Rolling 2014 Thread on Race

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.

Your wife otm tho, a woman's safety is the most important thing

well yeah of course, I was just surprised how she was v dismissive of the video being made at all, she was very "eh dgaf, not important". Granted she is a hardened citybilly and mother of two and I'm sure she a) doesn't get it as much as she did when she was younger and b) has been dealing w it for so long that it no longer phases her/she's not even aware of it

many xxp

i feel like i'm under pressure to say that something that had a 80% probability of occurring actually 100% happened and can be stated as a fact. and that's frustrating, especially when there are many other constructive things that can be said (and have been) without venturing into the land of assumptions. if somehow there was a way to prove this one way or another, i would certainly make a bet that Bliss made racist editing decisions on purpose. for sure. based off of his background, and what he said, it seems more likely than not. but having a hunch about something is different than knowing for sure.

but if i'm in contenderizer territory i must have made major mistakes somewhere along the way, so i'll just stfu.

Patriarchy and street harassment are real, scary, and dangerous. It doesn’t take a graduate degree in gender studies to understand that calling out and making comments about strangers passing on the street is not positive social behavior. It’s an exercise of male dominance and power that can easily lead to threats of violence and assault. But so too are the media images and narratives that single out “blackness” as its own threat to white security, selectively culling and dismissing the behavior of everyone else, are their own exercise of white supremacy.
They contribute to the illusion that black criminality and threats are present on every street corner, they justify the biased policing of brown and black male bodies, and they reinforce age-old myths about black hyper-sexuality and lasciviousness. Furthermore, they marginalize the experiences of black and brown women in the very same spaces.
Let’s end street harassment, for sure—but let’s do it for all of us.

That's from http://qz.com/289449/women-of-color-are-upset-over-the-catcalling-video-but-not-why-you-think/

Sorry on phone so can't format better

oh good a "not why you think" article.

That's a great article!

i feel like i'm under pressure to say that something that had a 80% probability of occurring actually 100% happened and can be stated as a fact. and that's frustrating, especially when there are many other constructive things that can be said (and have been) without venturing into the land of assumptions. if somehow there was a way to prove this one way or another, i would certainly make a bet that Bliss made racist editing decisions on purpose. for sure. based off of his background, and what he said, it seems more likely than not. but having a hunch about something is different than knowing for sure.

but if i'm in contenderizer territory i must have made major mistakes somewhere along the way, so i'll just stfu.

I'm not talking about intent. I'm talking about the artifact he produced, reviewed, and decided to put out to the world. I understand that deflection drives part of my objection, but I don't think it drives all of it.

in reference to white-supremacist-capitalist-patriarchy and what io and b. bell have been saying so clearly here, it's a problem when one point of that triangle is singled out using the other(s) as leverage (the transactional concept io brings up) (+ intent is a moot point!), that's a zero sum game, and the problem is not discussion about why that's a problem.

and djp too.

i feel like i'm under pressure to say that something that had a 80% probability of occurring actually 100% happened

Yeah but it doesnt feel right does it? sure its not 100% certain and you cant prove it, but it doesnt sit right. why is your first inclination to defend this person, to look for 'well maybe the equipment wasnt so good that day", even though 80% of you thinks thats not really true. I understand wanting a higher percentage in your mind before criticizing, but what is it thats making you sign your name to flimsy excuses you don't seem convinced of even yourself, to defend a guy that you've no real reason to align yourself with. This is what is confusing to me

do you need 100% proof that a guy that pushes you out of the way on the subway is kind of a dick, or well it could be he has problems with spacial awareness

One thing I hope doesn't get lost in all of this is that catcalling sucks and dudes really need to reacquaint themselves with the concept of "death by a thousand papercuts" before getting all "what, you can't even say 'hello'?" defensive.

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.

― mattresslessness, Friday, October 31, 2014 4:49 PM (34 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Thank you thank you! I was just talking it over w one of my anti-street harassment community org sisters last night and that distillation came to me. I was trying to see La Lechera's point about effectiveness and the basic truths that resonate w people and their right to feel that validation and be part of something but where does the responsibility actually lie and why do I care so much? In a way that is as simple as possible. And boom. :D

xp I am not even talking to those guys anymore, I did that for most of yesterday and I was SO REASONABLE AND CALM and I am done.

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.

I'm not sure if you can ever get the message that acts can be racist without racist intentions accepted and understood unless you uncouple it, to some extent, from the broadly accepted message that overtly racist acts are socially unacceptable, though. It's not simply soft-peddling a hard truth that could otherwise be made more effective with forceful delivery, it's explaining the very basic point that 'i didn't mean it to be racist' doesn't mean it wasn't racist to people who have no conception of that reality.

