white quotation of the week (robert terry)

The Parable of Ups and Downs

What makes an Up an Up and a Down a Down is that an Up can do more to a Down than a Down can do to an Up. That's what keeps an Up up and a Down down. The Ups tend to talk to each other and study the Downs, asking the Downs about what's up—or what's coming down, for that matter. The Downs spend a lot of time taking the Ups out to lunch or to dinner to explain their Downness. The Ups listen attentively, often in amazement, about the experiences of being down. They contrast one Down's experience with another Down's experience and don't worry too much about what the Downs are up to because the Downs never get together. If they did, the Ups would have to shape up.

After a while, the Downs weary of talking to the Ups. They tire of explaining and justifying their Downness. They think, “If I have to explain my Downness one more time, I'll throw up.” And so they form a process which they call “networking and support groups.” This act makes the Ups nervous. Three Ups together is a board meeting; three Downs, pre-revolutionary activity. Some Ups hire Downs, dress them up, and send them down to see what the Downs are up to. We sometimes call this “personnel and affirmative action.” This creates a serious problem for the Down who is dressed up with no sure place to go. That Down doesn't know whether he or she is up or down. That's why Downs in the middle often burn out.

Sometimes what the Ups do to smarten up is to ask the Downs to come in to a program one at a time to explain their Downness. The Ups call this “human relations training.” Of course, the Ups never have to explain their Upness; that's why they're Ups rather than Downs.

There's good news and bad news in this parable. The good news is, we're all both Ups and Downs. There's no such thing as a perfect Up or a perfect Down. The bad news is that when we're up it often makes us stupid. We call that “dumb-upness.” It's not because Ups are not smart. It's that Ups don't have to pay attention to Downs the way Downs have to pay attention to Ups. Downs always have to figure out what Ups are up to. The only time Ups worry about Downs is when Downs get uppity, at which time they're put down by the Ups. The Ups’ perception is that Downs are overly sensitive; they have an attitude problem. It is never understood that Ups are underly sensitive and have an attitude problem.

I used to think that when Downs became Ups they would carry over their insight from their Downess to their Upness. Not so: smart down—dumb up.


***********************


I find this parable helpful to gain insight in my work and life. Very rapidly we move into up and down categories and misunderstand each other. If Downs want to understand why an Up doesn't understand an issue, all they have to do is think of their own Up category and see why that issue is not understood. Downs know more about Ups than Ups know about Downs, yet we tend to come out of our Down category first to make sense out of our experience. The Up category is taken for granted and is rarely under review.

Who often has more insight about how the society functions, how organizations function, what's really going on? Frequently, it's Downs, not Ups. Ups are too busy trying to maintain the system rather than generate insight about what's really going on or how to change it. So our source of new insightful information comes from Downs, not from Ups. Yet it's Ups who are the ones whom we often call leaders.


Read more here (PDF)


Robert Terry directed the Reflective Leadership Center at the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota, and was the author of For Whites Only. He died in 2002.

have an aversion to non-white names

I was at a party recently, talking to a young woman of Korean descent named Hae Sook. We'd just met, and as we were talking, a middle-aged white woman I knew approached us. Since Hae Sook didn't know her, it was up to me to introduce them.

"Hae Sook, I said, "This is Margaret. Margaret, Hae Sook."

As I told them a little more about each other, they smiled and shook hands, said "nice to meet you," and so on.

Then Margaret said, "Your name is really hard to catch! How about if I just call you Helen."

I didn't write a question mark at the end of Margaret's question, because her tone implied that she wasn't really asking a question. It was more like an announcement, a statement about something that she was going to do from now on.

Hae Sook's smile sort of froze in place, and she looked as if she felt stunned. I certainly felt that way.

"Um, well," Hae Sook said, "Helen's not my name."

Margaret has this way about her sometimes that I find hard to describe. It's a kind of insistence on getting her own way, but in a friendly way.

"Okay," she said, "well, I'll just do my best, then."

She acted almost . . . put upon. Burdened by an expectation that she take an extra moment to learn and use someone else's actual name, instead of the one that she'd been ever so kind enough to suggest instead. As the three of us chatted for a couple more minutes before Margaret headed off toward someone else she knew, she never asked for a repeat of Hae Sook's name.

"Do you get that a lot?" I asked Hae Sook. "About your name?"

"Sometimes. I've never had someone suggest Helen, though. A lot of people just don't ever bother calling me a name."

