(no subject)

[rivka]

I've been following the Great Post-Wiscon Cultural Appropriation Debate with considerable interest. (If you haven't, rilina has a comprehensive link roundup here.)

My thoughts are a little bit scattered, and mostly focus on this observation by yhlee:

In four journals--mine, rilina's, oyceter's, and cofax7's (I believe that was the fourth; oyceter, correct me if I'm wrong)--discussion of cultural appropriation and authenticity kept turning to discussions of white cultures and distinctions, deflecting attention away from cultures that do not have white privilege.

My father has told me stories about ways in which, as a person of Jewish descent in Boston in the 1940s and 1950s, some people perceived him as Not White (and Not Acceptable). Those are interesting stories about my father, and interesting stories about the history of anti-Semitism in the United States. But if they're what immediately comes to mind for me to talk about when a person of color talks about racism he or she experiences today, I need to stop and ask myself why.

I was talking about this with Michael yesterday, and he pointed out that people are likely to perceive two potential characters to identify with in a story about racism: the victim and the evil oppressor. Well-meaning liberal whites genuinely don't see themselves as the oppressor, so the only way for them to slot themselves into the story is to find a way to analogize themselves with the victim. So the prejudice their Irish ancestors experienced a hundred and fifty years ago, or the suppression of a minority white ethnic group back in the Old Country from which their ancestors emigrated, is placed on the table as a token of which side they belong to.

I don't think that's necessarily a conscious process, by the way. I think that one of the ways that white privilege affects its recipients is that it makes distinctions among white cultures and white ethnic experiences genuinely seem like the really interesting questions about race. I think the people yhlee complained about had no perception of themselves as ignoring or minimizing the perceptions of people of color - I expect that they saw themselves as moving beyond racial dualities in a sophisticated way that looked at subtle distinctions among races generally perceived as monolithic. In one sense, they weren't wrong. Those are interesting questions. They just happen to be interesting questions that put the spotlight on white people and their feelings and experiences, at the expense of people of color who are pushed into the background.

I want to suggest that white people don't have to choose between slotting ourselves into a story about racial prejudice as the Victim or being forced into the role of the Evil Oppressor. There's a third option, a third role that one can identify with: The Person The Story Is Not About. It's possible to listen to people of color talk about race without either trying to ally your experiences with theirs, or explaining why you aren't the bad guy. It's possible, in other words, to just listen, and try to hear the story from the other person's perspective without immediately leaping to put yourself at its center.

That's not an easy thing for a member of a dominant culture. We're used to most stories being about us, in one way or another. (Okay, it's also hard for humans in general, because egocentrism is pretty much an organizing feature of the human brain, but members of minority cultures get a lot more experience with stories that are not about them and that don't even allude to them.) I recognize that it's not easy, and I don't claim to be especially or particularly good at it myself. But given the number of other things that are easier when you're white, I don't think it's unreasonable to expect us to spare the effort.

A final comment about egocentrism. In white folks' comments to the cultural appropriation debate, I'm seeing a lot of frustration that "there's no way we can win." If a white author depicts an all-white world in her books, that's racist; if she doesn't, that's cultural appropriation. Double-bind! It's a common theme in white folks' responses to discussions of white privilege in general.

Here's what I want to say about that: "how can I win?" is not the right question to be asking in this discussion, especially if "winning" means something like "not having to worry any more about being criticized on racial issues." "There's no way we can win," again, takes the focus off the problems of people of color and puts it onto white people. I'm sympathetic to the feelings it reflects, because I too am a person who wants to Do The Right Thing with respect to race. I don't think there's anything wrong with wanting that. What's wrong, I think, is expecting that I should be able to put myself into a position where my race doesn't ever matter because I am behaving correctly on racial issues. People of color don't ever get to be in the position where their race doesn't matter, and it's a reflection of white privilege to believe that if I "follow the rules," I should be able to be there myself. Race matters, and requires careful consideration and reflection and acknowledgement of double-binds and paradoxes and above all listening.

One doesn't get to demand rules that let one opt out of doing that work.