The starting point you're working with (and correct me if i'm wrong) is that most / all white people are both personally racist and complicit in broader systems of racist oppression but can make an effort to educate themselves and limit (but not necessarily remove entirely) the negative effects. Act stemming from those failings are by definition racist but are not necessarily de facto evidence of any greater personal shortcomings than exist in the man on the Clapham omnibus. Focusing on the individual and not the act isn't helpful. That's probably true but that's not the starting point that most people are currently working with.

The video maker may be overtly racist, there's a case to be made for that on the evidence available, so may not be the best example here, but the broader idea that the benefit of the doubt should be extended on malicious intent but that this doesn't mean removing racism from the agenda when that intent's not there, or not proven, seems like the best way to start most conversations around grey areas.

tl:dr but the gist is that the failure to distinguish between overt and systematic /endemic racism makes it's harder to convince a lot of people that systematic / endemic racism exists.

The problem with this video is that even though it claims to speak for the experience of all women, the women who are disproportionately affected by street harassment are nowhere to be seen. If this video had featured a woman of color, one who belonged to the LGBTQ community, there would have been a better representation of what the most common victims of harassment actually face. But who knows if a video like that would have garnered as much sympathy, or as many donations? Well, Hollaback probably knows, which is exactly why they endorsed this white-washed version rather than depicting a day in the life of someone who is far more likely to be victimized.

Don't think this Brooklyn Mag article has been shared here yet? But the above conclusion seems very otm to me.

Love that. My friend just said last night that she felt it was financially motivated and extra gross when she saw the appeal for donations at the end, which tbh I had just ignored so hard I didn't even notice it.

Yeah but it doesnt feel right does it? sure its not 100% certain and you cant prove it, but it doesnt sit right. why is your first inclination to defend this person, to look for 'well maybe the equipment wasnt so good that day", even though 80% of you thinks thats not really true. I understand wanting a higher percentage in your mind before criticizing, but what is it thats making you sign your name to flimsy excuses you don't seem convinced of even yourself, to defend a guy that you've no real reason to align yourself with. This is what is confusing to me

do you need 100% proof that a guy that pushes you out of the way on the subway is kind of a dick, or well it could be he has problems with spacial awareness

i think there is plenty of indisputable evidence of Bliss' background of assholeishness, and plenty of indisputable reasons to criticize the end result of the video (the racial inbalance), and that it's very useful to draw connections between these two things. that's already a powerful argument! my problem is extending that stance to headnod along with everyone else that since there's a good chance that he acted intentionally, and he is definitely a dick and the final product has a racial imbalance, then therefore we should all agree that he certainly acted intentionally. why do that? why venture off into making up facts? why not stick with what's already certain, which is already damning for Bliss? i just don't get it, sorry.

also although my first reaction to getting told to stfu is to stfu and hate myself for the rest of the month, since i'm already pissing everyone off i may as well continue the trend by saying it's a really shitty thing to tell someone that they're not allowed to engage in a conversation about something. it makes sense if someone is straight up trolling, so if that's how i'm coming across then i deeply apologize. i realize (PAINFULLY REALIZE) that whether or not he did it intentionally or not ultimately doesn't matter, so i apologize for making that aspect of it more prominent than it needs to be. but i thought it was pretty non-controversial to say that no one can actually prove that he had a bunch of footage and edited it out. but hey, since he probably did it, then he did it. let's just round up to "100% certain", facts don't really matter.

Buddddddddy, I don't think you're trolling and I like you a lot. I think you are WAY over-inspecting something because something about it makes you uncomfortable and you want to turn away the full point of the argument against it, even if you can only splinter off a little bit of it, it seems like a "win." That kind of rhetorical hair-splitting is something we know well around here and we've probably all done it. It's just your turn today. We still love you.

I just wanna echo something that in orbit said above.

Things I've been saying are not my original ideas; I did not come up with them on mine own. These are ideas that I have heard from (and in some cases discussed with) Women of Colour, and I want to acknowledge their role in shaping - and relearning - my thoughts on these issues. Most of them are women I follow on twitter through a shared interest in music or pop culture, who have opened my eyes - J., Rana, Chitra, Bim, Reni and others. These ideas come from blogosphere people like Sara Ahmed and Flavia Dzodan. These ideas come from reading books by bell hooks and Angela Y Davis and a primer on Black Feminist Thought which included many other writers (like Audrey Lorde) whose works are harder to find in the UK. They come from blogs like Gradient Lair and Racalicious and Crunk Feminist Collective. And many other tweeters and writers whose names are escaping me right now but whose words and experiences are cycled constantly by the labour of women of colour. These are their ideas, I am not claiming them as mine own.

It's not that I don't appreciate a shout-out from mattresslessness, it's that I am not the one who deserves it. I agree with these arguments, I support them - and I am also painfully aware that as a white woman, I am far more likely to be listened to by white men than women of colour are.