Rolling 2014 Thread on Race

I don’t need language.

O RLY

that's so raven

whew thought i'd need to read gawker comments to hear that joke - spared

I'm not interested in forcing any labels on her besides perhaps "narcissist"

have we discussed this anywhere yet? http://s2smagazine.com/2014/10/06/raven-symone-im-not-african-american/

― Mordy, Monday, October 6, 2014 2:53 PM (54 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

fwiw as a millennial i grew up believing that we were all aspiring to some post-racial color-blind utopia and to a large extent that's how i understand raven's statement. obv there's a backlash against this kind of race 'naivety' going on atm - like in that slate article dayo posted last week. i know there are more dramatic narratives of self-disavowal + shame that could be read here too.

― Mordy, Monday, October 6, 2014 3:04 PM (42 minutes ago) Bookmark

I guess my reactions to this are twofold: (1) I'm not gonna question how she self-identifies and (2) If she is able to structure her community, society, and whole world that she interacts with in a way where race is never a factor for her, then she has my blessing and best of luck to her

you guys: http://www.whitenessproject.org

That is very interesting! Good design. Watched about a half dozen of those; I've heard variants on those conversations pretty much all my life so it's hard to tell whether or not these seem exceptional? the white=normal thing and the "i don't see color" trope seem the most pervasive sets of blinders.
tattooed girl's line of argument was something i wrestled with awkwardly in college, lil' embarrassing to hear it spat back now.

What's your neck say?

Yeah I'm skinny and effeminate and have long hair, 'twas a spectacularly misguided attempt at solidarity that led me down that road, so glad I wasn't *too* much of a prolific internet poster/interview subject when I was a teen. That said I can't imagine I would have actually said "people don't treat me like a white person," that shit's a bridge too far.

*worriedly searches posting history from early aughts*

xp "#notallwhitepeople"

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/oct/09/-sp-north-carolina-teenager-suspicious-death-lennon-lacy

Warning: pretty rough story to get through

There was a similar incident in Texas a few years ago where a very suspicious death was also ruled a 'suicide'

That detail about the shoes really creeped me out

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/21/upward-mobility-race_n_6016154.html

New study from Brookings Institution finds that upward social mobility is much more achievable for poor white people than poor black people

Which is why when people say "It's a class thing it's not about race" I think inside my head "STFU"

The interesting thing about that from my anecdotal experience is that, depending on where you are and who you're dealing with, if you can make that mobility breakthrough you gain more power to exert control over the sphere in which you operate in, effectively reducing the amount of specifically personal racial nonsense you have to put with or notice. So, it's difficult to make that step but once you do, things get SO much better; it's one of the reasons I believe my life has been so ridiculously charmed (and my parents, while solidly upper middle-class, are a couple of notches below "rich" as understood by having the ability to have your baseline lifestyle defined by extravagance; there's no huge house, their cars are nice but they've owned them for well over a decade, they travel everywhere by car rather than by plane and stay with family whenever they can, etc etc; of course on the flip side my dad started a tiny vanity vinyard as a retirement project so maybe I'm delusional about how well off they are).

What's your neck say?

― pplains, Friday, October 10, 2014 8:47 PM (1 week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Imagine all the DWTs that "just as discriminated" person must have on her record!

One reason poor black people really have a hard time is that they often live in communities that no one truly cares about - I don't think institutions are encouraging their residents to "look upward" and who can blame them? Little to no faith is invested in those communities - literally. If you're not from those places, you don't visit there, don't shop there. It perpetuates the negativity.

Whereas poor whites can be found living in the low-income sections of otherwise middle-class communities.

Getting annoyed with people in my class peer group lately - they often shrug and say, "don't blame me, I voted for Obama." As if resisting Republican pressure tactics is worthy of a medal. We have to do better at viewing the poorest black people as OUR NEIGHBORS.

New study from Brookings Institution finds that upward social mobility is much more achievable for poor white people than poor black people

Which is why when people say "It's a class thing it's not about race" I think inside my head "STFU"

― 龜, Wednesday, October 22, 2014 11:15 AM (9 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the social genome model they discuss in that study is really fascinating:

The model is structured as a series of regression equations in which outcomes in each life stage are treated as dependent on outcomes in all prior life stages, plus some more contemporaneous variables.

http://i.imgur.com/hcDu4YG.png?1

Whoa, that's fascinating.

I'm trying to figure out how you combine the probabilities, e.g. if you start at the "on track" birth stage, what's your overall probability of getting to "on track" adulthood.

Here we go...

