rolling "Is This Racist?" thread

whiteness as a whole has been defined by our treatment of non-white ppl, when they actually talk about being white they just bring up their specific ethnicities rather than race cause there's actually something else to talk about there

xp

Exactly! She was so mad she wouldn't even tell me WHAT video, I had to go searching youtube.com and guess at which MObama attack ad it was mostly likely to be!

Well that whiteness thing isn't going to get very far. If you're inclined to say things like, "I don't get the whole discrimination thing," you're likely to view a "whiteness project" as the product of elitists.

Those responses are the embodiment of "whiteness" - avoiding dialogue with outsiders is a tactic if exclusion. So is the refusal to think about discrimination, to consider another's view.

"tactic of" exclusion, I meant.

they sound honest though - isn't that the point? to get their honest, biased views?
actually, i don't really know what the end game is here with it either

This was where I saw it, fwiw:

http://www.salon.com/2014/10/15/why_the_whiteness_project_is_so_mortifying_partner/

People are talking about it like we are here so maybe it's good idk

"Maybe it's good idk" -- 2014 rallying cry

seems like it will shortly outlive its usefulness once it achieves ubiquity at which point racist white people will call it out as racist against white people and avoid it

then we can just go back to flagging the everyday racist things white people say all over the internet

We sure do talk about white people a lot.

I do wonder what determined the constant emphasis on being white as an opposition to blackness in these videos - was it the questions, was it unprompted, selective editing of answers? Or was it really that these people automatically focused on it?

gathering individual testimonies on some general notion of whiteness abstracted from the dynamics & situations in which it is reified seems unproductive. the only value is negative & given how defensive ppl are about it it doesn't seem helpful. there's plenty of more serious & historical attempts to understand ~whiteness~ like the nell irvin painter "history of white people"

I actually think the whiteness project is productive, partly *because* whiteness is (maybe just for white people? or just me??) such an elusive concept -- in these videos, the juxtaposition of attitudes that aren't normally found in such close proximity (because of age & class stratification) comes closer to making the essence of "whiteness" appear than anything else I've ever encountered in my life

like obviously the hipster girl wearing coke cans in her hair(??) saying "I JUST CAN'T FIGURE OUT WHICH RACIST JOKES ARE OKAY TO TELL AROUND MY BLACK FRIENDS" is worlds away from the working-class dude who still has an ax to grind over some affirmative-action hires that got newspaper coverage in 1993, who is in turn worlds away from the office professional saying "none of my coworkers identify as white, we all identify as Irish or Polish or Italian"

... buuuuut they are all part of the ungraspable totality of White Systemic Racism in America & it is unusually honest to see them lumped together as such

I'm worried my argument might boil down to "the ignorant statements any given white person is likely to make will reflect only a narrow subset of all the possible ignorant things white people in america can believe"

the affirmative action case that old guy references is fairly recent, though

I'm worried my argument might boil down to "the ignorant statements any given white person is likely to make will reflect only a narrow subset of all the possible ignorant things white people in america can believe"

xp sorry I just assumed it was older because lol news cycles... would it at least be fair to say that the interpretive framework through which the Old White perceives an affirmative-action-related lawsuit is basically unchanged since the 90s? because I'm pretty sure that, if you had asked him in 2002, there would have been some high-profile case in the past ~5 years he could have pointed to just as easily, to make the exact same point.

btw my gut feeling is that this tendency is less pronounced among millennial whites, but I could be totally off the mark there... I've definitely encountered the second-generation affirmative-action grievance before ('my uncle was passed over for promotions at THREE different companies!' type shit)

http://colorlines.com/archives/2014/10/director_of_the_whiteness_project_wants_honest_conversation_about_race.html

I think I uktimately agree with this dude and what he's trying to do but I'm not very likely to check out the rest of this

I’m going to be frank. I’m not really interested in hearing white folks talk about race or whiteness. I’ve been a minority in majority-white spaces since I was 12 years old. I feel like I know what your subjects are going to say. Why should I take the time to watch?

