Time for a follow-up. When is criticism like “wilding?” Never. Never. NEVER.
Unless, of course, you’re a racist trying to defend friends from people of color.
It is possible to describe criticism coming from people of color in a way that doesn’t equate words with violence. The criticism is fervent; it’s angry; it’s passionate; it’s vehement. If one disgarees with it, one could call it overblown, exaggerated, vicious, cruel, unreasonable, stupid, ridiculous, douchebaggy, mean-spirited, made in bad faith, irrational.
Who is the primary target of historical and present racialized violence? People of color. Black men lynched; black women raped; Chinese men slaughtered; Native American’s scalps collected and turned into the government for cash; Native American women systemically sterilized against their wills until 1975 so that 1/3 of child-bearing aged Native American women had undergone a (usually involuntary) hysterectomy; Chinese women imported for prostitution; Japanese people caged ni internment camps; Indigenous peoples all over the globe shoved aside to make room for colonial conquest; and so, so much more.
Amanda and Seal Press are being critized. Their lives are not in danger. Their physical integrity is not in danger. They are not being dragged through the town square. They are not being “handed a rope.” They are not being lynched, wilded, or raped.
This language suggests actual physical threats that are historically and presently used against people of color in general, and particularly people of color who stand up against racism. It uses that language to suggest that citicism from people of color is equivalent to these actions. Black men are slaughtered by policemen who fire into a car full of unarmed men and white women are criticized with harsh, unflinching language.
These are not equivalent.
And even if you think it’s clear as crystal that Amanda and Seal Press are being unfairly and hyperbolically impugned, it should be really easy to see why.
See also my original post about hyperbolic language being used to describe criticism coming from people with less privilege than one has.
(Feminist, anti-racist commenters only.)
I think I just need a break from the internets for a while. They’ve seriously become toxic to my health.
I’m going to ask a stupid question. I don’t foray into pop culture very much, so there is frequently slang/colloquialisms/sayings/etc that I just don’t understand. “Wilding” is a word I’ve never heard before. I mean, I kind of get the gist of it, but its so odd to me that I decided to look it up. Dictionary.com says, basically, when used as a noun, it refers to wild fruit, or possibly, an ‘escaped’ plant. When used as an adjective, it is something uncultivated, or wild. Wikipedia is no more help, the closest thing being ‘invasive species’ (again, referring to plants). I mean, taking into account what this person is saying, the use of this word is certainly offensive, but from what I perceive, isn’t what they are trying to say.
So, in this context, what does ‘wilding’ mean? I am correct in that it doesn’t actually make sense/is a misuse of the word, or does it have some other meaning that I am ignorant of?
Mandolin: It goes around, particularly in the feminist blogosphere, unfortunately. All kinds of things are referred to by certain people in hyperbolic language; anecdotally speaking, I’ve seen prostitution called an act of violence per se, seen the actions of doctors with a poor bedside manner described as medical rape, and so on. It gets to a point where people confuse rhetorical hyperbole with the reality, and then we end up seeing posts like this and it all starts to get very, very stupid.
Laura: It may possibly be this; I have to admit to having to work it out from context, too.
O. That makes more sense. Thanks. I just bookmarked urban dictionary.
I’ve only heard it in a racial sense in connection with when Black men commit crimes or allegedly commit crimes, i.e. Central Park rape (which was committed by a lone man whereas a group of young Black men served prison time for it).
It’s like that off the web as well. If Black people and other people of color congregate for a rally against police brutality, there’s always a lot of police officers including those in riot gear. When they were giving out vouchers for affordable housing in Boca Raton, Florida and more people showed up than could be given vouchers, even though the crowd was peaceful, out came the riot police to force them to leave.
And it’s not the first time that criticisms against Whites has been seen as being more important than violence against men and women of color.
Sorry for confusion but who used the term “wilding”? It’s a gross comment to be sure, but I’m not sure where it comes from.
laura: read the second paragraph from this post by Rachel S. For me, that was the first time I heard of the term “wilding”. It seems to be more of ’60s-’80s term, but maybe it’s still used in some parts of the country that I’m not familiar with.
It’s in the Seal Press apology thread, from some douchebag who thinks he’s helping Seal Press by defending them in such a fashion. I tried to link to it.
Mike, thanks for that definition – I’m not American, and I hadn’t heard the term “wilding” before, but I can see the racist relevance of it now!
I’ve been following the whole debate, watching and grieving as two communities I care about tear each other apart. Imagine, then, the bitter irony that hit me as I followed the link to Mandolin’s 2007 post about hyperbolic language.
If there is still one minoritized group of people whose experience is all too frequently appropriated, metaphorized, and thereby erased it is that of disabled people: the title of the post is “Since when is being criticized like having your limbs blown off by a landmine?”
