-action hypothesis does have this in its favor: it broadly prescribes the correct, achievable course of action (fix your own individual behavior, since that’s what you actually can do), even as it fails to adequately describe the situation. The collective-action hypothesis has in its favor the fact that it is on to some basic truths, even as it fails to come up with workable plans of action. (Ironically enough, folks who are clueless often behave better through random guessing than folks who have a part of the puzzle but are convinced that what they have is the Holy Totality.)
It would be nice to see a synthesis of these partially-wrong theories. We might actually start making some progress again.
Robert wrote:
It’s easy enough not to see the control factor if you’re one of the privileged race, I’ll wager.
Is that really what you get from this thread ? Maybe you should re-read it. The question is not whether there are reversals or exceptions, but how important they are to the big picture, and how relevant they are to most members of the privileged or unprivileged groups.
Of course, as with issues surrounding sexism, it serves defenders of the status quo to focus as much attention as they can upon exceptions and reversals. Man bites dog, and so forth.
The question is not whether there are reversals or exceptions, but how important they are to the big picture, and how relevant they are to most members of the privileged or unprivileged groups.
Right. (Eyeroll.) And yet somehow, in no significant situation or area do those exceptions to the pattern become worthy of voluntary comment, or action, or anything.
I observe a similar rhetorical defense mechanism in some of my racially prejudiced cousins; “oh, not all the are wicked or lazy or immoral; why, some of the finest people I know…” – but somehow, none of the finest people are ever president of the bank.
Comment is one thing. Manipulating a discussion to make it look like one or two cases of tit for tat makes “equality” is quite another. Again, I don’t think you’re really comprehending a lot of what has been written here.
Yes, and such a pitch actually allies their bigotry with y0urs, as you continue to foist your Invisible Hand fantasies on us as truth;Pretending that there’s no such thing as conservative elders nurturing and growing the careers of younger conservatives in the media biz. Just one or two stellar minority individuals “working hard and going to college” does it. No particular foundations, media orgs, and what not have anything to do with it. It’s, like, sunspots or something, and to suggest otherwise is nothing but crazy conspiracy talk.
Please.
Wow! Robert and alsis39, please continue this dialog. It is informing and stirring thought (at least in me), in addition to what has been discussed.
Robert, “I hate to be Mr. Moderation here…” don’t worry; we won’t let it get in the way of how you really feel. It is good you brought those points to the table. Blessings.
Rock, I’m enjoying your comments, too.
Really, though, it’s tough to have a debate when you feel the person on the other side isn’t proceeding honestly. I tend to think that a person who obsesses constantly about exceptions to the rule is not debating honestly.
Also Robert, who decreed in the neighbor thread that Malkin “made it” through pure merit in a fictional world in which pure merit is all, and no system exists to reward individuals who tout certain party lines and who reinforce certain long-lived power structures, has more in common with his bigoted relatives than he will ever own up to.
I think Sydney tried valiantly. I applaud her stamina, which is more than I could manage.
I tend to think that a person who obsesses constantly about exceptions to the rule is not debating honestly.
Right. Because it’s inconceivable that the rule could be, in fact, simply one rather large clump of contingencies, and not the totality of the reality.
Everyone who has different data sets than you is evil.
I didn’t say that you were evil, Robert. I said that your argument was dishonest.
Yes, we draw a distinction but we never use it the way racists use it. When a black person calls another person nigger they mean:
1) guy, dude, etc.
2) a close friend or person with whom you share a bond
3) an ignornant, lazy, no account, good for nothing person
It’s never a hate filled slur as it is when used by racist white people. It’s the difference between calling someone a jerk or a motherfucking asshole who likes to fellate goats in his spare time.
But the term under discussion here is “race traitor,” which seems to me to be an anger-filled or hate-filled phrase, no matter who says it.
Exactly.
Back to something Sydney said earlier: “And in some ways I would also list Bill Cosby and Condoleeza Rice as betrayers of the black community.”
Condoleeza Rice? Huh? She has supported affirmative action, so she passes that litmus test. What has she ever done that supposedly hurt the black community?
“It’s never a hate filled slur as it is when used by racist white people. It’s the difference between calling someone a jerk or a motherfucking asshole who likes to fellate goats in his spare time. ”
Snort. The part about the goats was damn funny.
And the rest of this post was right on target too. What s/he said.
Alsis: “I think Sydney tried valiantly. I applaud her stamina, which is more than I could manage. ”
Thanks Alsis. Alas, I was unable to get through to particular individuals so I decided to step back and simply read for a while. I am intrigued by the conversation between you and Robert though. I love this:
Alsis: …”Yes, and such a pitch actually allies their bigotry with y0urs, as you continue to foist your Invisible Hand fantasies on us as truth;Pretending that there’s no such thing as conservative elders nurturing and growing the careers of younger conservatives in the media biz. Just one or two stellar minority individuals “working hard and going to college” does it. No particular foundations, media orgs, and what not have anything to do with it. It’s, like, sunspots or something, and to suggest otherwise is nothing but crazy conspiracy talk.
Please. ”
Seriously, you cracked my shit up! With this statement you highlight the unwillingness of many (NOT ALL) conservatives to face actual reality and not the reality they imagine that exists. I also think you’ve made some great points regarding honesty. There is no point in continuing a fruitless conversation where the other individual refuses to analyze their personal feelings/reactions but instead jumps around from hypothetical to hypothetical in an inane attempt to “prove you wrong”. But I hope you are able to get through- good luck :)
I came across this quote in a writing on fear. I thought alsis and others would appreciate it especially, as I believe much of the response from folks that frustrate her/him are not out of malice in their person, but from fear and what happens when one lives in fear. This is not off topic, as the basis of many of the ruminations on race and “race traitor” IMO is fear. I included the address of the page to read the writing for those that want to see the whole thing. I have never seen it said more accurately. Blessings.
‘”Hatred,” wrote C. S. Lewis’s Screwtape to Wormwood, “is often the compensation by which a frightened man reimburses himself for the miseries of Fear. The more he fears, the more he will hate.” The darkest fear of all, the fear that has the power not only to shape a life for death-dealing, but also to distort an entire community, is the fear that lurks beneath the pretense of power and privilege, the fear which crouches behind the doorways of prejudice and preys upon the least of these. It is often a righteous fear, justified in the name of a greater Power who has, according to us, willed our dominant hold on the present order.’
The shadow side
by Cynthia A. Jarvis
The Christian Century
Sunday, August 7
http://www.christiancentury.org/article.lasso?id=1096
Maybe after a few cups of coffee, Sydney. Also I need to clean the kitchen and get some bulbs in. :/
Happy to be of some small assistance to you, though. ;)
Did you not see the paragraphs that I quoted? I was specifically responding to someone who questioned how black people use the word “nigger.”
But in regards to the term “race traitor”, the problem is that racists and non-racists use the same term to mean different things. When white people call another white person a “race traitor” they really mean nigger lover, i.e., someone who wants black people to be equal to whites and is fighting to end racism and white supremacy. When black people call another black person a “race traitor” we mean “Uncle Tom” or “house slave”, i.e., someone who has been co-opted by and identifies with white supremacy and continues to perpetrate white supremacy and racism to the detriment of black people as a group. When white liberals call minority conservatives “race traitor” they mean the same thing. And if you think that a person who fights to end racism=a person who fights to continue it, or that calling someone “a person who promotes racism” is racist, well then I really don’t know what to say to you. And yes, you can talk all you want about how the minority conservatives who are called “race traitors” aren’t actually perpetrating white supremacy and racism but many think they are and that is why they are called “race traitors.”
a fictional world in which pure merit is all
I went to law school with a lot of people like this–one minute they’d be crabbing about affirmative action, the next, bragging about how they were a shoo-in for prestigious jobs because Uncle Bill knew a federal judge or their dad had introduced them to the hiring partner at BigFirm. Or how they went to IvyLeague U, just like dad and granddad.
