Humorless

One of the long time accusations toward feminists, at least white ones, were that we are humorless. Even a comedian I love a great deal, George Carlin, made a joke along this line - I believe the 'joke' was, 'Imagine Elmer Fudd Raping Porky Pig.'

Two things make that joke more funny than other rape humor, which is to say not much. One, the figures are not only fictional but cartoons. Two is that it is rape of a man by another man, which carries an additional "they deserve" it weight than even rape of a woman by a man.

"You deserved it" is the implicit threat of rape. Usually the "deserved it" is justified by a presumed poor decision on the part of the rape victim/survivor. Just about anything is a poor decision by this rubric: wearing too much clothing or too little; going out or living along; letting a male friend sleep over; being someplace in public; having male friends; touching male friends. You'll note the entire previous list presumes the victim/survivor is female, implicitly if nor explicitly. That is largely because, for all intents and purposes, only one form of male on male rape is acknowledged - prison rape - and there the "you deserved it" is being a criminal. Or, rather, being prosecuted by a court of law, which is not necessarily the same as being a criminal. Male on male rape outside of prison is barely ever mentioned, and female on male rape is considered a joke by a distressingly large number of people.

I'm not touching racial or sexual orientation issues very much; a lot of this is because I'm not sure of them, but I will note in passing that there is history of accusations of rape being used as a "you deserved it" for murdering black men, which is unacceptable, and that men of color are disproportionately sentenced to more and longer terms in prison, which opens them up for a higher likelihood of rape. I'm sure there are many more intersections, such as appearance and fat biases, and caregiver rape of their clients which is under-reported and also often used as a punch line.

Recently, someone I find quite funny and appealing and even a bit hott made reference to a longstanding joke about a "rape van" with pokemons and lolipops in the glove compartment. It stems off of a recent addiction of mine, Repo: the Genetic Opera (if you like dark, love music, and can handle a bit of gore, this movie may be for you), specifically something said by TZ, one of the two authors and an actor in the movie, about the presumed target audience and their presumed attitude toward women (I htink; I can't find anything on the original instance). I haven't yet decided, outside of this post, how I'm going to address the comment by TZ (if at all), and I didn't have the ovaries to talk to FAH (funny, appealing, hott) person who made the reference, but someone else did and he rapidly dropped it without any sign of defensiveness, which should be normal but is phenomenal.

At least some of my hesitancy was that old insult about humorless feminists. I consider myself rather funny and witty, and I had accepted wholesale that being a humorless feminist was a horrible, awful thing to be, but I've changed my mind.

I'm ok being humorless in some things.

Rape isn't funny.

Jokes about rape carry an implicit "you deserve it" which is unacceptable to anyone, male of female, because at the end of the day the "you" includes all of us.

Shades of Hopelessness

I often don’t know what to say.

Many have spoken in the past about the importance of speaking out, even when you’re unsure; sometimes I think my own fear of speaking out imperfectly – of getting something wrong – is an artifact of my white liberal consciousness, and sometimes I think it’s tiredness after a day of swimming from fractured consciousness to fractured consciousness, and sometimes I think it’s an excuse to do nothing, eat ice cream, and enjoy a life where my neighbors (or people across the planet) aren’t dropping bombs and my apartment is standing, with running water and electricity and internet.

A lot of the time, I’m just not sure.

And perhaps the desire for surety itself is an artifact of other ways of thinking which impedes what’s in my mind, and perhaps the desire for surety is one learned from the histories I’ve read of sure people who could exist with clean consciousnesses.

My consciousness these days seems shaded with smoke and blood. Obscured by suffering that isn’t mine, and often suffering that is at a distance.

There is suffering in Gaza, and Iraq, and Afghanistan, and the suffering of one place doesn’t make the suffering of the others any less, but it does make it harder to hold in hands I can wash clean at the sink, standing in a living room unmarked by ash and bombs and death.

There is a part of me which wants forgiveness for this laziness; this privilege, but another part which knows the desire for forgiveness is centering myself, centering whiteness and liberality again, in a world that needs a different center.

I am not an organizer, or a letter writer. I’m lucky if I can remember to contact the people I love regularly, or do my dishes, or take care of my cat. These days anything beyond tracking my clients and being with them seems impossibly hard, including writing papers and reading books. There are days I don’t want to get out of bed – it all seems to futile, and I won’t manage anything anyway, so just sleep, just rest, just laze in comfort and forget those who don’t have beds, whose families are torn, whose lives are so far from mine.

Selfish and horrible, right?

Some days, all I have is the hope that if I hold faith that a way out is possible, a shining thread will appear by the Minotaur to show me the way out.

But last time, Theseus left Ariadne abandoned on an island.

The underpinnings of these stories are diseased.

