Rolling 2014 Thread on Race

HE DOESN'T HAVE TO BE AN EVIL GENIUS TO DO A RACIST THING THO! He just has to be a little intellectually and critically LAZY, which he demonstrably is!

it's not right to accuse someone of a racist act without being able to prove it.

ZS I love you but this is a ridiculous burden of proof.

i know, but here it is again: that statement assumes that either a) he had a bunch of good footage of white guys and cut it out, or b) he had a bunch of poor footage of white guys and made a mistake by not including it anyway, or c) they should have went out and filmed a new version of it.

a) is impossible to prove, because real life is weird and you can walk around manhattan one day and get a bunch of clear footage of white guys harassing woman, and then go out the next and get nothing. it was filmed on the back of a guy wearing a hidden camera. b) is a judgment on the creative work of the filmmaker. i can totally see how they wouldn't want to include shitty off-camera footage. if they did, the film wouldn't have the same impact and it wouldn't have reached so many people. c) is the only persuasive argument, and it assumes that they would have captured all of this footage, spent however much time editing it, and then scrapped it and told the subject of the film "hey could you go out there for another 10 hours please? we need a do over."

c) is a totally fair criticism. but a) and b) aren't imo and a), especially, seems to be the default stance of bloggers/tweeters/whathaveyou on this

hah, I was about to say the same

acts aren't racist because of the intent (well, unless you're a _total_ asshole), they're racist because they reinforce or exhibit racist attitudes

whoops, xpost on that.

it's not right to accuse someone of a racist act without being able to prove it.

this is a ridiculous burden of proof.

is it, though? i'm not saying that 100% clear proof is needed, like a FBI camera that captured Bliss working on the video and clicking a little segment that had a white guy harasser, and saying out loud "well we won't be needing THIS clip, will we?" as he deletes it. i'm saying that even a preponderance of evidence would be nice, something more than "i'm sure he had more footage of white guys, he just must have".

eh, i guess we're talking about different things, an intentional racist act vs. more of a lazy/subconscious one. sorry

guess i'm just not comfortable seeing this kind of thing:

Automnia @Aut_Omnia
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So this white guy, Rob Bliss, records a woman getting street harassment from loads of men, then cuts out most of the shit from white guys.
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even if it was mediocre or slightly off-camera, wouldn't you at some point think "hmm, I cut out all the white people, that doesn't seem quite right"

if you have the internal narrative that street harassment is mostly a thing where poor people of color harass women, then you're going to unwittingly cut your film to match?

yeah, i guess i don't know a lot about Bliss' background, so if he has a pattern of behavior than i can see how you wouldn't want to give him the benefit of the doubt

You know that other word we talk about a lot, that word 'privilege'? Well, one of the ways that it functions, is through what kinds of people are routinely given 'the benefit of the doubt'.

You have a guy who is deeply committed to the idea of gentrification, or at least stands to gain a great deal from it. Gentrification is a phenomenon that involves racial issues and class issues right down at a root level. But somehow this guy makes a video on street harassment which predominantly focuses on working class PoC, and... oh no, we must not think that he or his beliefs have anything, conscious or unconscious to do with it, it would be so unfair to judge him, we *must* give him the 'benefit of the doubt'.

That maybe, just maybe, the problem here is not Automnia *failing* to give this guy 'the benefit of the doubt' but the fact that so many people who see a middle class white guy just routinely *do*?

yeah, i guess i don't know a lot about Bliss' background, so if he has a pattern of behavior than i can see how you wouldn't want to give him the benefit of the doubt

Almost every American citizen of every race has that pattern of behavior because it's how our society was formed.

having biases is pretty human imo

good posts. I guess my problem is that I do want to give the benefit of doubt to people, to everyone. but i suppose that goal is really flawed, considering that everyone has biases, whether we acknowledge them or not, and I'm probably granting too much to this other middle class white guy because i'm a middle class white guy.