And yes, you can talk all you want about how the minority conservatives who are called “race traitors” aren’t actually perpetrating white supremacy and racism but many think they are and that is why they are called “race traitors.”
Given that there are legitimate differences in the black community about a wide range of policies, the wise thing to do would be to express disagreements in a more civil fashion. (I.e., it would be prudent to avoid calling Condi Rice a “race traitor” for no reason other than that she is a Republican.)
What Niels said.
Oh, and BTW, Phaeton, thank you for the concise and cosolidated summary of usage for “nigger.” I was not reading your comment in isolation, but rather WRT the (significantly earlier) posts on this thread.
“Given that there are legitimate differences in the black community about a wide range of policies, the wise thing to do would be to express disagreements in a more civil fashion. ”
Oh here we go again: the white middle-class boys dictating what is “proper” behaviour on the parts of groups that they can’t even begin to understand the positions of.
Of course, as those of us who have to face shit every day due to the forms our physical selves take know quite well, “civility” and “politeness” are often just ways to sidetrack issues, obscure the truth and generally water down any debate to the point of meaninglessness.
It’s no suprise the white middle-class boys love these rules of theirs so much: those rules go a long way to keeping the status quo.
You can also be as “civil” as “civil” can get and still have a moral code that is, to say the least, objectionable. For example, I don’t in any way fault Rice for her appearance, her speech, her intellect, and what not. I do fault her for casting her lot with a nest of rich thugs and for using patriotism as a cheap backdrop for latter-day colonial bullshit.
Even formiddable intellects can sport about as much morality as would fit easily inside a thimble. Kissinger, anyone ?
Oh here we go again: the white middle-class boys dictating what is “proper” behaviour on the parts of groups that they can’t even begin to understand the positions of.
I’m not “dictating” what is “proper.” I’m just stating a fact: If someone wants to be viewed as a rational adult, it is prudent to avoid throwing around vicious slurs that have little-to-no basis in reality. If you want to use such vicious slurs nonetheless, feel free, but ultimately, you’re only hurting yourself.
Of course, as those of us who have to face shit every day due to the forms our physical selves take know quite well,
Condi Rice has to face shit every day due to her supposed betrayal of the black community, and she knows quite well that such accusations are based on ignorance and sheer meanness. (As “Alsis39” points out, Condi Rice may have objectionable values in other areas that have nothing to do with white-vs-black issues).
Niels, I actually agree with Amp in this case. As a White woman, I don’t think it’s my place to decide whether or not Rice has betrayed the Black community. I do think that she is a prominent force in retrograde foreign policies that negatively impact Americans of all races, to one degree or another– except her buddies and their corporate/military backers, of course.
For me, that’s quite bad enough. :( It doesn’t preclude any criticism of Rice that acknowledges her race. I just don’t think that I’m the one to make that criticism.
I’m not “dictating” what is “proper.” I’m just stating a fact: If someone wants to be viewed as a rational adult, it is prudent to avoid throwing around vicious slurs that have little-to-no basis in reality.
Yes, yes. You know that is a fact in all circumstances & cultures. You know that the term “race traitor” has “little-to-no basis in reality” whenever it is used. That is just another simple fact. And not at all condescending or full of assumptions. Niels knows best. Thank you so much for imparting your infallible wisdom to us mere ignoramuses. Or would that be ignorami? Enlighten us more, sir, please.
I find it hard to believe that you have actually listened to anything anybody from the group that you’re instructing has said.
“I’m not “dictating” what is “proper.” I’m just stating a fact”
Because, of course, your personal standards constitute “facts”, not just subjective, personal opinions of what is right. Um, no, sorry. They don’t.
“it is prudent to avoid throwing around vicious slurs that have little-to-no basis in reality.”
Sometimes these terms have a very great basis in reality. At the end of the day, if we are discussing what Black people think about other Black people, it’s up to them to determine what is “reality” in that specific case, and not two white people like you and me. OK?
What goes on between “Condi” (lord, do we need those eye-rolling smilies sometimes) and other Black people is OUTSIDE of your realm of experience. You are NOT CAPABLE of understanding exactly what the dynamics are there, so you are NOT QUALIFIED to appoint yourself judge and jury on what is “right” or “correct” or “real”. You have no right whatever to lecture Black people on their responses in this case. Full stop. It seems to me that if you were truly concerned about “civility”, you could take that on board.
I want to make clear I was only agreeing with Niels on the part about calling black person a race traitor just because they are Republican. I do not agree with the rest of what he said about civility and maturity.
Sometimes the only words that can effectively convey the depth of frustration, disgust, and anger one person feels towards another are harsh, loaded terms. Based on the posts on this thread, “race traitor” appears to be one of them. It just feels to me like an excommunication from the church when someone uses it, except that once you’ve pasted the race traitor label on someone, there doesn’t seem any way to get it off.
Jake, please:
I’m not “dictating” what is “proper.” I’m just stating a fact: If someone wants to be viewed as a rational adult, it is prudent to avoid throwing around vicious slurs that have little-to-no basis in reality. Yes, yes. You know that is a fact in all circumstances & cultures. You know that the term “race traitor” has “little-to-no basis in reality” whenever it is used.
Did I say that “race traitor” is without basis “WHENEVER it is used”? No. It might be an appropriate term in some instances. Your response is therefore irrelevant.
I find it hard to believe that you have actually listened to anything anybody from the group that you’re instructing has said.
You’re not paying attention: Earlier up in this very thread, someone proffered Condi Rice as an example of a race traitor, and I specifically asked what on earth Rice had ever done to deserve that label. There was no response. So there was nothing for me to “listen to” on that point.
Crys: What goes on between “Condi” (lord, do we need those eye-rolling smilies sometimes) and other Black people is OUTSIDE of your realm of experience. You are NOT CAPABLE of understanding exactly what the dynamics are there, so you are NOT QUALIFIED to appoint yourself judge and jury on what is “right” or “correct” or “real”.
With Condi, there appears to be nothing to understand in the first place — nothing that anyone can explain in words, anyway.
I wonder how you’d like the same logic applied to any other group: “What goes on among Southern rednecks is OUTSIDE your realm of experience. You are NOT CAPABLE of understanding their pride in their heritage, etc., and so you are NOT QUALIFIED to disagree with the fact that they put the Confederate flag on their pickup trucks.”
Look, there’s a measure of truth, of course, in the notion that we all come from different perspectives, that we could all do better in trying to understand each other, and that many differences of opinion come from lack of understanding. At the same time, NO ONE, in ANY group, has the blanket right to be nasty and vicious and mean, and then to claim immunity from all criticism on the grounds that “you’re not part of my group and you can’t understand me, so you just have to shut up about anything that I say.” BULL. No group of people is beyond “understanding.”
“What goes on among Southern rednecks is OUTSIDE your realm of experience. You are NOT CAPABLE of understanding their pride in their heritage, etc., and so you are NOT QUALIFIED to disagree with the fact that they put the Confederate flag on their pickup trucks.”
Wrong-o, there! I happen to have real, live Southern rednecks in my family (though they thankfully do not put Confederate flags on their trucks), so nyeeeeaaaahhhh. Actually, you are playing the old game of trying to say that a group such as Southern rednecks is in an equivalent situation in US society as Black people are. And that does not wash. Southern rednecks may not be the highest-status group in the US, but they are far from a historically discrminated-against minority group, however much some of their number might like to make out that they are. And please do not come back with examples of petty indignities some of them have had to put up with. Yes, I don’t condone the classism some of them have had to face, but to put it in the same league as racism against Black people would be offensive in the extreme.