As I later told Margaret, her comment reminded of an incident involving Betty Brown, a Texas state representative who was speaking about voter registration problems with Ramey Ko, a representative of the Organization of Chinese Americans.




As Ko explained some problems that arise when people of Asian descent transliterate their names into English, Brown said,

Rather than everyone here having to learn Chinese -- I understand it's a rather difficult language -- do you think that it would behoove you and your citizens to adopt a name that we could deal with more readily here?

Betty Brown seems like a nice, well-meaning person, and she was quick to apologize to Ko (but also to say that she was "misunderstood" -- it can be so hard for white people to admit that they've done something racist).

"We're ready to work with any of these people who are having problems and have them educate us on anything that might be going on that we're unaware of," said Brown.

Among the things that Brown seemed unaware of, as did Margaret, was that her comments said a lot about who she presumes the real Americans are, and what should be done by others to accommodate them.

This aversion to non-white names can also have significant practical consequences.

For instance, researchers in Canada last year conducted a study of "English" versus "non-English" names on resumés. They "composed 6,000 resumés to represent applicants with English or non-English names and sent them to 2,000 different job postings offered by Canadian employers in the Greater Toronto Area." The researchers then discovered that "those with an English name like Jill Wilson and John Martin received 40 percent more interview callbacks than the identical resumés with names like Sana Khan or Lei Li."

In a similar study conducted earlier in the U.S., researchers sent out about 5,000 false resumés in response to want ads for jobs in two newspapers. According to Jet magazine, these researchers "analyzed birth certificates in coming up with what names to use. The White names include Neil, Brett, Greg, Emily, Anne and Jill. Some of the Black names used were Ebony, Tamika, Aisha, Rasheed, Kareem and Tyrone."

The results were even more stark than those in the Canadian study:

Resumes with White-sounding first names elicited 50 percent more responses than ones with Black-sounding names. . . . the "White" applicants they created received one response -- a call, letter or e-mail -- for every 10 resumes mailed, while "Black" applicants with equal credentials received one response for every 15 resumes sent.

Here's another example of the common white aversion to non-white names. A lot of white people who dislike Barack Obama do so in part because they think his name sounds so "un-American" -- that is, non-white. They often express their derision by including and emphasizing his middle name, Hussein. Birther movement leader Orley Taitz -- a woman dedicated to "proving" that Obama wasn't born in the U.S. -- does just that at about 1:45 in this clip.

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor's last name is another one that many white people couldn't be bothered to pronounce correctly. Writing for the National Review, Matt Krikorian spoke for many when he wrote,

Deferring to people's own pronunciation of their names should obviously be our first inclination, but there ought to be limits. Putting the emphasis on the final syllable of Sotomayor is unnatural in English . . . and insisting on an unnatural pronunciation is something we shouldn't be giving in to.

[One] of the areas where conformity is appropriate is how your new countrymen say your name, since that's not something the rest of us can just ignore, unlike what church you go to or what you eat for lunch. And there are basically two options -- the newcomer adapts to us, or we adapt to him. And multiculturalism means there's a lot more of the latter going on than there should be.

Oh, that damned multiculturalism!

I obviously disagree with Krikorian's plea for assimilation to (white) American standards. I think that instead of expecting non-white people to adjusting their names for the lazy comfort of white tongues and ears, white people should struggle a little more than they often do with names that they find unfamiliar -- it's really not that difficult.

Using a person's actual, correctly pronounced name acknowledges his or her individual humanity. White people in the U.S. should also practice correct name pronunciation because, as their demographic majority continues to decline, they're likely to encounter more and more people with names that they haven't heard before. I also think that if white people do feel uncomfortable when they encounter unfamiliar names, they should do some self-reflection about just what that discomfort means.

How about you -- have you encountered other instances of white aversion with non-white names?

use racially coded jungle settings to promote world peace

And now, some Friday music.

Have you heard of Sir Ivan? He's a well-intentioned performer of techno music with an interesting background (see below).

I really wonder just what Sir Ivan was thinking when he made the following music video. He appears here in his getup as "Peaceman" (complete with billowing cape), who springs into action to spread world peace by, um . . . getting tribal Africans to stop fighting and start loving?




Will this tired setup of individualized white performers backed by anonymous black people, in jungles and other settings, ever die?