I would say that people like you and me who have thought about race a lot and have been around and processed it, maybe that’s not who this project is for. But, again, I go back to all these women of color who’ve written me from Albuquerque to Australia, who’ve said it was really painful but incredibly cathartic to hear what white people say when they’re not in the room. That’s all I can say.

Are you afraid that you’ll end up creating caricatures of white people? How will you avoid that?

I certainly hope not; that’s not my intention. I think that’s an issue every time you do a project on race: People always try not to see themselves in the people up there on the screen. One of the reasons why I did it in Buffalo is because when people think about race they think about the South. When I did “Two Towns of Jasper,” people would say, “That’s not me. That’s the South.” But you’d be in denial as a white person if you didn’t admit that you hold some of the most discomforting things [said in “The Whiteness Project”]. When Deanna says white people think black men are inherently violent, she’s not saying something that people don’t know. And I’m not sure why I’m getting attacked for saying something that’s true. All she’s saying is something that’s representative of 40 percent of white Americans. I don’t think it’s that radical to acknowledge it. You can caricature [“The Whiteness Project”] but you’d be missing an opportunity to examine perhaps for yourself why and how what’s being said relates to you—as opposed to attacking person saying it. It’s not about these particular individuals. They represent common views. I don’t want people tying this whole thing to those particular 21 people in Buffalo. I commend and respect them. And I am incredibly grateful that they agreed to participate.

Have you talked to anyone involved in the series since it went live last Friday?

Yeah. One person told me he values and believes in what I’m trying to do. But he also says he’s nervous about the effect it’ll have on everyone. You know, I’m happy to become the punching bag for this project but I really hope these 21 people don’t become the punching bag. They took a leap of faith about being honest and it’s terrible to think that then you get punished for it. Everyone’s always saying they want an honest conversation about race but then when you have one, you can’t punish people when they speak their minds—especially if they’re not attacking you. And certainly if you want to bring someone along [in their understanding of race] and make progress, attacking them does not advance the conversation.

In the responses you’ve gotten since last Friday, what’re the three common themes you’ve picked up?

One: “This is amazing, Thank you for doing this, This is the most incredible thing I’ve seen.” Two: “I don’t understand it.” Three: “You’re a fucking asshole”—and, “You all just should die.”

I don't need to watch this; I can get exactly the same results by going to pretty much any family gathering.

I think I uktimately agree with this dude and what he's trying to do but I'm not very likely to check out the rest of this

― 💪😈⚠️ (DJP), Friday, October 17, 2014 11:05 AM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

^^

me three i think.

everybody i've shared that link with gives me serious side-eye and then asks why i want them to watch it.
"discussing whiteness" among liberal white people is an immediately suspect thing to do.

Just throwing out there that one of the reasons white people don't have anything to say about whiteness that isn't about non-whiteness is that whiteness is already, as the metaphor goes, the water we're swimming in. What do you say about air? What do you say about the sun coming up in the morning?

when you grow up as effectively the ONLY black person in your town, the white ppl around you sometimes forget you're black and expect you to parrot this shit back at them, so I haven't really felt like I've learned anything other than new and exciting ways to roll my eyes

Basically it just demonstrates that whiteness is the baseline of "normal" for white people and everything deviating from it is what's up for discussion.

Some of us don't need this demonstrated but it's okay if not everything is for you/me/us. Like Dan said.

xp Well sure.

xxp it's warm, it's cold, it's humid, it's bright, it's dim, it's oppressive, it's stifling, it's open, it's freeing, it's beautiful, it's bleak
no shots fired at you orbit, but lacking an opinion or perspective on your inherent/unearned role in the place where you live and the culture where you do your business strikes me as lacking in self-awareness and empathy

this seems of a type (though better and more thoughtfully constructed) with the videos Sarkeesian is putting out on video games.

lacking an opinion or perspective on your inherent/unearned role in the place where you live and the culture where you do your business strikes me as lacking in self-awareness and empathy

― Steve 'n' Seagulls and Flock of Van Dammes (forksclovetofu), Friday, October 17, 2014 3:25 PM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yes, I rather think that's the point.

your post about "the water we're swimming in" etc read to me as if you were arguing clueless whiteness as an understandable (and perhaps forgivable) state of self; i'm suggesting it doesn't take much imagination to avoid.