Southern rednecks have their voice in the US. They are not a freaking oppressed group. So, no point for comparison.
“NO ONE, in ANY group, has the blanket right to be nasty and vicious and mean, and then to claim immunity from all criticism on the grounds that “you’re not part of my group and you can’t understand me, so you just have to shut up about anything that I say.” ”
You are neglecting to note that it is YOUR SUBJECTIVE OPINION and YOUR INSISTENCE ON IMPOSING YOUR STANDARDS ON OTHERS that labels calling your beloved “Condi” a race traitor an act that is “nasty and vicious and mean” in the first place. You are dismissing out of hand any argument that such a label could have merit, or at least a understandable explanation. All because YOU say it can’t be so. And the fact that you do so DESPITE having been told by actual people of colour that you don’t know what you’re talking about, that you aren’t grasping the dynamics of the situation, is what *I* personally call bull.
You really ARE being the middle-class white guy who stomps into the middle of someone else’s home, plops himself down in the biggest chair, and proceeds to dictate to the occupants of the house how they must conduct themselves. And just because you say so, as well. Tone down the arrogance a few notches, huh?
Crys:
The point of my analogy was NOT that rednecks are equivalent to blacks in terms of being discriminated against, etc. Of course they aren’t. But that has absolutely nothing to do with it. Don’t get caught up in things that are utterly irrelevant. (It’s even more irrelevant that you, personally, have experience with rednecks. That is totally beside the point.)
The point is, EVERYBODY can claim to be part of some “group” or another that has a unique perspective on life. Heck, multiple groups. People all have gender, race, geographic location, occupation, religious or non-religious beliefs, educational background, familial upbringing, hobbies, etc., etc. For every last one of those groupos, anyone could say that their group is beyond understanding by outsiders: “You don’t know what it’s like to be a [man, woman, Southerner, North Dakotan, child of divorced parents, student in an urban school, long-distance runner, Muslim, etc., etc., etc.].”
But part of liberalism — or of rationality itself — is the notion that we can all understand each other IF people are willing to explain themselves.
So that’s why I’m not impressed by any sort of argument that basically amounts to, “I have the right to be reckless with vicious slurs, and you can’t say anything about it, because you have the wrong skin color or other attributes, and therefore you can never understand me.”
If that’s really true — that people can never understand each other — what a depressing world it would be.
You are neglecting to note that it is YOUR SUBJECTIVE OPINION and YOUR INSISTENCE ON IMPOSING YOUR STANDARDS ON OTHERS that labels calling your beloved “Condi” a race traitor an act that is “nasty and vicious and mean” in the first place. You are dismissing out of hand any argument that such a label could have merit, or at least a understandable explanation.
To restate the obvious: No one has made any argument whatsoever as to why Condi Rice is a “race traitor.” That argument doesn’t appear to exist.
” Don’t get caught up in things that are utterly irrelevant.”
What an unintentionally hilarious remark.
Niels, you have a case of entitlement disorder of absolutely monstrous proportions. Get over yourself. And quit fucking lecturing the rest of us on what is “right” and how we should behave.
Black people don’t freaking OWE you explanations for what they think or say, even if it is about (god help us) “Condi”. I know that is a shocking fact for you to have to deal with, but there it is. Maybe if you condescended to actually, y’know, *ask* somebody honest questions and (gulp!) *listen* to their replies, you might just get the answers you say are lacking. But of course, that would involve you actually doing something other than wagging your finger and lecturing.
And, btw, yes, the whole point of your bringing up rednecks to equate their position with those of Black people in the sense that they are perceived as 2 definable groups in society. I don’t have the time or inclination to give you a detailed lecture on group processes right now (hell, crack a book rather than relying on what your own personal experience tells you are “commonsense” theories some time–your life is not necessarily like most people’s you know), so I’ll just say a couple of things: unfortunately, merely existing as a definable group is not enough. For example, men cannot have a real understanding of women because most of our lives occurs under your radar. You have no real clue as to what our lives are like or what goes on between us. On the other hand, male lives are seen as the default. We get what you think and what you believe and how you live shoved down our fucking throats 24/7. We are in the position to make fairly accurate judgments about you.
It’s exactly the same thing when you are talking race relations. Black people get images of whiteness and information about white culture ALL THE TIME. White people, on the other hand, get little information about Black lives, and even what little we do get is often distorted. WE ARE IN NO POSITION TO JUDGE.
If you want to change that state of affairs, you can start by shutting the hell up and LISTENING for a change, instead lecturing and patronising all of us. Until you do that, YOU are the one who is creating the situation that so depresses you.
It may not be your business to police the language Blacks use, yet I do believe that is possible for whites to accurately criticize racism within minority groups. Whether a black calling another black a “race traitor” actually qualifies as an example of racism is another question, and not one that I know the answer to.
But Niels, you are oppressing people by asking them to provide justification for their statements…
How convenient. You can judge men, but they can’t judge you! What do you mean by “male lives are seen as the default”? Even if you are right that “male perspectives” are given more attention than “female perspectives” in our culture, that doesn’t mean that women can ever actually understand the experience of being male. In the big picture, I think that both genders are equally ignorant towards each other’s experiences.
Middle-class white guys do this? Wow, I must have missed reading that page in the job description…
Well, I get very little information about the lives of Southern Rednecks, and what I get is often distorted. Does that mean I am in no position to judge Rednecks who are racist?
Black people don’t freaking OWE you explanations for what they think or say, even if it is about (god help us) “Condi”
No one owes me any explanation if they keep to themselves. But when you come on a public internet forum that is explicitly addressed to the question of whether and when it’s ok to say “race traitor,” and when you use the term “race traitor” to describe Bill Cosby and Condi Rice (as someone did above), then when someone else says, “Hold on, how come they are race traitors,” you DO owe an explanation. That’s what it means to engage in public debate in the first place.
I know that is a shocking fact for you to have to deal with, but there it is. Maybe if you condescended to actually, y’know, *ask* somebody honest questions and (gulp!) *listen* to their replies, you might just get the answers you say are lacking.
Please try to get this through your head: For the third time, I DID ask the question (multiple times) why Condi Rice had supposedly betrayed other blacks, and there was NO REPLY. There was nothing to “listen to.”
You really ARE being the middle-class white guy who stomps into the middle of someone else’s home, plops himself down in the biggest chair, and proceeds to dictate to the occupants of the house how they must conduct themselves.
I’m not going into anyone else’s home here. If someone wants to call Condi Rice a “race traitor” in the privacy of her own home, I have no objection. If someone wants to call her housemate a “selfish bitch” because she didn’t open the blinds in the morning, that’s her privilege. If she wants to call her landlord a “psychotic asshole” because he was two days late in fixing a leaky roof, that’s fine.
But again, this is a public debate in a public forum. (You’ve noticed that we’re all exchanging messages here, on the Internet, where anyone can see?) What’s more, the very topic of debate is the appropriateness of the term “race traitor.” I have just as much right as anyone else to participate in that debate.
In fact, you’re the one who should listen to genuine blacks like Condi Rice, Bill Cosby, Clarence Thomas, etc. Maybe YOU could learn something from THEM. (But then — oh my goodness — you might realize that black people don’t always agree with each other! What is a white person supposed to do? Just pick out the person who is the most self-righteous in condemning other blacks for not being “black” enough, and then believe everything that he/she says without questioning?)
Thanks for your posts, CrysT and alsis.
