Rolling 2014 Thread on Race

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

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.

I think organizations that work on SH have a responsibility, especially since they're working toward righting an injustice, have a STRONG responsibility to be accountable for their race, LGBTQ, etc positions as well. Hb has been around for long enough to notice that they have a problem with a lot of white women telling stories about being harassed by Black men, and that without any intervention, the air in the room can be completely used up by that one thing. (And the way we can talk about it sometimes gets SUPER uncomfortable really fast.) But they keep making these dumb missteps, like, whatever they SAY about not intending to single out PoC that's what they end up doing again and again.

there's an icon on public transportation here accompanying the dictum "no offensive language or conduct" that looks like an angry person of unverifiable color, i'll have to post a picture obv. that "rule" is so obnoxious and race/class weighted language police, why not "be considerate of others" ffs. the jackasses in charge of public transit here make me so angry.

I don't take any credit for working this shit out on my own btw. I didn't. I didn't know ANY of this when I moved to Crown Heights over 10 years ago. I didn't know that any stereotypes HAD been assigned to Black men because I almost literally didn't know any Black men or know anyone who knew any, basically, so I'd never heard of those slurs before.

But what I did feel was increasingly angry and traumatized by being sexualized everywhere I went, and also very, very ASHAMED. Like the things men said to me were my own fault, like I was being stripped and exposed and made dirty by their eyes and their words and the way they called public attention to their power over me because of my gender presentation, how helpless I was because they were in groups and I was alone--not that I was in danger, but that they always had the crowd on their side. And there was nowhere for my shame and anger to go, nothing positive or productive to transform it into, it was just eating me up.

The group that I meet with now gave me an outlet, they gave me a chance to try on a whole different framework about SH and objectification and to have a vision of transforming it into something better. I owe BMC like everything. No, I will not stop talking about them because they're so amazing.

http://brooklynmovementcenter.org/anti-street-harassment/

No Disrespect envisions a world free of harassment, particularly of people whose identities have been historically marginalized. We reject domination and objectification as the basis of public interaction and are working towards a world in which these interactions are instead based on mutual respect and love. We further believe that powerful, organized, and sustainable communities are rooted in the deep and compassionate understanding between individual members; and that the current culture of intimidation and harassment undermines our overall potential to create these healthy versions of community living.

that looks like a good group of people orbit.
yelling shit at people on the streets is bullshit. harassing people in offices is bullshit. basically people are bullshit is the way i break it down to an extent.

I kinda feel like in 2014 if a man doesn't *get* the difference between a friendly "hello" and a "hey hot girl you make me horny" hello, he has some self-examination to do. FWIW I almost never say a friendly "hello" to someone on the street unless there's some weird awkward eye contact moment and I need to break the tension. I might do so in my building lobby or somewhere more familiar, but not on the streets of NYC, that's just life in the big city imo. I can see how if you live in a small, tight-knit neighborhood it might be more of a thing to say hello to people on the street in that neighborhood. I can also see how if you were a woman in a small, tight-knit neighborhood, even the "hey you are hot" hello might be less threatening (not saying unthreatening) -- not necessarily wanted, but at least you are more likely to know who the person is or recognize them. Doing it to someone totally unfamiliar in a totally unfamiliar setting just seems menacing.

I just make a grand gesture of tipping my hat and offering a firm "m'lady" to let her know that she is not to be threatened by me.

I say hello to the next three men just so they know I'm a weirdo who says hi to everyone on the street, not a threatening menace. Then I mentally un-hello the men.

Pplains as ron burgundy ovah heah

more on the video, from Slate: The Problem With That Catcalling Video

...The video is a collaboration between Hollaback!, an anti-street harassment organization, and the marketing agency Rob Bliss Creative. At the end they claim the woman experienced 100 plus incidents of harassment “involving people of all backgrounds.” Since that obviously doesn’t show up in the video, Bliss addressed it in a post. He wrote, “we got a fair amount of white guys, but for whatever reason, a lot of what they said was in passing, or off camera” or was ruined by a siren or other noise. The final product, he writes, “is not a perfect representation of everything that happened.” That may be true but if you find yourself editing out all the catcalling white guys, maybe you should try another take.

...Activism is never perfectly executed. We can just conclude that they caught a small slice of catcallers and lots of other men do it too. But if the point of this video is to teach men about the day-to-day reality of women, then this video doesn’t hit its target. The men who are sitting in their offices or in cafes watching this video will instead be able to comfortably assure themselves that they don’t have time to sit on hydrants in the middle of the day and can’t properly pronounce “mami.” They might do things to women that are worse than catcalling, but this is not their sin.

"White people just aren't as loud as persons of color. Now a Puerto Rican, there's someone who can drown out a firetruck siren."

This whole thing is getting way overthought imo. The video pretty effectively makes the point overall and now it's getting drowned out by the think piece arms race. But why not just do a sequel? Have multiple women of different races walk around and caption the white guy comments that are allegedly too hard to hear. Sun is gonna rise again tomorrow and men are gonna keep catcalling too, easy to repeat the result.

So... is Slate implying that only white people have office jobs or visit cafes on purpose or did they just do the exact same thing Hollaback did?

At least the Rosin piece doesn't throw in "differing cultural expectations" like a lot of the pieces I've seen, like you know "Hey, I don't want to be a presumptuous white person here, maybe black and latina women love being harassed on the street." I even saw one that said there should be a "study" of how women of different races and classes feel about catcalling before we make any assumptions. I'm being a presumptuous white guy here too, but my presumption is that most people of all races and classes don't like being harassed on the street by strangers, until proven otherwise.

I think that's a safe bet. Also just in general I'm pretty sure anyone who wants to talk about how it's a "cultural" thing is being hella racist. But if that dude wants to ask a bunch of Black and brown women how they feel about street harassment, I support that! He might even learn something.

Dan: I...don't know? That sentence went right by me. I don't have a take on it, but if that's your read, then the piece has a problem.

Did you feel the same way when I said (above) "white men, who on the whole have academic and economic privilege"? My take, if anything, is that she's referencing that fact without specifying it. Maybe that's too charitable, or maybe it's important to be specific?

But if the point of this video is to teach men about the day-to-day reality of women, then this video doesn’t hit its target. The men who are sitting in their offices or in cafes watching this video will instead be able to comfortably assure themselves that they don’t have time to sit on hydrants in the middle of the day and can’t properly pronounce “mami.” They might do things to women that are worse than catcalling, but this is not their sin.

If the main criticism of the video is that it unconsciously pitches catcalling as something more likely to happen when men of color see a "white" woman, causing a swathe of white men guilty of or complicit in similar/analogous behaviors to go "phew, not me!", this section in that context reads to me as casting comfortably middle-class men in offices and cafes as almost exclusively white. "Man" is intended to be read as "white man". I don't have a strong problem with the baseline sentiment but it should be expressed explicitly, not implicitly.

(I do have a small problem but I have a meeting to go to)

Hurting, I currently live and work in an area with a lot of gang members, street people, drug addicts...and I'm coming to the difficult realization that 1) guys who take a friendly gesture as an indicator of romantic interest are OF this class of people - whether they live like a street person 2). these people don't KNOW what self-examination is and probably find the concept threatening.