(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

[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.

[elusis.livejournal.com]

There is some good information here (http://colours.mahost.org/org.html) that is helpful if one wants to improve one's ability to act and communicate in a way that dismantles, rather than supports, covert racism.