I have no patience for asshats right now, whining about the oppression of the white male or lecturing people outside their group on proper behavior. Everything you said, though.
I have no patience for asshats…lecturing people outside their group on proper behavior.
Oooh, so much for prescriptive feminism.
Ummm, Robert, if you are going to refer to my post, could you take it in its entire context? Thank you.
Then after that, perhaps you and Niels could park your White male priviliage for a minute and reread the posts done by Shannon, Sydney, alsis, Crys T, Sarah and others here. Thank you.
You are here to learn from others and not to troll, right? Or not.
It would be nice to actually read a thread which does not have people pleading the case of the poor oppressed White male, whose life is so inconvenienced by men of color and women asserting their rights. But then hell, as a feminist, it would be just about heaven(whether of the secular or various religious interpretations of what this means) to be able to read a thread about women’s issues without it being, what about those poor damn men??? And then there’s the varying rules of civility and how men’s rules trump women’s rules and all that.
As far as whether women know the male experience or not, what I can say is that women know more about men’s lives, than vice versa. Why? Because modern society dictates that WE HAVE TO. Survival, is one reason.
I think this applies in its own way with people of color knowing more about the lives of Whites than vice versa, as well. That’s been said and shown here many times.
From an educational standpoint of how women can’t help but know the male experience:
We know about White men’s accomplishments? That’s called history.
Want to know about the histories of people of color and white women??? That’s called Black history, Native American history, Chicano history, women’s history, etc.
We know about White men’s writings. That’s called American and English Literature.
Want to know about People of color and white women’s contributions to literature? Those are electives.
That’s called Black, Chicano, Asian-American and women lit. Those are electives.
We know about male sexual responses. That’s called plot structure for novels, short stories and plays. You know, intro, buildup, climax, resolution.
We know that to men, size and ejaculatory power matters, because we celebrate tall and taller buildings, long missiles and nuclear weapons, towers, tall flagpoles, etc. Guns, rifles, cannons and rockets. Caliber sizes, magazine sizes, firing power/sec, etc. All these things.
These are a few ways, of many, that women know the male experience. It’s kind of all over the place. Men have more difficulty learning about women, because whatever presense the female has in society is either downplayed, in some cases invisible, or in many cases demeaned and denigrated.
This is a blunt, and perhaps crude depiction, but it’s there, most women know about these things, if men don’t consciously.
As far as being civil, I don’t think this post is half-bad really, either. Except for talking about some sensitive male issues.
btw, this post is for those out there who may have a “click” moment, not for those who think they know everything about everything, well just because…they’ve been told so due to a few biological factors.
“It would be nice to actually read a thread which does not have people pleading the case of the poor oppressed White male”
But….but….if we don’t focus every fibre of our beings on white men (after all, the only Real Humans, as we all know), we might…..have energy and time to spend on others, and we certainly can’t have THAT, now can we?
I knew they’d fly into screaming fits of rage over my saying that women know far more about men than men do about women. Because not to would mean having to think for a second about how fucking privileged they actually are. And seeing as they don’t give a damn about any lives but their own, that ain’t going to happen any time soon.
“As far as being civil, I don’t think this post is half-bad really, either. Except for talking about some sensitive male issues.”
But of course, you do realise that merely pointing out those issues is taken by them to be an act of hostility. Anything other than servilely grovelling is to them an act of hostility.
They are not here to listen or learn or have any sort of exchange: they are here to masturbate their egos on us.
But you know, Crys T, women aren’t supposed to mention SIZE….that’s breaking one of patriarchy’s most sacred laws.
I’m sorry I’m not sufficiently nice or servile, but I am so not in the mood for this crap today. Issues and discussion of issues outside the realm of the White male experience can not be done, unless the White Male Experience becomes front and central, to the discussion and everyone else’s perspective is shunted to the curb.
btw, Crys T. Your posts are spot on. I’m sure glad there’s women like you out there.
Thanks, and I’d like to say that goes double for me when I read your posts. It’s just so GOOD to see sanity does exist out there!
I think it’s amazingly arrogant for anyone to claim to understand the experience of any group they are not in. They can study that group all they want, but ultimately, the only way to understand the subjective experience of those people is to be one of them.
Give me a break. All the examples you gave are only a small part of the experience of some males. I hope you don’t actually believe that they encompass the totality of the experience of being male. Get this: you will never have any real understanding of the male experience. Neither will I ever have any real understanding of the female experience. Unless perhaps we both become transsexuals…
I will agree with your argument that women may have more of an understanding of the male experience than vice versa. Yet I think that is only a slight difference in the degree of cluelessness that both sexes have towards each other. And I definitely don’t think the existence of flagpoles, and reading James Joyce in highschool instead of Toni Morrison gives women a unique position to criticize men, while men cannot criticize women. Same kind of thing with race.
This criticism might make sense in another thread, but it doesn’t in this one. The topic of this thread is race issues, not women’s issues. And when has anyone complained about “the oppression of the white male” in this thread?
Actually, talking about sensitive male issues is not the problem. You may be correct that male perspectives are more common in eduction/literature than female perspectives. At my high school, we read both James Joyce and Toni Morrison, but perhaps it is atypical. As for your argument that women can understand the male experience from our culture while males cannot understand the female experience, although I consider it both wrong and arrogant, it is not actually uncivil. What I find problematic about your post is accusing Robert of trolling telling him to “park your White male priviliage for a minute and reread the posts done by Shannon, Sydney, alsis, Crys T, Sarah and others here.” Have you considered that maybe Robert and Niels have read those posts, and simply find them unconvincing? Why not get to the bottom of why they disagree, and possibly change their minds, instead of flaming them?
Radfem, CrysT, and all:
Since I speak as a middle-class white man with a really, really big penis I know that you’ll follow my suggestions because I am a middle-class white man with a really, really big penis. This white man who is middle-class and has a really, really big penis has the grace to impart the following objectively true information to you. And you know that it is objectively true since I am, as I’m sure you’ll be delighted to learn, a really, really big penis-bearing middle-class white male.
There is nothing in this thread nearly as important as answering Niels’ question about why Condi is a race-traitor. The reason that nothing is nearly that important is because Niels is a white man with a truly awe-inspiringly huge penis. It follows that his conclusion that since nobody has answered his question that there is no way in which Condi could possibly be validly called a race traitor by some non-white or non-male.
Please, I beg of you as a kindly middle-class, amazingly endowed in the genital region, white guy to stop harming yourself by ignoring the vital question that Niels (a white man with a stunning example of a penis) has been asking over and over again. You just make yourselves look immature and irrational and I, as a white man with a really, really big penis, know that you have it in you to be rational, civil and mature.
(Things-yes, that is parody. Do not take the above words at face value.)
I read in a women’s mag once that Condi dresses too drably and that she should have a more flattering haircut, because her current one makes her look dumpy. Isn’t that traitorous enough for you all ?
Give me a break. All the examples you gave are only a small part of the experience of some males.
Umm, Aegis darling? The examples are a part of the experience of every person who has spent time in the US education system. Are you now going to tell us that only “some males” have experienced the public and/or private schooling that is available in the US? You did read what she wrote about history & literature, right? Not to mention the bits about buildings and the importance of size which is in the realm of experience of every conscious human being in the United States, right?
Just checking.
Damn, I picked up the wrong week to give up the violin!!
“I think it’s amazingly arrogant for anyone to claim to understand the experience of any group they are not in. They can study that group all they want, but ultimately, the only way to understand the subjective experience of those people is to be one of them.”
——————————————-
If only Niels, jake and some of the men here were told to take that same advice! But then again, they don’t have to! Part and parcel of racial and gender privilage is that you get to sit and lecture other groups how to conduct discussions amongst themselves.