This thread and its comments are not the place for a discussion of who is more minoritized, vulnerable, excluded… than whom (a pointless rhetorical endeavour). Nor is it my intent to discuss the place of disabled people, the disappointing intersections between feminism, race/ethnic studies, and disability. I just want to observe that the strategies of exclusion so well documented throughout this particular instantiation of the debate — ironize, metaphorize, appropriate, etc. etc. — are not peculiar to this particular conflict; they are the strategies adopted by any group when it seeks its own legitimacy. When crap happens, it is important to hold individuals responsible, but it also important to look for the systems, the conventions, the habits that make such crap possible. And as we seek justice, recognition, authority, and legitimacy for own selves, I think it is critical that we look behind us and ask at whose cost are we succeeding.
WCD
Thank you, Mandolin, for your statement.
As I’m sure you are already aware, I had a recent personal brush with that on Feministe.
But like for any actor, in order to invoke Missy Anne’s White Lady Vapors, one must have something to which one feels one can react.
Justice for All? No, “Safe Space” just for Some.
So that is all I will say here.
“It’s in the Seal Press apology thread, from some douchebag who thinks he’s helping Seal Press by defending them in such a fashion. I tried to link to it.”
It’s really annoying to see Amanda and Seal Press trying to handle this in an appropriate manner (it would’ve been more appropriate if SP hadnt’ve done it, needless to say) and have some random douches coming up behind them and trying to put brakes on their apologies (don’t fall for the hype, putting African savages in the book was just fine, and this is getting blown out of proportion by oversensitive bleeding hearts)… this is happening on Pandagon, as well. It’s a weird phenomenon that I’ve seen before. There’s a job blog that I read and the writer admitted to making a racist assumption about a customer in a post, and the comments were full of people playing Monday morning quarterback, telling him that his assumption wasn’t racist, as if they knew better than him, and putting the blame on the customer for not reacting more civilly to the guy’s assumption. To me, this phenomenon is even stranger than second-guessing POCs when they talk about racism — second guessing people when they cop to racist actions?
Some of the criticism coming at Amanda and Seal is richly deserved; some is hopelessly over-the-top. But none of it is “wilding”. Learning to face righteous anger is part of the job of those progressives, particularly privileged progressives, who want to make a difference — and who, invariably, will fuck up while doing so. That’s how we learn.
I learned a long time ago that the only time MRAs would say nice things about me was when I was publicly called out by a feminist ally. It took a long time to learn not to be suckered in by that tactic.
Since Urban Dictionary’s content is user-generated, it’s not necessarily the most reliable source of information in the world. Luckily, my work computer has the Babylon dictionary installed, which gives the following definition (without which I, too, would be at a loss to understand the word’s context):
wilding
n. act of committing violent and aggressive crimes against innocent bystanders (such as rape, physical assault, etc.)
Using Google define:wilding also returns some interesting results.
(I am not commenting on the Seal Press debacle because I am beyond frustration and feel that nothing I could say would be restrained and logical enough to contribute to the conversation. Have some dictionaries, instead.)
Lea:
Well, it was just an attempt to get some meaning which seemed to fit context. I know that UD can be unreliable, to say the least.
I think, Lea, that the definition you posted misses the intensely racist connotations of “wilding.” It was a word that surfaced during the Central Park jogger case, when a group of young black men were accused and convicted (falsely, as it turned out) of the vicious rape and beating of an upper-class white woman. The media and police alleged that the young men were “wilding,” an activity that was supposedly popular among young black men in New York City and that consisted of committing acts of violence purely for enjoyment. “Wilding” was depicted as the young men’s own term for this behavior, but it’s not at all clear that the term ever had any currency among the men who supposedly participated in “wilding.” The press and the police relied on the concept of “wilding” to make a case that young black men were scary, out-of-control savages and rapists. The young men who allegedly committed the crime were consistently described as animals: beasts, wolf-packs, etc.
Years later it came out that the rape had been committed, not by a pack of young “wilding” black men, but by a solo serial rapist.
“Wilding” is a racist term, and it’s intimately connected with the idea of black people as savages, which is, after all, what the entire controversy about the pictures in Amanda’s book is all about. It’s a pretty telling term to use about POC whose anger one finds scary.
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I can’t believe that so many people are still misusing / misunderstanding the term “Wilding”. The term emanated from the 1989 rape case of a jogger in Central Park NYC in which 4 young black men were wrongly convicted and years later acquitted. But the word “wilding” is actually the result of a misquote of one of the accused black youths by NYC police officers during the investigation / interrogation. The word was wrongly reported by the NYC police and was all over the next day’s news papers. The actual quote was “wild thing”, as in “doing the wild thing” which was a common urban term at the time.