I think you read that post exactly 100% wrong wrt tone

could be.

whiteness is really more about in-groupness than anything else. if you meet someone new and they conform to a general blandness then they code as white.

not sure if it was on that whiteness project page or elsewhere but the dumb idea that all these people of color or distinct ethnicity have a homeland they could return to if they don't like it here in 'merica is pretty much the core of unexamined assumptions about who and what you actually are in society

I'm gonna come across as typically clueless but I'd like to see "general blandness" interrogated. I can relate to that judgment of whiteness but I don't think I understand well what I'm relating to.

I would like to see "whiteness" and "general blandness" divorced as concepts.

Blandness is the absence of flavour. It is the concept of whiteness as not-a-thing - when it is not not-a-thing, it is itself a carefully constructed pose represented as a default.

That positioning "whiteness" as "Mayo" or "Vanilla" is a more helpful way of looking at it.

Mayonnaise has a flavour! It has a creamy, oily, slightly eggy flavour that you learn not to notice when you have been eating sandwiches soaked in mayonnaise your entire life. Vanilla also has a flavour! That one has learned to eat vanilla ice cream, and thinking of it as "not a flavour" without noticing that ice cream itself has the physical sensations of sweet, fatty, cold, and vanilla itself has a flavour which is actually distinct from eating plain cream. One only thinks of vanilla ice cream as "not having a flavour" in comparison with rocky road or mint chocolate chip. But compared to a glass of water, milk has a very definite flavour. It's a flavour we've been trained through familiarity not to notice. (And milk is an even more apt comparison, because Northern Europeans are pretty unique among humans through having a weird mutation which allows us to digest milk as adults!)

Equating "whiteness" and "blandness" is dangerous because it ignores all this. Equating "whiteness" and "default" is more to the point, because one can relearn viewing "default" as "one position among many available positions" as opposed to the "total lack of positionality" that "blandness" implies.

Your food examples are great, raising points about those flavors of food that get cast as bland. Mayo, the devil's condiment, has a flavor (I am told) that is easy not to notice; same with milk. Are they cast as bland because they're familiar to "white folk" as the tastes of "their" culture? I don't know. My father comes from Latin America and finds much "white person" North American food inedible because, he says, it's bland. He'll load that food up with salsa and then it's ok. I think that putting chilis on food doesn't code as bland to my father on account of its being "his" culture's taste. Instead, he'll say it burns his mouth, and that's not bland. So there's something about food blandness, it seems, that exceeds mere cultural familiarity.

But if that's right, then is there an analog to whiteness there?

No, because I think that that is where the metaphor falls down.

Because there is an actual quality of 'blandness' in real food - as when drinking water, pure distilled water has no taste. But there is no race equivalent of 'water'! Even when talking about "whiteness" as default, we see this when comparing American whiteness to e.g. British whiteness. There are very distinct and noticeable differences which show that there is a thing, there is a quality, a presence there, it's just a presence that has become invisible through sheer familiarity. (I would compare American Whiteness not to blandness, but to... sweetness. Or a specific sugary taste. Like, when I visit the States, I am struck by how sweet all of the food is, even savoury food. Yoghurt, bread, sauces, cereal, tinned beans - everything tasted so highly sugared that I ended up having to go to special 'natural' shops to get unsweetened versions of things, for a taste I was more familiar with!)