———————————————-
“Give me a break. All the examples you gave are only a small part of the experience of some males. I hope you don’t actually believe that they encompass the totality of the experience of being male. Get this: you will never have any real understanding of the male experience. Neither will I ever have any real understanding of the female experience. Unless perhaps we both become transsexuals…”
———————————————
I’m all out of breaks today. I’ve read intelligent posts by women who are explaining their experiences and perspectives as women, and to Black women who are explaining their perspectives, as being black, being female and being both together. Then I’ve read White men tsk, tsk everything they see, not listen to a damn word of it(because they do not have to) and be lectured by White men who seem to believe they are experts on the going ons of people of color, women and Black women.
I will be forcefed for my whole life the reality of the male experience, even if I never enjoy his priviliages or “rights”. OTOH, not only will men never have to be women(which most of them would rather be DEAD than to be associated with anything “feminine”(i.e. sissy) but they don’t have to LEARN A DAMN THING about what women are, how they feel, what they write, their sexual experiences, or what they talk about. Even less so, with women of color.
As for M-F transexuals, which I’m no expert on, they weren’t BORN women, they weren’t raised women, so they miss a lot of women’s experience, and discrimination, though no doubt they face discrimination mostly by a society that favors men who are defined by machoism.
————————————————-
Actually, talking about sensitive male issues is not the problem. You may be correct that male perspectives are more common in eduction/literature than female perspectives. At my high school, we read both James Joyce and Toni Morrison, but perhaps it is atypical. As for your argument that women can understand the male experience from our culture while males cannot understand the female experience, although I consider it both wrong and arrogant, it is not actually uncivil. What I find problematic about your post is accusing Robert of trolling telling him to “park your White male priviliage for a minute and reread the posts done by Shannon, Sydney, alsis, Crys T, Sarah and others here.” Have you considered that maybe Robert and Niels have read those posts, and simply find them unconvincing? Why not get to the bottom of why they disagree, and possibly change their minds, instead of flaming them?
——————————————–
I am correct, but it’s more than just a difference of male and female contributions to literature, being taught inside the classroom. It’s the internalization b/c of the overemphasis on men’s contributions and the underemphasis on women’s that helps build the male entitlement that it’s a fact of life that men do more, contribute more, and thus are superior(since more and more in modern times, the physical superiority argument is falling flat)
So if I ask the men here, who arrogant would be a compliment in terms of some of their posts, lol, to listen to what women are saying about WOMEN and what Black women are saying about BLACK WOMEN, warrants a response to reconsider what the White men who are all out of sorts from having THEIR opinions challenged, and try to change their minds.
They didn’t come here to have their opinions changed, or else they’d actually be listening to what Sidney’s tried to explain to them a zillion times rather than stubbornly asserting that she’s wrong about her community because they’re basically White men, who know everything about everybody. But then when women, or men of color purport to say they know anything about the MALE experience, or the WHITE MALE experience, the dander sure flies!
And actually, I’m not here to change the minds of White men who choose to be smug, why should they change their minds b/c that would mean only 98% of the pie for them rather than the whole thing! Incidently, they’re not the folks who have actually taught me anything, except perhaps things they didn’t intend to pass on….
Gee, someone’s bothering with Aegis? I can sum him up easily and in fewer words:
“But you’re not talking about ME ME ME ME my penis my love life my desire to fuck anything I want to my desire to be the center of discussion my desire to talk about ME ME ME ME ME. God, you’re so selfish.”
[Ginmar, on threads started by me, I’d really prefer that personal attacks by posters on other posters be avoided. Thanks! –Amp]
Dear Jake,
you wrote: “Since I speak as a middle-class white man with a really, really big penis […]”
Well, after reading your blog, I think the interesting issue isn’t the size of your penis, but rather the consistency of your balls. I think they got squeezed quite mushy by some women in your life:
– “I love people. The crazier and more stupid the better. […] Kathi says, “I’m only going to pay for 1/8.” I patiently explain that that is exactly what I just told her.”
– “She gets hostile and raises her voice, demanding that I give it to her right now, that I’m stealing her money.”
– “I keep myself between her and her bike (which is parked in my driveway) because I don’t want her getting away […]”
– “I can only guess at what Kathi told [the police], but I believe it is something along the lines of ‘…man physically intimidating me & he’s stealing my money.'”
– “And then she starts arguing with me again. I really don’t want to deal with her any more so I say, ‘Look, I don’t want to argue with you. It’s pointless. […]'”
– “Sharon (& that fuck) are evil.”
– “What Sharon did to me (& what that fuck did to me) is the sort of thing that causes deep, lifelong emotional pain to people. The sort of pain that makes people do horrible things like injure, maim and kill one another.”
– “Sharon is no different now than she was for the entire time I knew her. She still thinks only of herself. Witness the photo of her kid. Why not just send me a photo of her and that asshole fucking? Same difference. But that simply didn’t occur to her. Who wouldn’t want to see her kid? Certainly her heartbroken & crushed ex would love to see the kid she produced with the guy she cheated on him with.”
– “She tried to isolate me from my friends because she needed to be in total control. She needed somebody entirely emotionally and socially dependent on her and her only, she has that with that bizarre fuck.”
– “She actively tried to destroy me. She tried to remove me from all social contact with people she did not control. By that I mean people who didn’t know me before her and whose perceptions of me she could control. She tried to destroy my sexual confidence. She tried to destroy my self esteem. She tried to break me through overwork. Our relationship was all about her […]”
– “She would have come back to me if I had tried. ”
—-
I feel your pain, man.
Hey, hun, I don’t mind you quoting my writing a’tall. I do mind you taking partial quotes that lose the context. T’isn’t honest, y’know. This quote that you did:
– “I keep myself between her and her bike (which is parked in my driveway) because I don’t want her getting away […]”
really doesn’t reflect the whole sentence does it? Don’t you think that, just maybe, the “…with my legal documents.” part is really important for people to read in order to judge the meaning of the sentence?
I absolutely encourage people to read that whole entry (it’s at http://www.livejournal.com/users/jakesquid/15231.html ). Then if they want to criticise me, I’m happy to listen. I’d love to learn how I could have handled that situation better.
As for all that you quote from my entries about Sharon… Do you think it might be important to note that that comes from a time of deep emotional pain while reflecting on a person who did the thing that I had told her would hurt me more than anything else? By all means, folks, if you want to read some of what I consider my best writing – writing that came from deep emotional pain and is all about me, me, me (my journal, my life and all) – I suggest reading http://www.livejournal.com/users/jakesquid/12739.html . That gives all the background you might want to know.
And, Hun? I think you forgot an important quote from the entry that you cherrypicked from:
9) I am so lucky to have found Rebecca. Now I know how a person treats you if they love you. Having had no experience before Sharon, I had no way of knowing that she was trying to destroy me, that she didn’t love me. Now I know the difference and I am so thankful.
Kind of gives a different perspective on how I was feeling on the day of that entry, don’t it? Perhaps it gives a fuller picture of my personal relationships with women.
Not to mention that the entries you quote from, especially the one about Sharon, are about personal relationships with an ex-wife (could be some bad feelings there, ya think?) and an ex-tennant and are not discussions of women as a class. Nor did I use it to hijack a thread on another person’s blog.
I am not ashamed nor am I embarrassed by any of the quotes you posted. I only wish that you had provided the links to the entries you quoted so that anyone who wants could read them in their entirety & in context. In fact, I encourage anybody who wishes to know about the most painful experience of my life and how I have dealt with it and what I’ve realized about myself to go ahead and read those entries. I’m more than happy to read any constructive criticism or suggestions that people have for me. But, I think, that belongs on my blog and not here.