And then I remember shocked comments about “How can people live like that.” They have no choice. If the US were attacked tomorrow, and where I live was pinned in, and I survived, I would try to keep going, too – now because of a “how” but simply because the alternative is even worse.

The US continues to take unilateral action in Pakistan, a sovereign state, in a continuation of policies which began by attacking Afghanistan and Iraq, both also sovereign states. The rational is defense of our people.

The underpinnings of these stories are diseased.

I Will Never Be a Radical Woman of Color Feminist

I said this sentence in therapy and she said it would make a good blog title.

It makes a good blog post, too, I think.

I'm not a big fan of essentialism in general. Within my experiences as a white feminist, it is a daily irritant. Discussions on whether Thinking or Feeling as personality traits on the Myers-Briggs personality test turn into claims that there can be psychological essentials because men develop muscle easier (and then presumably are stronger than women, which is why there are no female fire fighters, blacksmiths, and why the military is easier on females). Just to cite a recent example of blinding rage. The continued claim that men and women unfortunately born in non-consistent bodies can never be actual men and women would be another.

However, there are identities to which I will never be privy and for which I can never know what it's like. To an anti-essentialist like myself, this is a bitter pie to dig into. I can feel my lip curling. (Did you know disgust was one of five emotions we think are universal with universal expressions? Now you know.) And sometimes this impossibility means that I cannot adopt identities despite finding them wonderful, interesting, and enviable. A part of my anti-essentialism I must also own to is that, as a white liberal who has grown up I can be anything I want to, this smacks of being told no in a very stern voice, and as a rule I don't like that very much.

But, I will never be a radical woman of color feminist.

I'm still teasing out the differences in my mind. I know there are these two things, one I like and one that I don't, and that there are bits and pieces all over the place with them, but I think it will take me being reconciled to the second (since I don't like it, let's call it the antithesis) until synthesis can arise for me personally.

Or I could read the synthesis on an awesome blog.

The second sounds easier - get to work! ;)

Musing on Collage

I walked away from closing one of my jobs down (which included literally packing everything in boxes) with an armload of National Geographics for collage making - which many (white) collagers probably know is like paper gold.

One of the side effects of my chosen thesis (currently condensed to "an attempt at amplifying the archetypal figures which come from and speak to marginalized populations") is that - as an integral part of its nature - it forces me to examine the images I am choosing to put forward in my collages in a way I never had before, and from this new perspective National Geographic is deeply disturbing.

Most of the people in National Geographic don't look like me, you see. Most of their skin is brown because the skin of most of the people in the world is brown. Even the people who have a similar skin tone to mine wear clothes which do not resemble mine, live lives with few ties to mine, have souls which are not a part of me outside of the more philosophical implications embraced branches of Buddhism, Hinduism, and the White New Age Movements in the US.

I find myself looking at the images which draw me with new eyes. Where lurk the artifacts of psyche which dehumanize these people whose photographs I had never before thought twice about cutting up for my own purposes? Can I find them all, or is this a twisted treasure hunt without either clue or end?

Oy! APA! WTF???

People who thing transgendered people need to be "fixed" are a bad choice on setting the DSM standards for anything.

I'd say more, but my brain hurts.

The obvious victims are men, but women exist unseen and unspoken of

This about the Indian workers who were brought in to Tulsa, Oklahoma to work who were held as ill-treated slaves. The details are even more horrifying that the broad strokes; above and beyond paying them, $2 an hour, they were told to clean toilets, fed half of an egg omelet for breakfast, and the vegetarian Hindus were denied milk, which led to many of them beginning to eat meat to survive. And to top it all off, the owner said he thought he was doing the Indian men a FAVOR because people were starving in India, so you can add blatant racism on the caliber of the rationals about owning black slaves because they're inferior.

A local priest gave up his home for them, and a local lawyer paid out of his own pocket to continue the suit against the company on behalf of the men.

And what struck me, especially in light of the recent discussions about what are feminist issues, is that it's this sort of racist mindset that leads to self-justified ill-treatment of women of color. And even in this specific case, the Indian workers borrowed so much money to come that they took out loans and borrowed from their families - which affects their wives and female children. And the way this fell out, some of the men have brought their women and children to the US.

And, more rootlike, these sorts of injustices are the same as the ones we fight against on behalf of women. As fall-out form this case, there is now a pathway for how to deal with human trafficking of this kind in the US; my understanding is that women tend to be trafficked more than men, so they are likely to gain benefits from this precedent. The racial biases against the workers would affect Indian women, too, in addition to the sexism they're going to face. There are so many ways in which this, while not directly a feminist issue, butts up against and will shift feminist issues.

Uprooting Colorblind Racism

I was raised a colorblind racist.