Experiencing racism sucks about a billion times more than being called a racist. I'll never understand why people are more defensive about being called a racist than they are about offending other groups. Totally self-absorbed nonsense.

I sort of understand it when people give the benefit of the doubt to an artist whos records they like (presumably they dont want it to be true), but its weird to me when people jump through these kinds of hoops to defend a random person theyve no connection to at all

But you're exhorting people to give the benefit of the doubt to Bliss. You're not exhorting people to give the benefit of the doubt to Automnia. In fact, you've p much been calling Automnia a "Truther" for pointing out that racism exists and gentrification is closely to it!

...closely related to it...

xxp not "random person with no connection"--the connection exists, the connection is whiteness/white privilege & wanting to blind ourselves to the socioeconomic processes (gentrification etc.) with which we are all complicit

Depends on how big a factor intention is in determining the initial problem.

I think we can broadly all agree that it's possible to commit racist acts through thoughtlessness, carelessness, ignorance, 'good intentions', etc. In those situation there shouldn't need to be any burden of proof, benefit of the doubt, etc. The act stands alone.

Where a malicious motive is implied, it's understandable that people are going to want to have some kind of evidence to base it on before piling in. That doesn't stop things in the second category fitting into the first automatically, though.

in America "giving the benefit of the doubt to" a black man means assuming he has never been to prison or belonged to a gang, while "giving the benefit of the doubt to" a white person means assuming he doesn't want to bulldoze the black man's house & put in a gastro-pub

obviously most white people are not out there in the trenches saying "that one's gotta go, time to jack up the rent" but that doesn't mean you can't be complicit in a social order that produces those outcomes; this is why the "malicious intent" argument holds so little water

I don't really understand what this has to do with "gentrification" tbh. It looked to me like a lot (all?) of the video was shot in Manhattan, maybe some in Harlem but most of it did not look like "gentrifying" areas. Unless the point is just that generally if it makes minorities look unsavory that will somehow contribute to the desire to gentrify them out, as though gentrification even needs a push in NYC.

xposts

I guess I wasn't clear in my tl;dr's, but i was trying to make the point that no one knows what footage he had to work with in the first place, so it's not possible to state, as a fact, that he cut out certain footage. i'm very comfortable saying that the decisions he made on where to film, and to not do another take when he noticed it was lacking white dudes, were racist in nature. no disagreement there! but that's not what automnia (and others) are saying - they leap to an accusation that he did this very concrete thing - deleting scenes, editing out footage of white people. i'm not criticizing automomnia for pointing out that racism exists. i'm criticizing automnia for asserting a fact without acknowledging that it's based on speculation. i don't understand why it's not enough to stick with what is known - that Bliss is an asshole, has a history of being an asshole, and big surprise, he produced a video that supports his gentrification agenda.

i guess that comes across as defending Bliss and attacking those who are criticizing him, but really i think it's just more important to stick with the strong accusations that one can back up, and to lay off of the stuff that's speculative. the former argument is much more powerful and important than the latter, imo

What was I just saying this morning, about who gets to have their 'intent' considered when assessing harm. (And whose 'intent' is always overwritten, assumed, and otherwise erased or subsumed under labels like 'crazy' and 'angry' and things like that.)

Where a malicious motive is implied, it's understandable that people are going to want to have some kind of evidence to base it on before piling in. That doesn't stop things in the second category fitting into the first automatically, though.

this, basically

sorry, didn't copy and paste in full. THIS, basically:

I think we can broadly all agree that it's possible to commit racist acts through thoughtlessness, carelessness, ignorance, 'good intentions', etc. In those situation there shouldn't need to be any burden of proof, benefit of the doubt, etc. The act stands alone.

Where a malicious motive is implied, it's understandable that people are going to want to have some kind of evidence to base it on before piling in. That doesn't stop things in the second category fitting into the first automatically, though.