At least when the California Milk Processor Board made a video like this to promote milk, they seemed to be parodying such racist, colonialist configurations (but then, maybe not).

"Sir Ivan" is the creation of a U.S. citizen named Ivan Wilzig. According to Wikipedia,

"Sir" Ivan L. Wilzig (born c. 1956) or Peaceman is a musician who is best known for techno remixes of 1960s songs such as "Imagine" and "San Francisco". He is also founder of the nonprofit Peaceman Foundation. . . . Wilzig is the son of the late Siegbert (Siggi) Wilzig, who as a penniless German Holocaust survivor earned a fortune through finance. 59 of Ivan Wilzig's relatives were killed during the Holocaust. Ivan was born in Newark and grew up in Clifton, New Jersey as the oldest of the Wilzig children. . . .

He and his brother, Alan Wilzig, assisted his father in running the Trust Company Bank of New Jersey. Most of Ivan Wilzig's work at the bank was in public relations and marketing; he tried one year as a corporate lawyer but hated it. In 2000 "Sir Ivan" abandoned his banking career to begin a career in music.

According to Sir Ivan's web site, he also established The Peaceman Foundation,

a private foundation which supports an array of charities dedicated to fighting Hate Crimes and treating the victims of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Sir Ivan is donating 100 percent of his recording artist net profits from his album to his Peaceman Foundation. To further promote peace through his music and foundation, Sir Ivan always performs in peace capes, which has earned him the title “PEACEMAN,” the rock star superhero fighting for peace.

These efforts seem noble, and Sir Ivan's music has apparently acquired a fair number of fans, so charity funds are presumably reaching some people who could use them. Nevertheless, this video for his version of "Kumbaya" needs to be called out. Its arrangement of one white body and a lot of black bodies revives, as if from a collective white unconscious, a fantasized, paternalistic relationship. This is an old dream, a fantasy about superior white men who bestow their benevolence upon inferior, primitive, alternately childish and hypersexualized African "natives."

The problems with this fantasy are, of course, multiple and complex. The presumptuous white supremacy that has helped to justify several centuries of suffering and resource-plundering remains within the collective white psyche. This lingering presumption provides white people, even those with the best, most "charitable" intentions, with ready-made narrative structures. These narratives place white individuals at the center, and non-white, non-Western people at their service. Even today, as Sir Ivan and his Peace cape demonstrate, inserting oneself into such a narrative structure tends to produce little more than self-aggrandizing displays of white Western oblivion, arrogance, and ultimately, abuse.

However sincere Sir Ivan's philanthropic efforts may be, he does Africans (and other colonialized people) no favors with this portrayal of both them, and of himself in relation to them.

feel entitled to touch black women's hair

This is a guest post by Los Angelista, who writes of herself, "I live in LA but at heart, I'm your average Black/Irish Midwesterner who loves to write, read, eavesdrop and take photos. I'm a Baha'i, an insomniac, I ponder becoming vegan, I'm fanatical about chai and I will love you forever if you get me front row tix to a Depeche Mode show."

No, You Can't Touch My Hair

Earlier this afternoon I was at Los Angeles' Griffith Park public pool with my kids. We were having a pretty good time. And that's despite the fact that some random old man hobbled by me and said, "Nice tits."

I was pretty shocked by his comment but he was gone before I could respond. To make things even stranger, he proceeded to walk over to an overweight pre-teen boy and say the same thing to him!

It was definitely a crazy moment, but it was a gorgeous afternoon so I contented myself with watching my sons splashing in the water and reading "O" magazine.

Unfortunately, the madness wasn't over. A few minutes later, a woman, a white woman, approached me, her hand extended toward my head. "Ooh your hair is sooo pretty. Can I touch it?"

I immediately leaned away out of her reach and said, "No."

Her response? A shocked and outraged, "Are you serious? I can't touch your hair?"

"No, you can't," I replied. I guess she's never seen my #donotpetmyafro hashtag on Twitter.

Indeed, she had the nerve to look confused and offended as she asked, "Why not?"

Really, lady? You want me to explain to you why I don't want you to touch my hair? Let's see...

Because you're a STRANGER.

Because I'm not an animal in the zoo.

Because this is my body and I don't have to let anybody touch any part of it, EVER, if I don't want to.

Because my black ancestors may have been your ancestors' property, and had to smile while they got touched in ways they didn't want to, but I am not YOUR property and never will be so you'd best move your hand away from me.