I say this without any particular shame or anger. Colorblind racism was an honest effort on the part of white liberals who wanted to support people of all skin-tones and histories but who clearly Did Not Get It (tm).

And what they did not get was that racism was systemic, not personal, and that all the "be proud of yourself" messages in the world wouldn't do anything so long as people of color (henceforth PoC*) faced regular objectification and bias due to the color of their skin. All of the "our race is human" does nothing against people who appear Latin@ (whether they are or not) needing to wear their birth certificate as protection against being deported for their skin tone and accent despite their birthplace. None of the "I don't see color" helps the thousands of PoC given less advantageous mortgages despite having the same financial situation as whites who got the good mortgages. The world is made of color, the world sees color, and people of color are regularly and routinely discriminated against in the present, as well as inherently disadvantaged due to hundreds of years of degradation and racism which kept them from the best jobs, education, and homes.

Colorblind racism is the well meaning attempt of privileged people to wite-out history and call us even, who then don't notice the people with most of the advantages are white because there is no color anymore. Colorblind racism is the person who immediately brings up "the race card" as something that should be talked about more, who when challenged to describe examples of this "race card" describe a situation where the person in question very likely was discriminated against because of his race, because bosses 'worse' then him were promoted. Colorblind racism is the systematic listing of examples of times when one was racially enlightened in some way without noticing the myriad examples of privilege which smoothed one's path. Colorblind racism is using "ghetto" instead of "black" and not liking it when the blacks outnumber you, but saying you're not racist.

Colorblind racism makes being named a racist worse than racist acts.

Colorblind racism is gaining merit badges on diversity and sewing them onto a dress inspired by Native Tribes who were destroyed by the country I live in, and not even noticing that it might be wrong to take a phrasebook of Native words to pick an "Indian Name" as a part of the same program.

That is what colorblind racism is. I'm going to indulge in one of the more self-indulgent leavings of my liberalism with some quality navel-gazing in the hopes that it will help others to give up their colorblind racism, or at the very least stop precursing racist statements with, "I'm not racist, but..." This form of navel-gazing can be seen as, and used as, an insulation against actually doing the hard things, but I'm hoping here it will serve as something educational in addition. We all know white people LOVE to be educational. ;)

My road from colorblind racism to what I am now (whatever that is; I don't consider myself an ally yet) began with what seems like a simple act, but which in retrospect seems to be a surprisingly rare one for liberals to mention. I approached black women as my superiors.

The seed for this was set in my teens, when many of my wisest supervisors were black women, and some of my wisest friends were Latinas. In watching white liberals hit the shoals of Angry Black Bitch (my gateway drug to the feminists blog-o-sphere), Angry Black Woman, or Having Read the Fine Print and disintegrate into waves of denial, shame, rage, and suddenly pathetic logic, I think I've found that the pattern in general seems to be that they all approach these women as if they were neophytes to their own life experiences - that is, as if the white liberals were the experts, and the women who lived the lives were ignorant of the deeper implications of their lives.

In contrast, I had developed a pattern with presumed whites which I continued into a non-white context; when you are the visitor, your host is the expert. I may eventually disagree with them, but the assumption is that they are the experts and I am the neophyte, so the cues should be taken from them not from my life experiences up until that point. So I would read articles about dumb white people, or racism, or how bias played out in the media, and my ground floor assumption would be that they were accurate.

It helped, I think, that Angry Black Bitch types exactly as my supervisor and peers had spoken when I was a teenager; I found how she turned a phrase and the language she used to be familiar, and I could hear the voice in my head as an echo of those days where I wasn't once of the group, but I was tolerated and possibly even liked. It also helped that Angry Black Woman uses an intellectual language I was comfortable with, and regularly indulges in one of my favorite pastimes - analysis of media - and that she likes many of the same shows I do. Both of these facts eased me into weighing their other statements, the ones I was not aware of or comfortable with, more heavily than I might have otherwise. Because it's all about me. (Actually, I think that both of them were explicitly not writing for me was a feature, not a bug.)

By the time I hit the wider blog-o-sphere and such challenging and brilliant minds of Sydette on Having Read the Fine Print, Donna on The Silence of Our Friends, Nezua at Unapologetic Mexican and Field at The Field Negro, I was well primed to see things which made me defensive as a necessary suffering for the purpose of being able to hear their voices clearly, instead of through a fog of racist assumptions about them (a topic Nezua covers explicitly and extensively in his La Lente Blanca (The White Lens) Series).**

A lot of my assumptions, both about myself and about the world, had to be rethunk. One of the places where I have felt these shifts the hardest were in the media I preferred to consume. Most, if not all, of my favorite books, tv shows, movies, and music are racially problematic (a euphemism for fucking racist). As someone who develops extreme attachment to these things, and who uses them for self-soothing***, this has been the most life changing aspect of this process so far (like I said, I'm not an ally yet), and the part which provided the largest incentive to embrace my privilege and let all of my new knowledge unexist somehow.