“I am not ashamed nor am I embarrassed by any of the quotes you posted.”
I would have been greatly surprised if you were; after all, your blog is there for all to see if they click through your username.
Yeah, I apologize to all (& especially to Amp) for hijacking the thread.
Wow, that was just about the most deplorable and inexcusable personal attack on another poster I’ve ever seen at “Alas” (at least, that I’m remembering at this moment). Please don’t post on any of my threads again, Hun; you’re no longer welcome here.
Geeze, until I went back and re-read the entries that hun quoted from I had no idea how dishonest he was in his quoting. I hadn’t really thought of it as much of a personal attack or a bannable offense. But then I read the entries and I am stunned by the level of dishonesty.
There is a huge difference between what was actually written and what hun excerpted. This is a great example of dishonest quoting and something that anybody who wants to maintain credibility would do well to avoid. It is, of course, possible to dishonestly quote another person without intending to – I’ve done it – but I don’t think that this is an example of unintentional distortion.
Here is one of hun’s “quotes” of what I wrote:
– “I love people. The crazier and more stupid the better. […] Kathi says, “I’m only going to pay for 1/8.” I patiently explain that that is exactly what I just told her.”
The actual quote in it’s entirety (which is why context is important) was:
I love people. The crazier and more stupid the better. So, here’s how it went down.
Sunday was Kathi’s day to do the final walkthrough & be officially gone from the house. She shows up, we look at her room, it is clean. We go back downstairs and I tell her that everything is good except for all the unremovable white circles (from hot things or wet things or hot, wet things) on the kitchen table. I explain that we will want both her & Katy to pay for 1/2 of 25% of the cost of refinishing (there’s other crap there & the stains are on one quarter to one half of the table) unless one of them owns up to it. Kathi says, “I’m only going to pay for 1/8.” I patiently explain that that is exactly what I just told her.
So, yeah, I’m no longer thinking of asking Amp to unban hun.
Gotcha, ginmar. I guess there are nicer ways to say it but it doesn’t make it any less true, that a lot of men feel threatened when women don’t focus all their attention and energy on their needs, and when we don’t follow their rules of decorum, when to us, it’s not academic, it’s very personal.
And then hun goes off and provides a perfect example of what it’s all about, in his posts.
hun has served his purpose which obviously is to instruct through example, just how the Patriarchy works and how its most fervant supporters attack people including members of their own gender(which if they aren’t sided with their own, protecting the patriarchy, they are traitors of sort), who challenge their actions. I guess this is hun’s way of calling Jake a gender traitor?
I’m sorry he did that to you jake. That’s his bad. But he’s a bored patriarchal troll who is probably just steamed beyond belief that the attention is not all focused on his needs as a man. They show up everywhere that feminist women show up to try to deter conversation back to where it belongs: on issues pertaining to them. Women have no right to think of themselves, after all.
It goes back to how different it is, for the dominant societal group(in gender, men) to call members of its own group, traitors and treat them as such, usually by challenging their manhood, masculinity, whatever, when they don’t uphold the drive for that group to dominate and control everyone else’s lives.
Thanks for the kind words Radfem. I just found it very strange & had missed some things in his post. I don’t mind people posting quotes from my entries on my bad emotional experience. Hell, that’s why they’re accessible to the public. I figured that he was trying to make me look like a foaming misogynist by quoting what I had written about somebody who hurt me very, very badly out of context. I totally missed the questioning of my masculinity. So, I guess he was trying to make me out to be an emasculated misogynist – which is strange given my comments on this thread & his positions. I’m not really concerned about the public perception of my masculinity. But that’s why I’m glad there are so many perceptive people posting & commenting on this blog – they show me stuff I’d never see on my own.
When I think about folks like hun & Aegis & Niels I’m reminded of that wonderful quote from Family Guy:
It’s okay to lie to women, they aren’t real people like us.
I think that you can substitute any “other” group for “women” and find the underlying beliefs of almost any bigot.
Har har. I don’t understand what Niels’ perfectly fair request for an explanation has to do with him being a penis-toting white male. Why is a request for an explanation a sign of entitlement to you? Or is it only when the asker is a white male and the person making the assertion is a minority, because white males shouldn’t be allowed to question minority females at all and should just bow down to the “authority of experience”? If that’s not what you intend to imply, then feel free to clarify.
The burden of proof is on those who assert that Condi is a “race traitor.” Until they provide some kind of justification for that position, it’s perfectly fair for Niels to ask for an explanation (and to wonder if that label is simply a vicious slur). Now, nobody has to explain to Niels why Condi is a “race traitor.” If they want their argument for that position to be weak (or actually, nonexistent!), then that is their prerogative. Though if they choose to forgo the inconvenience of backing up their statements, then they (and you) have no business complaining that Niels or anyone else isn’t listening to them.
I’m not going to tell you that, Jake, because it’s not true, and it’s not what I said. When I said “All the examples you gave are only a small part of the experience of some males,” I meant that Radfem’s examples only tell us about the experience of some males (not that only some males are subject to the educational system). Reading Joyce and Hemingway might tell us something about their experience as men. But what does it tell us about the experience of other men, such as you, or me, or Amp? Not very much. As for science and history, reading about Descartes or George Washington tells about their experiences and accomplishments as a mathematician or as a general, but not about their experience as men. I will defer to Michael Kimmel’s thesis that American men have no history as men.
My main point is that even though Western culture may give people a larger exposure to male perspectives than female perspectives, those perspectives are stil only a small cross-section of how males experience being male (which is why I call B.S. on anyone who claims to know “the male experience” simply by living Western culture). Do you agree?
P.S. hun’s attack on you was not cool. If he disagreed with you, there were numerous better ways he could have expressed it. Shame on him.
I just saw this comment:
Wow, this makes me regret defending you above. What have I ever done to offend you? You lump me in with hun, you insinuate that I am a liar and a bigot totally out of the blue, yet you provide no reasons why I am either of those things. I would have hoped that someone who had just received a vicious personal attack would understand how it feels and think twice before turning around and biting someone else, yet apparently I was wrong. If hun has hurt your feelings, do not take it out on me. Please retract that comment.
Aegis,
I didn’t say, or even imply, that you are a liar. If I wasn’t clear enough on that, I apologize. What I am saying is that I get the impression from reading your comments that you don’t view women as being real people in the sense that you view yourself as a real person. I do think that you are a bigot in the sense that you don’t view women as equal to you. That is a strong impression that I have gotten from reading your comments over a long period of time.
As to your comment on my satirical comment… I was pointing out that Niels comes across as believing that he has a right to an answer. And that Niels comes across as lecturing minorities on how they ought to behave. And that Niels knows, objectively, the right way for groups he is not part of to act among themselves. These things come from being in a highly privileged group and, to those who are aware of privilege and its impact, Niels’ comments sound very much like my satirical comment.
I meant that Radfem’s examples only tell us about the experience of some males (not that only some males are subject to the educational system).
I still have no idea what you mean. How is the definition of “history” vs the definition of “black history” only the experience of some males? Sure, reading Joyce only tells us some of Joyce’s experience as a man, but I don’t see a relation between the experience one can learn reading Joyce’s works and the de-facto experience created by the definition of a word like “history” (in its practical use of being white, male history). I sometimes feel that you are being deliberately obtuse in order to avoid discussing an idea that makes you uncomfortable.