I was so overwhelmed by anger that my mouth opened and no sound came out. I think my eyes must've had shown what I was feeling because she made this weird face, turned on her heel and huffily walked back over to her towel.

Unfortunately her towel was maybe 10 feet away from mine. Just great.

The pool was closing in 20 minutes so I yelled a five minute warning to my kids and got busy packing up our stuff. That's when I overheard the woman talking smack about me to her child.

"I'm a nice person and I try so hard to be nice to THEM, but I'm tired of trying to be nice to bitchy black women."

My kids hopped out of the water and began drying off, all while she threw me dagger looks and ranted to her child. "All I wanted to do was touch her hair. What's the big deal about that? She should be happy I asked to touch her hair."

My eight year-old caught on pretty quickly, "Is she talking about YOU, mommy?"

It made me so angry that my sons were being exposed to the situation. I wanted to hit something. I wanted to drag the woman to the side of the pool, hold her head under water and scream, "*&#*%^ TOUCH THIS!"

Instead, with as much dignity as I could, I hustled us out the door, tears of pure rage pricking my eyes.

I couldn't go over to her and explain why her request was not OK. Why should I have to explain, especially when I feel like nothing I would've said would've made it right? The only thing that would've made it all better is if I'd said, "I'm sorry you're upset. Go ahead and touch my hair."

She wanted to objectify me and have me go along with her request, a request that smacked of racial superiority and privilege. But when I didn't like it, I became the problem.

I know there are those who'll think this woman's behavior has nothing to do with racism and subconscious privilege, and is instead a matter of someone being rude and unable to respect personal boundaries.

Being rude and being racist are not mutually exclusive things. In this situation I'd say that this woman's attitude -- a black woman, with all her afro-y exoticness must let me touch her hair because I'm curious and I did ask-- is both rude AND racist.

In addition, her subsequent comments gave voice to the prevalent racist American stereotype that black women are bitches. But, like so many, this woman failed to recognize what role her own attitude may have in any negative interactions she may be having with black women.

With her comment that I should've been happy she said my hair was pretty, I found myself feeling like I could've been the slave that the missus had deigned to notice. "Isn't our colored woman's hair cute?"

I know there are those who think black women should let folks from other backgrounds touch their hair. How else will we learn about each other, right?

In that line of thinking, I was just being mean to someone who was merely trying to be open minded.

Here's the thing: I don't really like people touching my hair, period. I don't care who you are.

I don't ask to touch other people's hair, either. But if we have a relationship where we're really good friends and a piece of lint has blown into my hair and you're offering to get it out for me, OK, you can touch my hair.

Otherwise, let me say unequivocally, please don't try to use my hair as some sort of cultural learning experience. And don't expect me to be all, "Oh thank you, missus! You sho is thoughtful to notice ole nappy me!"

You want to know what a black woman's natural hair feels like? Get your own black female friends and ask them, not me. That is, if you can stop thinking we're bitches long enough for that to happen.

On the car ride home my sons rapid-fired question at me. They wanted to know what had gone down. As I explained to them what had occurred they were shocked and angered. "How dare she try to touch your hair! You're not her dog!"

Exactly!

Hours later, my eldest son keeps hugging me and saying, "I'm so sorry that happened to you, mommy. She had no right to treat you like that."

No, she had no right. But sadly, I'm sure this will not be the last time I have to say, no, you can't touch my hair.

listen to jimmy carter

I don't know how many people in the U.S., white or otherwise, actually listen to Jimmy Carter anymore, but I think they should. Whatever the failures of his presidency, his ceaseless efforts since then to make the world a better place don't get the kind of attention they deserve.

In an interview marking his 85th birthday, Carter spoke out about the increasingly toxic political environment in the U.S., including what he called "the racist attitude that is the basis for the negative environment that we see so vividly demonstrated in public affairs in recent days."

Here's what Carter said about white racism in this NBC interview:

I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man, that he's African American. I live in the South, and I've seen the South come a long way, and I've seen the rest of the country, that's shared the South's attitude toward minority groups at that time, particularly African Americans. That racism still exists and I think it's bubbled up to the surface, because of a belief among many white people, not just in the South, but around the country, that African Americans are not qualified to lead this great country. It's an abominable circumstance, and grieves me and concerns me very deeply.

Reporter Chuck Todd says in this segment that Carter did the Obama Administration no favors by calling out racism like this, because "this is something they know they're going to have to respond to, and they're not going to be very happy about it" because of their "fear of backlash."