Comments

[therealjae.livejournal.com]

This is a smart post.

I have one concern, though. If we're supposed to listen to people of colour talk about their experience by just sitting there and listening, without chiming in with experiences we've had where we've felt similarly, then this means refraining from doing something that is simply a part of everyday conversation. I know from my work in conversation analysis that telling a little anecdote from your own life is a normal, useful way for a co-conversationalist to convey empathy with the person who's narrating some aspect of *their* life. It's not "egocentric," it's typical conversational style.

It sounds to me like you're suggesting that white people should talk with people of colour about their experiences as a therapist might talk with a client, instead of as a friend or an ally. Isn't there a level on which that's problematic?

-J

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I think there's a huge way in which it's problematic if the conversation is up to that point an ordinary conversation. If all I can do is listen and say "Yes, dear, and how did that make you feel?" I am no longer having a conversation. I think Rivka's suggesting that in such a conversation to context shifts from conversation to storytelling by the other person -- which is OK in some contexts, but somewhat unnatural.

But if the context is cultural appropriation and I'm not allowed to say that my culture and cultural heritage and mythology has really and truly been really thoroughly appropriated by American fantasy writers, that it's the most overused culture going, that people mangle my language and make the mangled version a cliche, and that I used to be really unhappy about that but now I think there's a way in which it's OK... well, I have white skin so I should just shut up.

[elusis.livejournal.com]

I have a problem with the idea that one is always entitled to talk about one's personal experience with issues of (gender, culture, race, etc.) just because the subject has been brought up by others. That's precisely the kind of re-centering the narrative on oneself that is so offensive to those who are members of historically oppressed or disadvantaged groups.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

I'm unsure that "always" (or "never") is a useful way of describing any interaction between people. And I can't completely describe what is offensive to members of historically oppressed or disadvantaged groups. But I will say that describing one's own experience in response to someone describing theirs is so universal that I begin to believe that it is the main conversational expectation and skill people of my culture bring to the table. I regularly finding myself wishing to stifle this impulse in commenters to my journal posts, because there are times when I don't want to compare mine with someone else's experience, I just want to be heard when talking about mine. Thus sharing experiences and using that as an attempt to relate to others isn't, in my experience, necessarily a cross-cultural problem. And obviously it is not always a tool that works well.

If this is the main tool for expressing empathy and understanding available to people of my culture, it seems other cultures are pretty likely to have different tools, but I don't know what those are. I would like to, not (I like to believe) to appropriate them, but to better be able to understand what their expectations are, and to use that understanding to step outside my own (admittedly shallow) skills.

I am in a multi-cultural multi-lingual environment a few days a week as a school volunteer, but I haven't picked up very many hints on this from the children I work with. I am generally complimented when the black kids tell me things about white people, or the hispanic kids tell me things about English people, but the subtleties of their cultural expectations are not clear to me, especially since these are young children. I do notice that, as the kids get older (I have worked with the same children for three years now), they are less interested in my advice, straight on. They ask for and seem to like to hear stories about when I was their age, or about my children, so I slip in advice that way. (It's usually "how to get your homework done" or "how to take care of yourself when things are really bad at home.") The current topic has been about politics among the girls, and I have helped a few of them understand how friendships flow between girls, and what's going wrong when there are problems. These are girls from at least 6 different ethnic backgrounds.

So, even here, I am using my own experience to understand and interpret how these minority kids are experiencing the world, though I do a lot of listening, and my volunteer schedule is purposely set up so that I have them in small groups so that listening (me to them, and them to each other) is easier to do. As the kids get older, I can see that my default conversational tool will be less useful, but I honestly don't have any great ideas about how to better understand what their cultural conversational assumptions and skills are.

K.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Well, half of this is in how you define "historically oppressed or disadvantaged". I know I don't count to an American because of skin colour -- actually I didn't know that before this debate. "Historical oppression and disadvantage" in Britain would count my grandmother being beaten in school in Wales for speaking Welsh when she couldn't speak any other language, and certainly all Jewish people who left Europe in the thirties would be assumed to have been historically oppressed and disadvantaged. Not that this is the point.