I ceased attempting to discuss things with you ages ago because you don’t seem to digest opposing arguments. You have usually just repeated the same tired, bigoted (yes, bigoted), and often cliched, point over and over, ignoring rebuttals no matter how many times and how kindly they were explained to you, you have repeatedly hijacked threads to talk about yourself, a whole new thread was created because you largely hijacked the prior one – that is what you have done to offend me. I suspect that the same will happen here, but I wanted to let you know what I meant by including you with hun & Niels in my comment.
crap, I obviously forgot to close my italics which should end at “(not that only some males are subject to the educational system).”
[Fixed! –Amp]
Jake, honey, trust me, everyone here other than a few random trolls know damn well that you’r neither a closet misogynist nor emasculated.
“I ceased attempting to discuss things with you ages ago because you don’t seem to digest opposing arguments. You have usually just repeated the same tired, bigoted (yes, bigoted), and often cliched, point over and over, ignoring rebuttals no matter how many times and how kindly they were explained to you, you have repeatedly hijacked threads to talk about yourself, a whole new thread was created because you largely hijacked the prior one – that is what you have done to offend me. I suspect that the same will happen here, but I wanted to let you know what I meant by including you with hun & Niels in my comment. ”
That’s pretty much my perspective too, Aegis. I’m not going to smack you down as hard as some others here might, but your argumentative style does leave the impression that you don’t listen, automatically disregard the opinions of women as less valid than your own, and generally feel entitled to hijack any discussion and transform it into one that focuses on the issues that are most important to you. That may not be what you’re actually intending to do, but it’s definately the impression you make upon others.
I think one can practically set one’s watch based on the expectation that every misogynist troll in the galaxy eventually starts bleating about who’s emasculated and who’s not.
We should start a band: The Emasculation Squad. I want to play bass. I will be quiet and stoic and stay in the back, like Tina Weymouth used to, only I will be dressed in my long black skirt and a fetching black lace tank top that I picked up at the used clothing store today. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Can you all come by a week from tomorrow and help me clean out the garage so we have a practice space ?
Except you, Jake. I mean, now that I know you’re pure evil and all. You can buy the pizzas, though. I’m feeling magnanimous.
I’ll sing lead. Can I wear the sexy jeans and the D&G corset?
And Jake – bring vodka, lots of vodka.
Pizza, check. Vodka, check. I can also make tasty little finger sandwiches – yummy, nutritious and easy to wolf down w/ little mess to worry about on your instruments. And sombreros & white russians – you can’t have too many kahlua drinks, it makes the whole band cool.
Jake,
I guess you’re right: you only implied that I thought lying to women was ok. Anyway, I accept your apology.
Well, ok. Maybe my comments are bigoted. I don’t think so, but who knows. Or maybe they aren’t, and you just didn’t understand my arguments. Maybe you operate under the assumption that anyone who contradicts feminists must be doing so out of bigotry, and you are just seeing what you want to see in my posting. I don’t know which of those possibilities are true. I will grant that some of the arguments I have made on this blog I have failed to support, and may even be wrong (I’m not perfect!). Yet being wrong is not the same thing as being bigoted. For instance, “females have more sexual power” is an empirical claim that may be right or wrong, but it is not inherently a bigoted statement.
Accusations are cheap, Jake. I see a lot of them on this website. What I don’t see is people actually backing up their accusations. Yet I would think that if I was really as bigoted as you say, then backing up that accusation would be easy, no? Ultimately, I really don’t know what to make of your accusation, because you don’t reference any examples of statements or arguments of mine that you consider bigoted. Until you can do so, I am going to lean towards the interpretation your allegations are B.S. and you just aren’t understanding what I’m saying.
I went and looked through Niels posts for an example of this “lecturing.” Here is the closest thing I found:
Niels is incorrect that he is “owed” an explanation, because this is not actually a public intellectual debate in the sense that he means (where people do owe explanations to each other). Discussion here doesn’t follow any such rules, because so many people here don’t follow concepts such as reason and intellectual honesty (IMHO, they feel oppressed by those concepts because they misunderstand them). Ampersand doesn’t enforce them, so this is essentially a place where people get mad and yell at each other ;) It seems to me that the best solution with Niels would have been to point out that this is not the kind of debate forum he believes, instead of reading entitlement and racism into his mistaken appraisal of the way this place works.
I think the problem is more likely that I often have trouble putting ideas into words. Since what I wrote was evidently confusing, I am going to restate in hopefully simpler terms:
Learning about the culture and history of a group, even a dominant group, is not enough to really understand the subjective experience of members of that group. Even if Western history is effectively white male history, that history is really only a small slice of the male experience (even of the white male experience). Why is this relevant? Because Radfem claimed earlier that by existing in Western culture, she could understand “the male experience.” Does this make more sense now?
Jake and BritGirl,
All I can say is that if you two don’t enjoy discussions with me, then you don’t have to engage in them. In the case of BritGirl, I do appreciate the amount of charity you show most of the time (if Jake gives me any such charity, I’m not seeing it).
You both say that I don’t digest opposing arguments, and that I don’t listen. Funny, I find discussions with both of you frustrating also, for similar reasons. I’m actually not surprised that we harbor these perceptions, because they seem inevitable in a discussion where both sides have radically different premises. I am willing to work around this problem, though perhaps you two don’t realize this, because you don’t see all the flames that I delete before posting them.
As for my legendary “thread hijacking,” I think that accusation is silly and childish. Hah, I wish I had as much power as you say I do. I am just a little 19 year-old with a computer. You both deny the agency (and responsibility) of those posters who choose, of their own free will to respond to me. If I post something, and 5 or 6 people go berserk and flame me, aren’t they at least as responsible for any resulting thread diversion as I am? If I raise an issue, and people can’t let it go, that’s honestly not my problem (hell, maybe some of them might even find it worth discussing?). If they really didn’t want the thread to be “hijacked,” they could simply stop responding to me. Or can they not control themselves and just have to respond because of my Patriarchal Penis Power?
Aegis, what am I going to do with you?
Let me see if I can explain what is meant by thread hijacking by means of an analogy. Suppose there was a thread about lynching in the Jim Crow South. Now imagine that reading and commenting on this thread are a group of African American people, some of whom are old enough to remember the Jim Crow era and others who actually had family members who were lynched. Imagine that I am a white woman who is attracted to and wants to date black men, and who feels that the racism that still persists makes it difficult for me to do so. Imagine that I jump into the discussion with this complaint. To me my complaint might be perfectly valid, and to me it may be a very important issue which has a significant negative effect on my personal life. How do you think my raising of this issue in the context of lynching will appear to the other participants in the thread? My guess is that I would be percieved as hijacking the thread in order to complain about my pet issue. Now, to me my issue might be very important and relevant, but in comparison to the issue that was actually being discussed my hypothetical personal issue is actually quite trivial. It may inconvenience me, it may make me unhappy, but it pales into insignificance in comparison to the very serious crime that is under discussion.
My guess is that if I behaved in that way I would come in for exactly the kind of anger and resentment that was directed at you in the other threads. And the thing is, the people getting angry with me would be quite within their rights to be angry. My attempt to introduce my relatively trivial personal issue into a discussion about a much more serious topic would be percieved as shockingly insensitive and rather self-centered. And, in fact, from an objective point of view the people making that judgement would be entirely correct.
Do you see what I’m getting at? You jumped into a discussion about rape, which is one of the most serious crimes there is, with a bunch of complaints about the way in which the current social setup disadvantages young men. You also did it on a feminist website on which several of the commenters have actually been raped, and most of the rest of us have friends who have been raped. Do you see the problem here? You may be correct that things are not so rosy on the dating front for young guys, but frankly compared to the issue of rape the problems experienced by young men in getting a date are just not that important, and your attempts to bring your personal issue into the discussion comes across as stunningly self-centered and insensitive. That’s why people are getting so angry with you.