It'll be interesting to see how the White House responds, if at all. Maybe the people there won't bother -- I doubt they listen to Jimmy Carter much more than most other Americans do these days.

I'm suddenly hearing, reading, and seeing a lot more talk this week about this issue -- whether racism is a significant factor fueling opposition to health care reform, and to Obama more generally. Are you hearing more of it too?

One of the better points I've read about it all comes from Danielle Belton at The Black Snob:

No one thought the world was ending when Bill Clinton tried to kick start Universal Healthcare. There were complaints from the Republicans and the industry and Harry and Louise ads and mocking tones about "Hillarycare." But there wasn't crying and screaming in the streets mixed with gun toting and swastikas by a recalcitrant minority of people who seem unable to grasp that election '08 is over and Sarah Palin lost.

Could the growing concern about racism actually be a concerted, increasingly successful Republican effort to make this health care fight all about race, all the while denying that their protests have anything at all to do with that? Could this be a "Southern Strategy Redux"?

What do you think is turning up the heat? The most recent teabagger protests? Joe Wilson's "You Lie!" outburst during Obama's health-care speech?

cling to racist mascots

This guest post (which originally appeared at Sociological Images) is by Lisa Wade, an assistant professor of Sociology at Occidental College.

Angry Asian Man wrote about two East High Schools–in Rochester, New York and Akron, Ohio–with a peculiar mascot: the Orientals.

East High School merch (Rochester, New York):

Screen shot of the East High School website (Akron, Ohio):

Notice the Asian-y font and the stylistic dragon.

When high schools and sports teams recruit a type of person as a mascot, it objectifies and caricatures them. It also encourages opposing teams to say things like “Kill the Orientals.” This can only be okay when we aren’t really thinking about these kinds of people as real humans beings.

This reminded me: As an undergraduate, I went to the University of California, Santa Barbara. Our mascot was the Gaucho, which I remember being described as a Mexican cowboy (though South American cowboy may be more descriptive). I went by the UCSB website and found these two logos. There is a story about the first identifying it as a brand new logo; the second is for kids:

I am troubled by the Gaucho mascot for the same reasons that I don’t like the Orientals mascot, but at least authentic gauchos are not likely to enroll at UCSB the way that “Orientals” are likely students of the East High Schools.

Then again, this is the image on the front page of the UCSB athlectics website:

It does indeed read: “GLORY. HONOR. COURAGE. TORTILLAS.” This seems to invalidate any argument that the use of the Gaucho mascot is “respectful.”

Thinking about the Orientals and the Gauchos, alongside the many American Indian mascots still found in the U.S., Notre Dame’s Fighting Irish, and the soccer team in the Netherlands who call themselves the Jews, may give us some perspective on this mascot phenomenon that thinking about them one at a time doesn’t.

If we feel that one of these mascots is less discriminatory than another, what drives that feeling? And is it logical? Or does it stem from a trained sensibility that isn’t applied to all marginalized groups across the board? Or is it in response to different characteristics of these different groups? Or different contexts?

Maybe all five mascots are equally offensive and offensive for the same reasons. But thinking about them together may also be useful for teasing out how, exactly, they are offensive. What do you think?

leave snarky comments on anti-racism blogs

At least, I'm pretty sure the following is a snarky comment, and that it was written by a disgruntled white person. But sometimes with these things, I'm not sure.

What do you think?

In response to the last post here, Sams384 (who, if memory serves, has never commented here before) left this totally OT comment:


Stuff White People Do:

Take a music award that belongs to a black woman

Piss off black tennis players and take a point because they're black

White people are getting arrogantly racist these days and it sickens me how obvious they make it. Even when it is in front of cameras without stress.

Did you see how racist Taylor Swift's body language was when Kanye took the mic?


I suspect this comment is bait from a troll. Am I wrong?

For one thing, when Kanye took the mic, I saw no racism whatsoever in Taylor Swift's body language. I mean, give me a break -- what would that even look like?

Here's what I suspect: that Sams384 found a rather snide way to say that thing that white people often say, you know, something about "the race card," something about how "black people and those wimpy whites who support them will always find some way to cry racism. Even when black people are the ones who did something wrong!"

And so on.

I think some white folks out there are waiting, and searching, and ready to pounce on complaints about racism in such incidents as these two, just to "prove" their belief that those who point out racism these days are way, way too anxious to do so.

