I’ve been meaning to post about this for ages. Generally — with a very few exceptions — I don’t favor the “replace ______ with the word black” school of criticism.1
This is any argument that takes the general form “Suppose this offensive thing were being said about Blacks, instead of about [speaker’s own group]? We’d all agree it was offensive!” Sometimes instead of “Blacks,” it’s “Jews” or “Latinos” or “women” or something else — but most commonly, Black people are the example. Sometimes it’s done with literal word substitution.
I was reminded of this by Hilzoy’s post, but no single example is to blame; it’s the pattern that’s the problem. The use of these comparisons over and over, by thousands of people, creates a pattern in which racism is constantly used as the ruler against with other oppressions are measured — and at the same time, there’s often an undercurrent of “racism isn’t so bad now, if only we could get treated as well as people of color get treated.”
There are a lot of problems with the “replace ______ with the word black” school of criticism.
First, it creates a burden on people of color, to constantly have their oppression used as the measuring stick.
Second, it implies, falsely, that racism is a problem that’s been solved.
Third, it implies that racism — and in particular, historic US racism against Blacks — is the platonic ideal of bigotry, against which other bigotries are measured. Other forms of bigotry are in turn only objectionable to the degree that they resemble bigotry against Blacks. This is then turned against other groups.
Fourth, it tends to make overlapping identities invisible. Some disabled people are black; some blacks are female; some women are queer; some queers are trans; etc, etc..
Comparing and contrasting different kinds of marginalization and oppression can sometimes be a useful exercise — but only when the comparison is being used to pull out really useful or new observations, rather than to bolster recognition of oppression A at the expense of recognition of oppression B. The “replace _____ with the word black” approach is easy to use thoughtlessly, and it’s less helpful than we assume. We should avoid it.
- This doesn’t mean I’ve never used it. But I’m trying not to. [↩]
I generally agree with what you’ve said here.
But I do think there’s a difference between substituting the name of a stigmatized group you belong to, and substituting the name of a stigmatized group you don’t belong to. For example, I’m Jewish, and if I was being jeered at for being fat I wouldn’t hesitate to say, “You wouldn’t call me a kike, but you call me a fat pig? We both know they mean pretty much the same thing, which is ‘you don’t look WASPy enough for me.'”
Or if I was speaking with another Jewish person and wanted to illustrate why saying Obama looks like a chimp is different from saying Bush looks like a chimp, I might say, “Don’t you think saying Britney Spears looks like she has horns is a different deal from saying Amy Winehouse does?” (Or, if the person I was speaking with wasn’t Jewish, I might say, “I’m Jewish, and I know I have a different reaction to hearing someone say Britney Spears…” etc.)
I also don’t think it should be necessarily off-limits to explore why someone might think openly slurring or insulting one group of people is out of line and doing so with others is not, or to explore the assumption that feeling the need to disguise one’s prejudices with code words is the same thing as actually being less prejudiced. If you know someone, I don’t think saying “you [specifically the person you’re speaking to] don’t ever say word x, why would you think saying word y was okay?” is automatically out of line. But of course, different people have vastly different “word x’s” and “word y’s,” not to mention bunches of code words for each.
Perhaps I’m wrong in this, but I always understood that statement as purporting that all oppression and intolerance is equal in that it is all negative. Our society is simply more trained to reject – or at least be aware of – bigotry against blacks than other groups. I’m not saying racism against blacks isn’t a problem anymore, far from it, but the context in which that statement would be used implies that the audience is not tolerant of such treatment to begin with.
What this kind of comparison also does is to falsely equate (and thus obscure) the different natures of the characteristics that people are discriminating against – inherent/genetic characteristics vs. those based on choice.
All of your points are valid and important. On the other hand, I think there is value in rephrasing something so as to illustrate prejudice.
I often do this with removing “Pagan” or “Wiccan” and replacing it with “Jewish” (and to Meowser’s point, I am all three: Pagan, Wiccan, and Jewish). I do this not to imply that antisemitism is over (ha!) but to illustrate why prejudice against Paganism is wrong.
Analogy is helpful because it shows people their blind spots. I once blogged the “personhood doesn’t give you the right to my kidney to preserve your life, why should it give someone the right to my uterus” analogy in a post on Blog for Choice day. I got a comment from someone who said they’d never thought of that and it moved them to shift their position. That’s remarkable, and that is the power of analogy.
I would like to find a way to considerately, consciously, and without burdening any marginalized group, use analogy as an eye-opener. To say, ‘Look, if we replace word X with word Y, do you now see the problem?’ without implying that prejudice has been eradicated in the case of word X, or indeed, without committing the other offenses you list.
I want to be more conscious about my use of analogy, but not give it up because it is a powerful linguistic tool.
I think the difference in what Meowser and Deborah are talking about and what Amp is talking about is that Meowser and Deborah are using analogies to a group that they are part of. They’re in a good position to decide how whatever they are comparing fits with their own lived experience as Jewish people.