If the issue is "how it sucks to have a different colour skin in the US" then obviously my personal experience is irrelevant. If it's "cultural appropriation in SF and fantasy" then I don't see that issue as limited in that way.

Of course, part of the problem in the wider meta-conversation may be that some people think the conversation is about racism in the US and others think it's about cultural appropriation in SF and fantasy. This is clearly a problem especially for those of us outside the US.

I was thinking how different this was from when roadnotes said that someone spat on her in the bank because she was black. Then the reaction was essentially "OMG! The bastard! You poor thing!" with a side of "I didn't realise things were still so bad!" -- "Oh yes they are!". Because there the conversation was one person reporting a personal experience, and I don't think anyone had the slightest urge to say "That's just like the time my bank clerk didn't give me the right change" or whatever, because it obviously wasn't.

But this conversation started in a different place. That's certainly why I felt I had something to contribute.

Well, it has certainly enhanced my understanding of US culture.

(Samuel Delany said in an interview on Slate that he expected in the future people would think the problem of gender and race were as silly as we think the problem of demonic possession.)

[rivka.livejournal.com]

To me, it reads really differently coming from you than it does coming from a fourth-generation American who is casting back to ancestral cultures that generally have no connection to their lived experience.

It's not, from my perspective, that your views and experiences don't count because you're white. The phenomenon I was trying to address is that yhlee, rilina, and oyceter had specifically stated in their posts that they wanted to host a discussion about how cultural appropriation applied to people of color, and people still responded to those posts by ignoring their racial points and attempting to re-focus the discussion on white people.

I would personally be very interested to hear what you have to say about the appropriation of your culture by fantasy writers, but not in the context of a discussion in which the hosts have requested a different focus to the conversation.

[juliansinger.livejournal.com]

Conversation analysis? Is this in linguistics, or in something else?

Anyway, having worked with (and facilitated) small-group dialogues focusing on issues of race and racism, I would say that no, actually, the kind of listening she's talking about is neither a passive thing, nor is it a therapeutic thing. (Though often therapeutic sorts of things happen in this kind of dialogue.)

It should be active, it should be grappling with questions -- it's just that a lot of people don't learn how to be that active a listener in any sort of conversation. (Nor do they learn how to get past their own defensiveness when questions of race and racism turn up.)

[therealjae.livejournal.com]

Yep, CA is a field of linguistics these days, though it originally grew out of sociology. (More information here (http://www-staff.lboro.ac.uk/~ssca1/sitemenu.htm), if you're curious.)

As for the topic at hand, are we talking specifically about "dialogues focusing on issues of race and racism," or are we talking about conversations in which a person of colour starts discussing his or her experience with same? Because I think that's where what papersky is saying comes in.

-J

[juliansinger.livejournal.com]

Well.

I was assuming that we were talking about conversations, yes. (Dialogues and dialogue groups are a different kettle of fish.)

And I rather strongly think that in any conversation, including charged ones like this, that if all you do is listen and nod your head and say yes dear, then it's not a conversation.

I just think that in these types of conversations, the ability to listen (and the awareness that listening and not reacting defensively) is central. That's not to say that argument, discussion, and chewing a topic over don't have their place in these sorts of conversation. It's just that the listening is a skill in and of itself.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

This is a great point, and I'm not sure how great of an answer I have. I'm going to flail around here a little, and hopefully other people will jump in as well.

It sounds to me like you're suggesting that white people should talk with people of colour about their experiences as a therapist might talk with a client, instead of as a friend or an ally. Isn't there a level on which that's problematic?

Yes, that would definitely be problematic, and it's not what I meant to suggest. And yes, I understand what you're saying about "chiming in" being a normal conversational technique for expressing empathy. But I think that there are situations in which "chiming in with an anecdote from my experience" is experienced as anti-empathy, because it seems to be claiming equivalence between situations which actually reflect a huge imbalance.

For example: when I was literally crippled by my arthritis, requiring crutches and narcotics just to be able to manage to get through a curtailed version of normal daily activities, I had this interaction again and again: I would try to talk about how that affected my life or outlook, and the other person would say something like, "Well, on some level we're all disabled. I'd like to run a marathon, but I'll never be able to."