On another issue, I think that you’re making a significant logical error in terms of how you approach many of the topics discussed here. I’ve heard you say several times that you feel that your ideas aren’t coming across clearly and that you have problems expressing what you want to say. The thing is, I think that you’re actually expressing yourself pretty clearly. It’s not necessarily that the other commenters here don’t understand what you’re trying to say, it may be that they just don’t agree with you. For example, I’m pretty sure that I get the points you’re trying to make, I just don’t agree with the conclusions you come to. You’ve re-stated the same points many times in different ways, and at this point I’m pretty sure that most people understand the ideas you’re trying to communicate. They just think that you’re wrong.
There’s a question that keeps coming into my mind every time I run across you. What is it that you’re trying to get out of your participation in these forums? I see you post on a number of different blogs on which you seem to fundamentally disagree with the basic premises held by the majority of the participants. Why hang out in forums in which you don’t agree with the basic philosophy being espoused? Do you actually imagine that you’re going to be able to convince everyone here to abandon feminism, or liberalism? Because I don’t think that’s very likely to happen. I’m not trying to pick a fight, I’m genuinely curious. I wouldn’t waste my time commenting on an MRA board because most of their basic philosophical beliefs are anathema to me. If you don’t agree with the basic premises of a particular group, what’s the point of banging your head against a brick wall trying to get them to change their minds?
Good morning,
JakeSquid wrote the following:
Does Kimmel qualify his statement, (i.e.) white american men? James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison are two writers whose work delves deeply into their experiences of living as black men in america.
I’m surprised if Kimmel doesn’t.
Thanks!
And for whatever it is worth, hun behaved very badly towards you.
Jay
Sorry about the blockquotes!
[Fixed! -Amp]
Jay,
I didn’t write that. I believe that was Aegis.
Whoops, you are correct.
Aegis, I will redirect my question to you.
Does Kimmel qualify his statement in any way as in white american men have no history as men? (See previous question directed towards Jake Squid.)
Thanks!
Does Kimmel qualify his statement, (i.e.) white american men? James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison are two writers whose work delves deeply into their experiences of living as black men in america.
From the introduction of Manhood in America (pp 2-3):
“So how can I claim that men have no history? Isn’t virtually every history book a history of men? After all, as we have learned from feminist scholars, it’s been women who have had, until recently, no history. In fact, if that book doesn’t have the word women in the title, it’s a good bet that the book is largely about men. Yet such works do not explore how the experience of being a man, of manhood, structured the lives of the men who are their subjects, the organizations and institutions they created and staffed, the events in which they participated. American men have no history of themselves as men.
…
But first we must make gender visible to men. We continue to treat our male military, political, scientific, or literary figures as if their gender, their masculinity, had nothing to do with their military exploits, policy decisions, scientific experiments, or writing styles and subjects. As the Chinese proverb has it, the fish are the last to discover the ocean.”
Is this the kind of context you are looking for? It seems to me that Kimmel is mainly talking about history, while you seem to be thinking of literature. I would agree with you that men do have a literature as men. I think Kimmel’s point is that males don’t have a history of their masculinity and their experience of it the same way that feminism offers females a history of femininity.
P.S. BritGirlSF, thanks for the thoughtful comments. I will respond to them soon…
Amp, he makes himself the subject of his posts. It’s kind of unavoidable. When we’re talking about rape and he talks about HIS love life and his perceptions, we don’t get a lot of room to manuever around that big elephant in the room.
But first we must make gender visible to men. We continue to treat our male military, political, scientific, or literary figures as if their gender, their masculinity, had nothing to do with their military exploits, policy decisions, scientific experiments, or writing styles and subjects. As the Chinese proverb has it, the fish are the last to discover the ocean.
Jesus, what bull. Privelege, first and foremost, is about transforming itslef into normality. If you’re priveleged, you’re the last to know it.
And, Aegis, you’ve been told this over and over again. You’ve wasted amazing amounts of time having this told to you. After all that time, your feet must certainly be wet, yet you’re still denying it.
Hi Aegis,
Thanks for providing the direct quote from Kimmel.
I have a thought/question that’s been rambling around my brain since a few days ago. I want to bring it here to you great folks, many of whom know theory much better than I.
So here goes:
In my anti-racist work, one of my fundamental premises is that individual acts of niceness on the part of individual white people don’t change a racist system. (I think this is the influence of Chomsky?)
Yet one of the challenges I have found is: why bother being anti-racist if the system doesn’t change? I _know_ why I am but how do others respond to this question from other white people?
Is there a so-called “tipping” point where enough anti-racists actions/orientations etc will change things?
I think so.
Yet in saying that I find myself back at the initial premise I denied: individual acts/worldviews do matter not merely individually / but collectivelly (sp?).
Paradox? Conundrum?
Thanks for any feedback / experiences/ thoughts.
Jay
These guys are a sample of the thing behind the name.
If they’re really white, anyway.
Race Traitor | Journal of the New Abolitionism
A reason to continue with anti-racist thinking — it keeps your pencil sharp…that is unless they completely take the paper away and then it would only be useful as a fairly ineffective self defense weapon or perhaps something to chew on in habit that in retrospect wasn’t really very good.
Consider…
Clarence Thomas in Hamdi vs Rumsfeld
Question left open:
If I wipe my ass on the bill of rights in order to demonstrate via circumspection that toilet paper is not a constitutional guarantee for a man about to take it up the ass from the Man and indefinately and with no protections, rights, or remedies, what is in fact my first principle of jurisprudence?
Answer:
No one has a clue — indeed, I shit on the whole bill of rights when I write a dissent like the one I wrote in Hamdi vs Rumsfeld. The best part…the turd will live on long after I’m gone for future turd lovers and those who keep trying to compare my turd fetish with jurisprudence and the work of my peers and predecessors.
Thomas is a Jack ass.
More on Thomas…
http://www.acsblog.org/-359-clarence-thomas-america.html
This justice’s opinions are like plutonium in reverse.
To get to the point where you can take Thomas to task on that point, you have to temporarily suspend the entire race discussion. So…
…Read what Thomas’s course of action is as indicated by his opinions in the page above (get a second opinion if you’re diligent).
And then ask, what does race have to do with Thomas as a judge?
Nothing?
As further a test, simply ask:
1.) Are Thomas’s opinions acts of kindness?
2.) Is Thomas doing anything to address racial inequity?
3.) Is Thomas looking out for my opportunities
4.) Is Thomas looking out for my RIGHTS
People of different age groups might answer 3 differently. No one can answer 4 in the affirmative.
So then, race and Thomas go together like what?
The answer to that final question is your actual position on race.
Age or financial — I told you it was a test.
Last thought: did I need Thomas’s limits on my rights to achieve my current status, whatever that may be.
If so, how in fact did Thomas’s limits help me?
If not, who is Thomas and can he be called for example “just another brother on the bench” without impugning who?
The answer to that question depending on what it is may in fact be a case of putting the curry before the chicken — beware, curry with chicken can be zesty but not philantropic.
It is this last that the removal of the paper does most harm to.
which is to say…
It is not necessary to destroy my rights (the basics, especially the bill of rights) in order to enforce a social structure that was already suffering before my rights were further eroded.
Why is that no whites are the only race that dont understand how they are screwing black over in America while other minority races can? There are rich minorities that still understand the blacks people struggle. So that’s not a excuse.
Um, Ted Rall (a white guy) basically called Rice a race traitor. I have seen many white liberals who use that term to describe right-wing minorities. Janeane Garofalo does it often, Keith Olbermann agrees. Kathy Griffin’s done it.
Timmy, do you have any links to support your claims?