Some of those folks might even be leaving snarky comments on anti-racism blogs, hoping to provoke such "cries" of racism.

But then, maybe I'm reading too much into a comment that's actually nothing but sincere. As I said, sometimes with these things, I'm not sure.

lead unethical lives

Wallace Shawn is a playwright, actor, and essayist, as well as the son of William Shawn, a long-time editor of The New Yorker magazine. In a radio interview with Doug Henwood prompted by his latest book, Shawn said the following:

Henwood: You have an essay on morality in this collection. . . . You grew up with a sense that you’re supposed to be moral, but then you’re thrown into this world that is very immoral, and you’re supposed to somehow separate your morality from the immorality of the world that you’re living in. How do you do it? I mean, is there a way to lead a moral life in a world that is so corrupt and violent?

Shawn: Well, very strictly speaking, I mean if you’re gonna put it so bluntly, not really. Because simply by living a bourgeois life, you’re consuming more than your fair share of the world’s resources, and you’re benefiting from a status quo that oppresses people all over the world. And that’s not even getting into the fact that it’s very hard to make a bourgeois living in a corrupt society without being mired in corruption. That’s very hard to do. People, you know, most people are doing things that are reinforcing the ugly realities of the world.

I think there’s a lot of hypocrisy involved in, for instance, people like myself denouncing, let’s say, the crimes of people like Dick Cheney and the crimes of the Bush administration. Yes, we’re right to denounce them, but when they say, “Hey, we’re doing it for your benefit! Don’t you want the oil that makes your home, you know, warm in the winter and cool in the summer? You do want the oil. Well, we're getting it for you, so shut up!”

And they’re right in that demand that you should admit that you like it, and admit that they’re doing it for you. You know, this is where there’s hypocrisy involved in the life of somebody like myself. So the true answer, if we’re being bluntly honest, is that it’s not very likely that you can live a bourgeois life, and consider yourself someone who follows ethical principles. . .


In a recent blog post entitled "God Shed His Grace Ennui," Dennis Perrin posted the following images and captions:

To demonstrate his determination to win the Afghan war,
President Obama began eating his hand --

Delighting his liberal supporters.

Despite suffering massive burns from a US air strike on her Afghan village,
nine-year-old Nadia Sahar urged American liberals
to not protest President Obama's war,
as it might hurt his re-election chances.

Heeding Nadia's plea, liberals immediately showed their solidarity.

Robert Jensen is a professor in the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin, as well as the author of several inspiring books. In Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity, Jensen writes of his encounters with two students several months after the events of 9/11:

One young woman came to my office the day after we had watched a documentary in class about the 1991 Gulf War and its devastatingly brutal effects -- immediate and lingering -- on the people of Iraq. The student is also active in the movement to support the Palestinian struggle for self-determination, and the day she came to see me was during a period in which Israeli attacks on Palestinians were intensifying.

We talked for some time about a number of political topics, but the conversation kept coming back to one main point: She hurt. As she was learning more about the suffering of others around the world, she felt pain. What does one do about such a feeling, knowing that one’s own government is either responsible for, or complicit in, so much of it? How does one stop feeling that pain, she asked.

I asked her whether she really wanted to wipe that feeling out of her life. Surely you know people, perhaps fellow students, who don’t seem to feel that pain, who ignore all that suffering, I told her. Do you want to become like them? No matter how much it hurts, would you rather not feel at all? Would you rather be willfully ignorant about what is happening?

I could see tears welling in her eyes and feel them in my own; it was an emotional moment for both of us. She left my office, not feeling better in any simplistic sense. But I hope that she left at least with a sense that she was not alone and did not have to feel like a freak for feeling so much, so deeply.

A couple of hours later another student came by. After dealing with the classroom issue she wanted to discuss, we talked more generally about her interests in scientific research and the politics of funding research. I made the obvious point that profit-potential had a lot to do with what kind of research gets done.

Certainly the comparative levels of research-and-development money that went, for example, to Viagra compared with money for drugs to combat new strains of TB tells us something about the values of our society, I suggested. The student agreed, but raised another issue. Given the overpopulation problem, she said, would it really be a good thing to spend lots of resources on developing those drugs?

About halfway through her sentence I knew where she was heading, though I didn’t want to believe it. This very bright student wanted to discuss whether it made sense to put resources into life-saving drugs for poor people in the Third World, given that there are arguably too many people on the planet already, or at least too many poor people in the Third World.