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B01QbhDCAAAhxQt.jpg

fuck

Joke's on them, their faces are stuck that way :)

fucking hell

Follow-up on the diversity stories from Silicon Valley:

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/new-numbers-reveal-asian-wage-gap-tech-n223196

Would like to see more detailed breakdown of the data, feel like AA #'s are high 1) because of H1B visa immigrants but 2) that keeps wages down

I...

http://instagram.com/p/uldv8WnPZD/?modal=true

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B04C1wjCMAAEPcw.jpg

definitely racist, though also the rare case where the inherent racism is maybe not the biggest problem with the thing

least fun internet game: what is most offensive?

rolling is this child abuse thread 2014

i posted this video on facebook earlier today:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1XGPvbWn0A

in orbit had some good comments on it, which i hope she doesn't mind if i repost here:

...you will not be surprised to hear that I totally agree with you, but can I just say it is representative of Hollaback's general tone-deafness on racism that they sent a white woman around NYC where she gets harassed/stalked by mostly non-white men.

Maybe they think their audience IS mostly white women who, because they live and move in areas with a large non-white population, perceive that street harassment is something that happens in the presence of black and brown men? Nice that they added one line in the last screen that says "of all backgrounds" because we know that's really code for "I'M NOT RACIST, HONESTLY" which does not actually absolve them of furthering racist stereotypes.

(i thought i'd just move the discussion here rather than doing the epic facebook comments thing + risking intrusion from the pool of terrible random facebook acquaintances, and also so that other ilxors can weigh in if they want)

in the description of the video on the Hollaback website there's a little section that says "Like all forms of gender-based violence, street harassers fall evenly across lines of race and class. It is a longstanding myth that street harassment is a “cultural” thing, perpetrated mostly by men of color. We believe that street harassment is a “cultural” thing in the sense that it emerges from a culture of sexism — and unfortunately — that is everyone’s culture", but it's not in the Youtube description. and words like that ring hollow if they're posted under a video which contradicts them.

although i know enough about Hollaback to understand and support their goal of documenting harassers, i don't read it frequently and so if they have a history of tonedeafness on racism I haven't been aware of it. in orbit had some good posts on their history earlier in this thread (march 9 and 10) which helped me to understand why one would be skeptical about how they acknowledge race.

but i guess my questions are: do you think the entire idea of the video (documenting a woman getting harassed dozens of times in the course of a day) is flawed, and if not, how would you improve it? filming in a different (whiter) location? using a person of color as the subject rather than a white woman? Editing the footage so that the races of the harassers are more balanced?

i don't know, i guess i'm just torn because if the subject of the video lives in a area with a large POC population and as a result gets harassed by a lot of POC, isn't it her right to document her experience without editing it to be something that it's not? at the same time i understand that a video like this might have the effect, for some people, of perpetuating this idea that catcalling is more prevalent among POC...which brings me back to the question of whether it's better, on balance, for the video to exist at all. like is the education value of showing all of this harassment overshadowed by the perpetuation of a myth?

(also, obv i am a white dude commenting on catcalling, so i'm prepared for the possibility that i am way the fuck off, and if so i'd like to be schooled!)

admittedly as i initially watched the video i noticed that it was mainly POC doing the catcalling, but it didn't stand out to me as racist (again i am prepared for the possibility that i am severely wrong) because when i'm walking around with my gf in my neighborhood (97% POC) and somebody makes a comment or compliments me for my "good taste" or says "you better hold on to that ass" or whatever, it's inevitably a person of color because that's where we live. so the video above just looks like "normal" catcalling as i typically observe it. i understand how people living in areas with different demographics would see the video and be like o_O, and how, even worse, someone might view the video and come away with the wrong idea about race and catcalling.

but then again, how does a white person living in a heavily minority area go about documenting catcalling? and should groups like Hollaback refuse to show videos that are racially skewed, even if they accurately represent the experience of the subject of the video? it's just kind of a weird problem.

sorry for long posts.

No this is awesome! I totally want to talk about this! I'm just making some food right now so give me a sec.

The story about street harassment of white women is really also the story of gentrification. Do all races and cultures harass? Obv, because they all are shaped by patriarchy. But white men, with, on the whole, educational and economic privilege, may do their harassing in other spaces than the street, like the office or job site or in the home to their domestic laborers--and when young white women move into majority-minority neighborhoods, their experience of SH can be almost completely that of being harassed by Black and brown men whose home community they are now living in.

That is the dominant story that gets told about street harassment, and that story is then used to not only "raise awareness" of SH as a problem, but also as a basis for criminalizing harassment and harassers and pursuing police involvement, forming a legal definition of SH, trying to pass laws that assign penalties to those determined to be "guilty" of SH, and so on. This will definitely disproportionately affect men of color because a) the problem, as it has been diagnosed, is being located in their communities, and b) white women have greater privilege in the court and carceral system to be heard and believed.