But usually the “replace ______ with black” is done by people who aren’t black. If you’re not black (and I’m not), it’s pretty presumptuous to say that people would never say x or y about blacks. I don’t think most white people really have a good sense of what it’s like to be black in this country on a day to day basis.
To Mia’s point, I think it often is meant exactly as you describe, but that is part of what makes it presumptuous. While I think it’s a good thing that the n-word can’t be used in polite company anymore, that’s hardly the be all and end all of racial discrimination or prejudice. I don’t think not using the n-word really reflects awareness of “bigotry” as an underlying problem or widespread phenomenon. I think it reflects awareness of “if I say this word, I’ll get in trouble.”
I’d add that the “replace __ with the word black,” and then saying, “You’d never do that if the person were black!” quite often is empirically false — people WOULD do that if the person were black — but it’s because the action has a different meaning in different contexts.
For example, many white feminists were very angry about the photos that surfaced of Obama’s speechwriter with his hand over the breast of a cardboard cutout of Hillary Clinton, and they said, “You’d never see a cardboard cutout of Obama being molested, because people do that to women but not to black men.” Except that I’ve seen people making sexual/romantic gestures on Obama cutouts anytime I’ve seen such a cutout available. The Root posted a specific gallery of photos from their inaugural ball where people were posing with the Obama cutout, and most of those photos include someone kissing/ groping the cutout. (I’d bet there were people making even more explicit gestures with the cutout that they used their own cameras to photograph or that the Root opted not to post online.)
But of course when people at The Root ball did this, it was to show their adoration of Obama; it had a different meaning than when Jon Favreau did it to a cutout of Clinton. So simply saying “You wouldn’t do that…” is both factually erroneous and obscuring of the real reasons to be distressed by what the white feminists wanted us to be distressed by.
I agree with the above commenters saying that “replace ____ with X” is different if X is a group to which the speaker belongs. But, of course, as chinonga notes, “replace ____ with black” is almost always used by people who aren’t black.
What this kind of comparison also does is to falsely equate (and thus obscure) the different natures of the characteristics that people are discriminating against – inherent/genetic characteristics vs. those based on choice.
But RonF, almost every characteristic that’s been used as an example throughout the post and thread is a characteristic that’s not voluntary. I’m sort of baffled as to why you think this is the key thing that this rhetorical device does. What are you talking about? The classic example is substituting “female” for “black” — both genetic characteristics. The only exception here is religious discrimination.* Are you trying to say that the purpose of this rhetorical device is to confuse discrimination based on characteristics people can’t control (race, sex, ability, sexual orientation, nationality, etc.) with discrimination based on characteristics people, at least to some degree, choose (religion and… creed?)?
* Just to be clear, since it’s been used as an example in the thread, I don’t consider antisemitism religious discrimination.
Well, I admit to having used this in the past and having it backfire on me. I would usually be talking in comparison to the disabled community, or women, or LGBT community. And what happens is people defend themselves by saying “but, but, but…disabled/gay/women really ARE different. Blacks just have a different color of skin!”
Which does two things. First, it dives into that whole colorblind issue. Yes, blacks are the same as other racial groups except for that whole skin pigmentation thing…but it kind of ignored the entire cultural history and experience of oppression that blacks must carry.
Second, it basically reinforces the idea that if you are the same as me, you deserve to get treated like a human. (A black person is the same as me, just a different color.) And if you are “different” than me (women and their biological differences and evo psych line of thinking, gays have different issues around family structure, and disabled people have different ways of having to get things done…all three that are seen by many as deficits to the norm), you don’t deserve to be treated as fully human.
Also, I think this goes to what RonF is saying above about choice. (I’m not sure which side of the issue he’s arguing for there.) It implies that if you have a difference from the norm (read: deficit) that isn’t your “fault” you deserve better treatment than if your difference is your “choice” (such as what some believe about gays, or religious beliefs, or being fat, etc.)
I think the replacing ____ with the word “black” only goes to separate people into categories of those who “deserve” equal treatment because they are like us except for one inconsequential and out-of-their-control detail such as color, vs. everyone deserves to be treated as human because everyone is human.
I think it’s really important, if you’re using any such analogy, to avoid taking that extra step of “people would never say,” and indeed, not to phrase your analogy in such a way as to imply people would never say.
In using an analogy, I’m trying to show that it IS bigotry, not trying to show that this other kind of bigotry doesn’t exist anymore!
Why is that?
Seriously. Antisemitism is more than religious discrimination, but beyond doubt sometimes it is exactly religious discrimination.
The technique of making those analogies gets used by lots of people, and the analogies vary hugely. I agree that “replace with black” is probably the most common analogy which gets used, but it is by far from the only one.