I contained my anger somewhat, and told the student that when she was ready to sacrifice members of her own family to help solve the global population problem, then I would listen to her argument. In fact, given the outrageous levels of consumption of the middle and upper classes in the United States, I said, one could argue that large-scale death in the American suburbs would be far more beneficial in solving the population problem; a single U.S. family is more of a burden ecologically on the planet than a hundred Indian peasants.

“If you would be willing to let an epidemic sweep though your hometown and kill large numbers of people without trying to stop it, for the good of the planet, then I’ll listen to that argument,” I said.

The student left shortly after that. Based on her reaction, I suspect I made her feel bad. I am glad for that. I wanted her to see that the assumption behind her comment -- that the lives of people who look like her are more valuable than the lives of the poor and vulnerable in other parts of the world -- was ethnocentric, racist, and barbaric. That assumption is the product of an arrogant and inhumane society.

I wanted her to think about why she lived in a world in which the pain of others is so routinely ignored. I wanted her to feel what, for most of her life, she has been able to turn away from. I wanted her to begin to empathize with people who aren’t white like her and not comfortable like her, people whose suffering is far away from her.

I do not want to overestimate the power of empathy to change the world. But without empathy, without the ability to move outside our own experience, there is no hope of changing the world.

Andrea Dworkin, one of the most important feminist thinkers of our time, has written, “The victims of any systematized brutality are discounted because others cannot bear to see, identify, or articulate the pain.”

It is long past the time for all of us to start to see, to identify, to articulate the pain of systematized brutality. It is time to recognize that much of the pain is the result of a system designed to ensure our pleasures.

do less than they could to make black students feel welcome on campus

Regular swpd reader LaSmartOne left a comment this morning that I'm turning into a guest post. In response to a satirical line in yesterday's post about how "whenever white people congregate these days, high concentrations of racial homogeneity are just pure coincidence," LaSmartOne offers much insight into life as a black graduate student at an elite, largely white research university.


These comments are off-topic, but I really need to vent. I am a graduate student at a major biological "research institution" in New York City. You wouldn't know this is a graduate/research program if you stumbled onto this campus. This exclusive, highly maintained campus feels more like Sandals resort with all of the young upper-middle class white or white male/asian female couples roaming around hand-in-hand during the evenings. Groups of white or white-and-asian students roam with tennis rackets on their way to the on-campus court. Or they congregate in packs at the on-campus student lounge with a personal bartender. Or the white and asian students have parties in the hotel-like student lounge of the dorms.

Most of the groups of people you see dotted around campus are all-white or white-and-asian. The campus is mostly white with a substantial number of asians but has a serious dearth of black or latino students--and I almost never see the other black students.

You wouldn't believe the amounts of implicit racism I've experienced here. Twice while coming on campus I've been stopped in a hostile and condescending manner by newly-hired guards who, having seen my ID, told me that I am 'ok' since I was a groundskeeper or a day worker for the animal facility, whose staff is mostly black and latino.

Coming to my dorm, almost every six months someone gives me a hostile look in the foyer as if I'm some intruder. When I attend lectures, I meet the same hostility until I ask a serious academic question of the lecturer.

When someone new comes to my lab, they'll automatically either intentionally ignore me or attempt to condescend to me. Scientific sales reps will intentionally ignore me and proceed to the white guys who are also just students. Believe it or not, this one white girl who rotated in the lab would speak to me in a passive-aggressive/patronizing manner. And almost everyone in the lab, despite my being there for years and attempting to form working relationships with them, never come to me casually or attempt to have conversations (work or otherwise) with me unless I initiate the conversation, and never at the casual or intelligent level they have with each other.

I noticed the other two black guys, who are accommodationists (and overrepresented with respect to the real dearth of black students on campus), also attempt to have conversations with the white people in the lab, but they are always the ones to initiate the conversation.

After five years of being here, the only thing I've learned is that white and asian people are the only people competent enough to be scientists.

A maintenance staff guy wrote an article in the student rag praising the university's president in light of the great hall of European philosophers like Kant and Hume and the great European scientific tradition. Additionally, the sense of ownership and privilege among other students is just incredible.