It also erases the experiences of Black and brown women WHO WERE ALREADY LIVING THERE and who have presumably been dealing with patriarchy in their own communities all along (and who have it worse in many ways that are different from what white women experience--Black women are already EXTRA sexualized and objectified because thanks, racism!).

Phew. I probably forgot something but let me take a break there.

Lots of people can be complicit in telling this story. Holly Kearl, founder of Stop Street Harassment, just got a big grant and a took a lot of time off to go around the US and document SH in lots of places and do some kind of survey of attitudes that she then published like an academic paper. The reason for releasing a study on something is to use it to

Oh damn sorry that last para wasn't supposed to be there.

oh I thought you were taking that break

;-)

haha, me too! i mean taking a break midsentence is not the usual course of action but

Anyway the only way I think that video could have advanced a positive gender and race critique is if the woman at the center of it was a WoC. It wouldn't make it completely unproblematic, but it would at least give priority to the reality of walking around in a Black woman's body and giving the viewer an idea of what THAT is like. What if in addition to all those comments that other woman got, she was also being called "chocolate" and racist insults at the same time? And that's, like, the MINIMUM that would happen.

Maybe like 10-12 years ago, another white woman made a SH doc called War Zone where she took a (non-hidden) camera around various cities and tried to talk to the men who harassed her. Some of those cities had a majority white poverty class who were more vicious and obscene than any of the New York PoC she spoke to, and some of them had white-collar men on their lunch break who harassed her even harder than non-white men but were way more ashamed of it when they got recorded/confronted.

xp lol of course

thanks for your response!

Anyway the only way I think that video could have advanced a positive gender and race critique is if the woman at the center of it was a WoC.

right, and this is what i started to think too. but again, then, where does that leave a white woman in a majority-minority neighborhood in terms of documenting her harassment? i'm not trying to be captain-save-a-white-person here but is her proper role to go to meetings and donate money to anti-SH groups and share articles and the like, but not to document her experiences in the form of images or video? i understand that she could still easily speak out/write about her experiences without the need to mention the race of the harasser, but when you visually document something - which i think is important and should be done as often as possible - there's no getting around race. suggesting to a white woman that she should participate in anti-SH in THIS way but not in THAT way just seems off. but i don't know, it's messy. EVERYTHING IS WRONG

If a white person is going to pursue any kind of goal that involves the lives of a lot of non-white people, there is just no possible way they can do that on their own imo. Especially considering the history we already have in the US of stirring up panic that Black men are just waiting for the opportunity to sexually assault a white woman and spoil her purity, which we will never be free of because it can never be undone.

On a ground level, if a ww wants to do something about SH in a historically or majority non-white community, she needs to find some WoC to talk to about it and see what they have to say.

there is a lot of harassment in that video which is :( sadface making. otoh I am also kind of bummed that saying "hello"/"how you doing today" is construed as harassment. I mean I get how it's all part of a rich tapestry of bullshit she's enduring and that she doesn't know these people so why are they saying hello but.. idk it's just depressing.

Is it me or there is a bunch of white dudes harrassing her in the video too?

I took a quick tally before I started talking about it this morning and by my count it's about 5 probably white guys / 18 definitely Black (or Afro-Latino or whatever but presenting as Black) guys / 3-5 ppl that either I couldn't tell (because faces are blurred out) or couldn't see who was speaking.

I am also kind of bummed that saying "hello"/"how you doing today" is construed as harassment.

Hahahahahah COME AT ME, BRO.

I took a quick tally before I started talking about it this morning and by my count it's about 5 probably white guys / 18 definitely Black (or Afro-Latino or whatever but presenting as Black) guys / 3-5 ppl that either I couldn't tell (because faces are blurred out) or couldn't see who was speaking.

― Orson Wellies (in orbit), Tuesday, October 28, 2014 5:11 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Also it's an edit so what I said is a moot point, they made the choice of showing more blacks.

But white men, with, on the whole, educational and economic privilege, may do their harassing in other spaces than the street, like the office or job site or in the home to their domestic laborers-

Really interesting - hadn't thought of it this way before, also saw this story earlier today and just made the connection

http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/lawyer_says_he_misunderstood_wind_up_period_in_lifetime_ban_on_representing

I think I link to this photographer's work every time this subject comes up but I always thought this series by a WoC photographer was very interesting:

http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/entertainment/Hannah-Price-photographs-cat-calling-on-the-streets-on-Philly.html

Hahahahahah COME AT ME, BRO.

nah I know, and this is not a thing I do, saying hello to random people on the street male or female. (People def do it to me but I am a man so it doesn't have the sexual overtones, at least not most of the time afaict, more "I am about to ask you for money"/"about my pet cause" overtones lol) It just bums me out that sexist assholes ruin things as basic as saying hello.

xxp