When thinking about whiteness in this way, I think it's more helpful to think about it in terms of accent. Everyone - even native speakers - speaks English (or Spanish, or Arabic, or other multi-nation languages) with an accent. Your own accent is almost never noticeable to you, until confronted with an accent that is different from yours. Accent is always perceived in relation to someone else. There have been various attempts to standardise accents e.g. the whole idea of Received Pronunciation in British English - no one in British actually natively speaks with that accent! But the closer one's accent is to that accent, the less "accented" one's English is supposed to sound. (Even though R.P. is itself an accent, and a forced, unnatural one at that!)

Whiteness is like that; it's conforming to an artificially decided "standard" of an accent which works to make you appear accentless, when really, there is no such thing as speech without accent. There is no such thing as "blandness" in accent. There is just closer or further away from familiarity, or from an artificial standard. Whiteness functions as a cultural standard in the same way.

Yes, that all sounds right to me.

Then I wonder: what is the quality, or presence, of American Whiteness?

I realize that many of you will be laughing at me at this point, and I deserve it. But it's where I was raised, and where I feel culturally alien, and where I keep trying to run away from because it doesn't interest me, and I want to know: what is it that doesn't interest me? It's not that it's bland, it has a presence, a flavor, that's it's own; but what is this flavor?

I hope we don't find out. Unless we are talking about the relative pallor of someone's skin, we are talking about an illusion.

I'm old enough that I can't get past it as a concept defended and enforced by segregationists.

Was surprised to see Jews included, and some of them don't even look white. The people saying the most racist things probably would not have accepted Jews back in the day. I don't like the fact that these racist whites are being told that these Jews are "white like them".

I didn't mean bland as in opposed to flavor, just perceived as to have no inherent distinguishable qualities.

lacking strong features or characteristics and therefore uninteresting.

There have been various attempts to standardise accents

In the US, this is the "general american" accent, also known as the broadcaster's accent. A large portion of americans speak generally within its bounds, although there's only a small swath in the midwest where it's the "native" accent: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_American

The idea of "whiteness" in the US is completely wrapped up in entrenched monied/patriarchal/political power structures. If you don't sound or look particularly different from a perceived "white" norm then you can fall into it. It is not an inclusionary definition, it is exclusionary. If you can't be defined as "not white" then you're white.

I guess I should note that "general american" is not an attempt to standardize accent, it's just adoption of a particularly unextravagant accent as a norm for purposes of broadcast news.

Accent is a good example of whiteness norms - you're expected to assimilate to some "standard" if you want to move up in the world.

A shame this whiteness thing brings up stuff like, "why do black people talk about slavery"? I'm having a major conflict on my Facebook h.s. group over something more subtle - how even allegedly "sensitive" white people prefer to move away from the "inner ring" burbs. The less white these burbs get, the less desirable they are. As in, "I don't want to live near a fried fish joint, my home value will decline." To the point that people I thought were my friends have referred to my neighborhood as "ghetto". If that isn't white...

So there's this:

http://media.irishcentral.com/images/MI+australia-no-way+Irish+Voice.jpg

Eh, this guy talks the talk, but I get the feeling he can't walk the walk. If he's all that's standing between me and the land of the long weekend, I think we're homefree.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rT12WH4a92w

http://i.imgur.com/SYoMqBe.jpg

hasnt been updated in 2 days, seems like a record, nice work america

ok, here's a new one... 🎺 let's play Is This Racist!:

popular denver burrito chain with several locations plans expansion to nearby ft collins, whereupon residents protest its name, "Illegal Pete's"...

http://www.coloradoan.com/story/money/2014/10/22/residents-ask-illegal-petes-change-name/17738197/

protestors claim that using the word 'illegal' in reference to a person in any manner evokes the term 'illegals', a pejorative often used targeting immigrants

the owner claims that the word 'illegal' was chosen for its connotations to cool underground activities or whatever and has nothing to do with immigration or anything of the sort

you heard what each side has to say, now it's up to YOU to decide... IS!.. THIS!.... RACIST!?!

You don't really have a stellar track record on these things so I'll go ahead and call it for you: it's racist

who knows what the "intent" originally was, but I say when a business name is at least equally open to racist and non-racist interpretations, probably best change the name