Now, whatever their motives - expressing empathy, making me feel that I wasn't alone, suddenly struck by the fact that all bodies are imperfect and wanting to share their insight - the effect on me was always to make me feel completely alienated, misunderstood, and trivialized. It felt like the difficulties of my situation made them so uncomfortable that they had to gloss over them by comparing them to something minor and making it seem like they'd "been there." It definitely felt like they were making the comparison to make themselves feel better, not to make me feel better.

I think there are normal, conversational, non-therapeutic ways of expressing, "wow, that sounds really rough and unfair and it's outside my experience entirely. I have no idea how I would handle that." Or, "that really sucks - what do you think should be done about it?" Or yeah, simply (as redbird suggests, "How can I help?"

[therealjae.livejournal.com]

I see what you mean. I suppose, though, that I think if someone makes an attempting-to-be-empathetic analogy to their own experience, the other person has every right to say, in some way (whether directly or indirectly): "well, but that's not the same thing, because x, y, and z." Again, that's how it tends to work in everyday conversation--in fact, I wrote a paper once that analyzed an excerpt just like that.

I really did like all the points you made here, and I think you're right about them in the context of this discussion. But looking at it from a slightly different direction, it's sounding a little too much like you're saying that when a member of a marginalized group is talking about his or her experiences as a part of that marginalized group, normal conversational procedures don't (and maybe can't) apply. And while that may in fact be true, I really hope it isn't.

-J

[rivka.livejournal.com]

I suppose, though, that I think if someone makes an attempting-to-be-empathetic analogy to their own experience, the other person has every right to say, in some way (whether directly or indirectly): "well, but that's not the same thing, because x, y, and z."

Of course. But if it's something that seems like it always happens, or seems to be happening in a systematic way because of the very power imbalances that you're trying to describe, or if it triggers intense emotions about being trivialized/marginalized, it's still likely to shut down communication even if the opportunity to correct and move on is technically present.

it's sounding a little too much like you're saying that when a member of a marginalized group is talking about his or her experiences as a part of that marginalized group, normal conversational procedures don't (and maybe can't) apply. And while that may in fact be true, I really hope it isn't.

I hear what you're saying, and I don't actually know if I think that's true or not. I think it's definitely an area where you have to pay more attention to the meta-conversation, or the larger context of the conversation, but I don't know that I think it's totally its own thing.

[johnpalmer.livejournal.com]

One of the troubles with saying "that's not the same thing" is that it can lead to accusations (internal or external) of whining. Or fears of accusations of whining. Or, just an overwhelmed feeling of how there's no way to bridge the gap.

I think that's one of the reasons it's important to be careful in this kind of situation, to be aware of the possibility that it could be hurtful to draw any kind of comparison. That way, if you do make a statement that's intended to be empathic, and it doesn't work out, well, now you can try to recover.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

Yes! I remember telling a friend that grocery stores are really difficult for me (I buy most other things online), and they are -- I have to lean on the cart and sit on all the benches the Giant has around and then give the cashier money and go sit on another bench until she finishes checking me out. My friend said "Oh, everybody gets tired at the grocery store," which made me feel like she didn't believe I was disabled.

[redbird]

Yes. The sort of things that might be well-intentioned but practically shout that the person either isn't really listening or doesn't understand what you're saying.

[aloha-moira.livejournal.com]

What a thoughtful post/series of comments.

I'm not sure I have much to offer, but the concept of "chiming in" as a technique for attempting to empathize really rings true to me. I feel like I'm often guilty of trying to draw analogies between other people's experiences and my own. I don't necessarily do this because I believe the experiences are equivalent, but because it's a way for me to get a better handle on the situation. I usually want to be helpful and offer advice, limited as it might be, and the only way I feel like I can do that is to speak from my own experiences. I can definitely see how it might make the other person feel that I'm trivializing their situation, regardless of my intent, but it's hard not to do it when it's the only way I know how to empathize.