So I am a bit confused about what you’re suggesting: Bar analogies like this completely? Bar them unless the speaker is a member of the analogized group? Or allow comparatively unfettered use of this particular analogy, but apply a special rule to comparisons to blacks?
Deborah,
Seriously. Antisemitism is more than religious discrimination, but beyond doubt sometimes it is exactly religious discrimination.
You’re totally right — I should have been more clear. I didn’t mean that it’s never religious discrimination, just that it’s more than that, and that reducing it to the religious aspect is leaving out much of the picture.
But to the extent that anti-Semitism is religious discrimination — and particularly, part of a general discrimination against all religious belief* — I think it’s slightly less noxious than racial discrimination. People can choose their beliefs, and indeed I’ve always been puzzled as to why religious discrimination is prohibited but political discrimination isn’t, except to the extent that we actually consider religion to be a part of our identity that isn’t under our control.
* If someone is picking on Judaism only but being respectful of all other beliefs, I’m going to be skeptical that this is genuine religious discrimination rather than a thin cover for antagonism toward Jews regardless of the content of their religion. In contrast, people like Bill Maher or the other atheistic fundamentalists generally are equal-opportunity offenders.
I’m not Jewish and certainly not an expert about this, but Judaism is unique in that it is both a religion and an ethnicity. Someone can be named Goldberg and have a “Jewish look” about them and be discriminated against, even if they have converted to a different religion.
Also, I think there is a difference between people bashing other people’s religious views (not that this is a good thing, usually) and bashing the person themselves. I think in the case of Judaism, the people themselves are attacked as an ethnic group more than that people are just saying to them, “Your choice to practice the Jewish religious sucks.”
Correct me if I’m wrong, natch.
PG and Lexie, agreed.
Well, the point is not to say that it’s wrong, but simply to say that the speaker wouldn’t say that about a black person (or people). It’s not a suggestion that black folks do not face any forms of persecution, simply that an indictment that the speaker is being insensitive in a way that they would not be in other cases.
We should be sensitive to all races, ethnicities, religions, etc. Great strides have made insensitivity to certain groups a cultural taboo, but not others. There’s nothing wrong with pointing that out.
I think I agree with all your criticisms of this trope, while utterly disagreeing with your conclusion (that we shouldn’t use this phrasing), because it’s always been really, really convincing when directed at me, pointing out my own biases. I have to imagine I’m not alone in this.
You point out the drawbacks of this phrasing, and I agree that they are all real drawbacks, but they are not sufficient to overwhelm the advantages of the construction, which is that it’s powerful and simple (and more powerful for its simplicity).
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If I may add to to your list, Ampersand…
Fifth: the criterion being used is always selective and non-representative. I remember an outcry in the APA activist community when some comedian used the word “chink” in a condescending manner (I believe the phrasing was, “I love chinks”). Most understandable. But then came the obligatory question, “would he have made the same joke with the word ‘nigger'”? To which, obviously, the answer is no. Just as there are other ways in which it is easier to be prejudiced against Black Americans than it is against us.
It is true that it’s far easier in our culture to get away with saying “chink” than saying “nigger”. It is also true that many realtors and neighbourhood association bigwigs deny many Black families the right to live in their privileged community, while being far more lenient to Asian families.
It is true that it’s easier to vote away certain gay political rights than it is Black rights. It is also true that there are far fewer top paid analysts of a major political party who pore over the map specifically to redistrict in a manner to maximally nullify the gay vote.
It is true that black men got the vote before white women. It is also true that white women held office before black men, and continue to do so in greater numbers today.
Which of these are more symbolically significant? Which are more tangibly significant? How pointless would the ensuing online debates on these two questions be, and how much closer would we be to a cure for cancer if that energy were directed elsewhere?
Sylphhead: Great post.
I think that, rather than make one of these criticisms, it’s better to explain why it’s wrong. Relying on saying, “Don’t do this, because it’s like this thing you’ve been conditioned never to do” isn’t going to convince anyone overall, but it might convince some people if you explain why both what they’re doing, and the similar thing they’ve been conditioned to never do are wrong. I don’t think your average person, much less one that’s inclined to make racist/homophobic/sexist/other ist statements are much inclined to ponder why they don’t preform certain anti-black actions, except that they know that it’s unacceptable in our society.
You occasionally see the construction with X=white, which is slightly different from other examples. It’s harder, at first blush, to explain what’s wrong with it (I think, that it ignores a history of oppression and supremicism).
I tend to compare discrimination against any phenotypy with discrimination based on the ability to taste cilantro.
It’s funny that in Russian, for example, it is pefectly OK to use word “Negro”, although it sounds very close to N-word (`NYE-gur). It does not have any perjorative connotation whatsoever. The word “black” applied to the person, on the contrary, is a slur (although not directly related to the people of African origin). Trying to fit both worlds Russian media uses either “black-skinned” or “Afroamerican/Afrogerman/Afrowhatever”.
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