Sometimes racists are just, y'know, racist, and sometimes they're intentionally racist! It's really important to always give white men the benefit of the doubt when establishing which it is!

whether or not this video paints street harassment as a cultural issue, or a class issue, or whatever, I think it is easy to buy into the argument someone made upthread about how street harassment remains invisible and unreported when it's happening to women of color, & only becomes 'an issue' when gentrification throws white women into contact with men who have been harassing their less-visible sisters for years--THIS DOES NOT MEAN THAT 'THOSE MEN' OR 'THEIR CULTURE' ARE THE PROBLEM--it is far more productive to think of this as a public-health/policing issue, in which case it would just be another ugly symptom of persistent underinvestment & lack of public spending in minority communities

xp to noone in particular

sorry I had to deal with my toilet backing up this morning so I started drinking very early, apologies if I'm not really making sense, what werere we talking about

Experiencing racism sucks about a billion times more than being called a racist. I'll never understand why people are more defensive about being called a racist than they are about offending other groups. Totally self-absorbed nonsense.

― Cousin Slappy, Friday, October 31, 2014 3:50 PM (29 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Basically.

xp NO, that is a lot of the problem with this shit, you've basically got it.

it is far more productive to think of this as a public-health/policing issue, in which case it would just be another ugly symptom of persistent underinvestment & lack of public spending in minority communities

My/our take is that it's a public MENTAL health problem, ie a masculinity problem. The only real solution is a transformation away from that kind of masculinity being broadly accepted as normative. Criminalizing men who street harass is not a solution. Calling them "creeps" and "pervs" and writing them off is not a solution. Excluding them from the idealized community that you envision is not a solution...unless due to race & class lines they weren't part of your vision of the future IN THE FIRST PLACE so you don't perceive any costs when you exclude them because they're not part of "your" community anyway.

Sometimes racists are just, y'know, racist, and sometimes they're intentionally racist! It's really important to always give white men the benefit of the doubt when establishing which it is!

It is if you want to address the issues effectively. Sometimes people need to be educated on why their behaviour / attitudes are racist because they genuinely don't understand, sometimes people need to be stigmatised and ostracised. It doesn't change the nature of the offence but does feed into the nature of the response.

street harassment remains invisible and unreported when it's happening to women of color, & only becomes 'an issue' when gentrification throws white women into contact with men who have been harassing their less-visible sisters for years

It is literally impossible to say this enough times btw.

With, as an addendum, the fact that white men toooootally street harass too, but men generally street harass women who they think aren't powerful enough to successfully object, ie white dudes harass women of identities that they think they can get away with, in places where they feel comfortable doing so. And bc they have power in private spaces too, to some extent they basically offshore their harassment to places other than the street.

a bunch of white people telling a bunch of non-white people that their men are sexist and need to change their behavior is never going to go well, change has to come from within etc.

Yeah no shit where do you think my entire analysis and commentary on this came from?

was odd talking about this w my wife last night in that I was the one taking the more feminist position and she was like "eh, this stuff happens I don't let it bother me, I'm not going to change those men's behavior by engaging w them (which more often than not will just create a worse/more threatening situation)". we did both agree that kind of the most personal, directly effective thing we can do is raise our son to not be a sexist asshole.

xp

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.”

Z S, how is this in any way ambiguous or open to interpretation? Dude baldly states "I edited out a lot of footage of white guys catcalling" and you're reacting to people's (in my view understandable) "that's kind of fucked up" response, especially given that his excuse is undercut by the fact that the entire video is subtitled.

Yeah, that is the weirdest point. This is about a white guy making a video of black guys harassing, and people are saying we should be careful how we critisize the white guy, or he'll never learn? Like, did the black guys just become invisible all of a sudden?

xxp Your wife otm tho, a woman's safety is the most important thing, and we all do what we need to, reach the compromises we need to get on w our lives. And one on one engagement is a big risk as a woman, plus a huge amount of work and also not your fucking job when someone just verbally assaulted you. It really takes a group to share their strengths and hold each other up and spread the work out, I think. I mean community organizing 101 obv.