I think a big problem is that most people *don't* know normal conversational non-therapeutic ways of empathizing or communicating in this sort of situation, so comparing to their own experience is the default. I think that most people grow up in a fairly homogenous environment, where it's usually perfectly appropriate to compare experiences. Then, when we eventually want to communicate with people who are very different (or who have had very different experiences), we aren't equipped with the proper tools - because we haven't had many opportunities to learn how.

I suppose part of the problem is the assumption that when someone discusses their problems, they must be looking for advice or empathy when really they may just want a sympathetic ear. So the first step would be to acknowledge that we may be doing more harm than good by trying to give advice or empathize. But the second step - actually knowing *how* to listen sympathetically despite not personally identifying with the situation - is still problematic for many people.

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

Now, whatever their motives - expressing empathy, making me feel that I wasn't alone, suddenly struck by the fact that all bodies are imperfect and wanting to share their insight - the effect on me was always to make me feel completely alienated, msunderstood, and trivialized. It felt like the difficulties of my situation made them so uncomfortable that they had to gloss over them by comparing them to something minor and making it seem like they'd "been there." It definitely felt like they were making the comparison to make themselves feel better, not to make me feel better.

I had the same reaction to people who responded to my depression by pointing out all the things I had to be happy about. In an effor to "cheer me up".

Talking to other people who were suffering from depression, OTOH, made me feel understood and commiserated with.

(Just noodling here.)

[rmjwell.livejournal.com]

Thank you for the insightful conversation.

Your comments resonate with me about a situation I see in business situations. If you ask someone, "Can you do [task]?" the most common responses are some variations on "yes, I can" or "no, I can't." Very rarely do I hear, "I'm not sure" or "I dn't know." It seems that owning up to an indeterminate state --whether it is about doing a task or listening to a story without picking a role-- is a difficult thing for people to do.

[vito-excalibur.livejournal.com]

It sounds to me like you're suggesting that white people should talk with people of colour about their experiences as a therapist might talk with a client, instead of as a friend or an ally.

When my therapist listens to me talk, it's not because it's going to be of any great value to her to hear what I have to say.

[therealjae.livejournal.com]

True, but I'm talking about behaviour, not intent. The behaviour of a therapist seems to be very similar to the behaviour of listening carefully without offering up your own anecdotes or observations.

-J

[vito-excalibur.livejournal.com]

What then is the difference between the behavior of a therapist and the behavior of a student?

Note also that anecdotes != observations.

"My mom died."
"Oh, that's too bad. You know, my cat died a couple of weeks ago, so I know how you feel."

is different from

"My mom died."
"Oh gosh, that must be hard. You two were very close."

[elusis.livejournal.com]

I know from my work in conversation analysis that telling a little anecdote from your own life is a normal, useful way for a co-conversationalist to convey empathy with the person who's narrating some aspect of *their* life.

Do you understand that your experience of this as a normal, baseline mode of interaction may be located within a specific cultural context?

[therealjae.livejournal.com]

Actually, in both my personal and professional experience it's located within several different cultural contexts--and even one intercultural context. You're right, though, that there may well be cultural contexts in which people do not do this. I'm not aware of any, but that doesn't mean they don't exist.

-J

[firecat]

simply a part of everyday conversation

Is "everyday conversation" really as monolithic as that?

[therealjae.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure what you mean by "as that," so the best answer to your question is that I don't know. There are in fact plenty of ways in which "everyday conversation" behaves in exactly the same way around the world--there are always strikingly similar mechanisms for turn-taking, for example. Whether this is like that, well--I think we probably don't have enough information about cross-cultural differences in showing empathy to make a claim one way or the other.

In general, though, the extent to which different cultures can be said to have entirely different conversational mechanisms that can then account for the various misunderstandings that arise has tended to be overstated, not understated. Intercultural communication scholars have tended to concentrate on misunderstandings because they're easy to spot and academically "sexy," but there are in fact far more ways that people from different cultures adapt to each other's slightly different conversational mechanisms and communicate successfully than there are ways that they misunderstand each other.

-J