Obviously, I haven't done that, but I couldn't be completely honest if I didn't say the thought crossed my mind more than once, especially at 3am when I couldn't sleep and every book I tried to read screamed 'racism, racism, racism' in my face.

More recently, though, the initial wash of guilt and rage and inarticulate stress, I found my brain doing something new. Reading one of my longtime favorite books, one of the millions set in a future that is implied to be all white despite the minority reality of whites worldwide, I began consciously shifting races for each of the characters. Very few had their skin color actually specified (one reference to guards - one light, one dark - and a mention of alabaster which seemed tied to the skin of one of the main characters), and I found it was surprisingly easy to imagine the calm, career cop Director of the largest, space-floating prison as a calm, unflappable, intuitive, Asian man and the narrow, grieving, top class cop as a wiry black man. The remarkable musician who played a piano in an age when most of the instruments will be unknown to us now, who was psychic, and who skillfully entered the Labyrinth and exited again changed but unscathed, could easily be an Australian Aborigine, and the French-speaking gutter-rat singer in the band could, through the magic of imagination, be Latina.

I ran each character through a kaleidoscope, noting where aspects of their character sparked resonances with my internalized biases about what "each race" was like, and which ran contrary to it, and the why wasn't far behind, and suddenly this story I loved so much for it's representation of mystical symbolism became at once more realistic and more rich - suddenly my favorite book didn't have the whitewash of my own brain.

And in my own writing, I notice the shifts. Even when a series I'm basing my stories off of ignore entire continents of the planet Earth, I can re-introduce them. When creating my own worlds, I can make them complex with racial and societal tensions. When thinking about the psychology I love, I can include a wider range of people - I can stop trying to treat me in all of my individual peculiarity, and try to treat us with the plurality of methods needed to actually meet the needs of a wide variety of people. When meeting people, I can try to understand their racial and cultural backgrounds as a part of getting to know them instead of ignoring it as a distraction.

And I find myself increasingly impatient with people who say, "I'm not racist, but..." or who bring up 'reverse racism' as a serious problem that not enough people talk about as their first response to me saying that I want to help create a psychology that is multicultural and anti-racist. And when I notice the fucked-upness of privilege lurking, I speak up about it, I point it out, I teach Racism 101, and frequently I drive people to change the subject or leave altogether. I'm also seeing more on my own, instead of waiting for a member of the group being discriminated against to point out the problems. I've noticed this awareness spreading out from racial awareness to awareness of how disabled people are discriminated against, or the mentally ill, or lesbigaytrans individuals. An increased sensitivity in one area has made me a better person overall in terms of my own ethics, even while those ethics remain essentially unchanged.

Someone recently (if anyone remembers whom, I would love the name, my sieve-like brain is unhelpful Two people who touched on this are Ilyka in this comment thread at Creek Running North about being an ally and Donna at The Silence of Our Friends) brought up the problem that by portraying becoming an ally as something difficult or painful, it gives privileged people (by any of the measures, not just racially) an excuse to not be allies and to justify it. I think that it can be used that way, and will be used by people who want to have their ethical cake and eat it to - i.e. who want to say they are anti-racist without internalizing any of the awareness of racism or changing their world-orientation and actions in accord with their ethics. But I would argue that those kinds of people would find excuses one way or another to avoid walking the walk that they talk.

The pain of becoming aware of how unjust and wrong the world is, how skewed and unnatural, how powerful people have twisted everything good for their own ends, is a true and honest pain, I think. The ability to ignore reality is a gift that is given to very few people, and those few people can do an enormous amount of damage in their blindness, but there is pleasure to be found in ignorance and giving up that pleasure, however unearned and world-damaging, is painful. I personally think the warning that it will be painful may help the honest ones of us, the ignorant and privileged, to keep going even at 3 AM when all the knowledge of the world we ignored for decades is beating down our bedroom doors.

I'm only a few steps outside, though; my ability to be wrong is legion.


* I am aware this term is somewhat problematic depending on the individuals who I would place under this umbrella term, but I find the phrase "non-white" even more problematic. If anyone has a better turn of phrase, I'd love to learn about it.

** The rest of my link list came later, in some cases much later; this is mostly chronological, so some of my best links, like brownfemipower (whose blog has been removed due to it not serving the community in the manner she wished it to) came much later.

*** For those who haven't gotten psychological phrasing bone deep like I have, self-soothing is the process of diminishing one's anxiety through tasks which bring one pleasure or comfort. In my case, this was often reading a particular section of abook, or watching a movie which was deeply meaningful.