Z S, how is this in any way ambiguous or open to interpretation? Dude baldly states "I edited out a lot of footage of white guys catcalling" and you're reacting to people's (in my view understandable) "that's kind of fucked up" response, especially given that his excuse is undercut by the fact that the entire video is subtitled.

if you have a bunch of off-camera audio of white guys saying terrible things, you'd have to label to subtitle it something like

White Guy: "Hey Sexy Thing"

in order to show that it was a white guy saying it. and that would be weird, because then you'd have to do the same thing for all of the off-camera harassment audio. and also off-camera footage just isn't very effective, i imagine - you need to the person doing it. so it's easy for me to see how an editor would come to the conclusion that they just shouldn't include any off-camera stuff. and given that the raw footage was captured pretty haphazardly (back of backpack style) it's easy for me to see how they'd have a lot of off-camera stuff they just couldn't use. i dunno, i guess that line of reasoning appears to be jumping through hoops for the rich white racist asshole, but it seems very plausible to me.

ugh, missing words syndrome yet again, sorry. i meant

"and also off-camera footage just isn't very effective, i imagine - you need to SEE the person doing it."

i guess that line of reasoning appears to be jumping through hoops for the rich white racist asshole

Yes. Yes it does. Also this is the point at which maybe you have to reexamine the WHOLE PROJECT because if it just leads to confirm your existing biases there's PROBABLY SOMETHING WRONG WITH IT.

And I think liberation is antithetical to transaction--I don't think liberation can be bought AT ALL.

such a t-bomb. and great posts from b. bell. the idea of a white-supremacist-capitalist-patriarchy from bell hooks keeps echoing around in my head wrt all this. the proof is around/in us all the time.

Dude baldly states "I edited out a lot of footage of white guys catcalling"

also, he doesn't state this! here are his relevant bits from Slate:

“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.

he doesn't say he "edited out a lot of footage of white guys catcalling" - the writer says that.

if you have a bunch of off-camera audio of white guys saying terrible things, you'd have to label to subtitle it something like

White Guy: "Hey Sexy Thing"

in order to show that it was a white guy saying it. and that would be weird, because then you'd have to do the same thing for all of the off-camera harassment audio. and also off-camera footage just isn't very effective, i imagine - you need to the person doing it. so it's easy for me to see how an editor would come to the conclusion that they just shouldn't include any off-camera stuff. and given that the raw footage was captured pretty haphazardly (back of backpack style) it's easy for me to see how they'd have a lot of off-camera stuff they just couldn't use. i dunno, i guess that line of reasoning appears to be jumping through hoops for the rich white racist asshole, but it seems very plausible to me.

I'm going to repost the actual quote with some added emphasis:

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.”

You're focusing on the "off camera" part and ignoring the "in passing" part that precedes it, a description which is true of virtually all of the footage shown in the video aside from the two dudes who followed her.

also are you unfamiliar with paraphrasing or just being really stupid here

"We got a fair amount of white guys [who presumably were catcalling since that was what we were attempting to capture with this video], but for whatever reason, a lot of what they aid was in passing, or off camera [so they were edited out]" yes I am making an assumption here but it seems to be a reasonable one to make?

ZS you are in contenderizer territory here, just go down and stay down, honestly. You're in the wrong on this one and you may need to work through that and you should do that on your own terms but don't do it by throwing yourself against the wall here again and again.

Things can exist on a personal level; things can exist on a systemic level. Existing on one of those levels does not preclude it existing on others.

I understand the point about being pragmatic, but when responses to racism basically boil down to "but we need to figure out how to make this argument more ~palatable~ to white people" it just makes me feel like such a fundamental point has been missed. This is not about ~sparing out feelings~. It's about acknowledging our part in something which is larger than just us.