I'm beginning to think that biomedical science is almost a white supremacist enterprise by default. Science is supposed to be a collaborative endeavor with a free collegial exchange of information and support, but when people are constantly patronizing or condescending to you, such is a psychological assault informing you that you are inconsequential, "tolerated" or unwelcomed. I read a report somewhere that around half of black graduate science students drop out of their programs. If they meet the same kinds of hostility or implied white supremacy I meet, small wonder.

I've especially felt a sort of patronizing attitude right off the bat from many of the white female students on campus. White women, with the help of affirmative action, have made great gains in both scientific student bodies and faculty, but you would still be wont to find black faculty and only a little more lucky in locating black students in scientific graduate programs across the country. That aside, most of my interactions with white females on campus has been unnecessarily hostile and patronizing.

There are two other black male students who happen to be in my lab; they're very sycophantic towards the white male students, which surprised me. They're always kissing up, laughing nervously, you know that trying to court your attention laugh, around these other white males who are just graduate students like them. They prick up their minds and attempt to engage the white guys with crisp, intelligent conversation. They'll go to the white guys equally whenever they have a problem as if they are the fount of knowledge (I've never seen them approach any of the white girls or the Indian guy when they have problems, but they will approach them for prick-up-your-mind 'casual' conversation, more than they give me [or each other]). When explicitly in the company of the white guys (which never seems to be together with each other), they intentionally ignore me or will attempt to condescend to me. It's irritating to watch white guys no better than the average black guy get their egos stroked day after day by white girls and sycophantic blacks while they also slap themselves on the back. It's not like they're especially brilliant or that this science is just so difficult that only superiorly intelligent white supremacists like James Watson can do it.

I don't even want to get into the student listserve conversation I had to observe in the wake of James Watson's comments back in 2007. Some of them practically endorsed the man with statements like "science is about objective data, not political correctness" or "what does giving a writing prize for his autobiography have to do with him making statements that any old man would make"?


What could white students, staff, and faculty do in everyday situations to be more inclusive of black students? How could they reduce levels of what LaSmartOne labels here "implicit racism"?

object to having their children "brainwashed" by a black president

Despite a lack of solid empirical evidence to back me up, I would bet cash money that the vast majority of the people who objected to President Obama's speech to children in school today were white (98%? 99?).

But that doesn't have anything to do with fear of a black president. Nothing whatsoever at all.

After all, whenever white people congregate these days, high concentrations of racial homogeneity are just pure coincidence.

Right?




At this point, the feared effects of Obama's speech don't seem to have kicked in yet. As the Field Negro noticed,

so far there have been no 911 calls from middle A-merry-ca that little Johnny is trying to work on his basketball moves. And that little Heather, all of a sudden, has a crush on Bow Wow. Kids weren't walking around the school yards like Zombies chanting "yes we can."

Do you know anyone who kept their children home to protect them from our irresistibly hypnotizing leader?

[h/t: David Neiwert @ Crooks and Liars]

labor day movie rec : salt of the earth

FlintPublic, who posted the 1954 film Salt of the Earth in sections on YouTube, writes that its dramatization of an actual labor strike during the 1950s was

produced, written and directed by victims of the Hollywood blacklist. Unable to make films in Hollywood, they looked for worthy social issues to put on screen independently. This film never would have been made in Hollywood at the time, so it is ironic that it was the anti-communist backlash that brought about the conditions for it to be made. In many ways it was a film ahead of its time. Mainstream culture did not pick up on its civil rights and feminist themes for at least a decade.




You can watch and/or legally download the entire film for free at the Internet Archive.

At filmjourney.org, Doug Cummings calls Salt of the Earth "a movie the FBI and the Hollywood industry did everything they could to destroy."

Cummings also writes,

Based on a true story about a 1950-’52 strike by zinc miners in Silver City, New Mexico, the film is a rousing depiction of a community of Mexican-American workers and their efforts to demand equal rights with other (white) miners. It was financed by Local 890, the union depicted in the story, and made by one of the “Hollywood Ten” filmmakers, director Herbert J. Biberman, as well as other blacklistees: producer Paul Jarrico, composer Sol Kaplan, and writer Michael Wilson . . .

Detailed in James J. Lorence’s 1999 book, The Suppression of Salt of the Earth: How Hollywood, Big Labor, and Politicians Blacklisted a Movie in Cold War America (as well as Biberman’s own published account), industry string-pullers such as Howard Hughes banned laboratories from processing any of Salt’s footage or offering post-production services of any kind–initial editing was done secretly in a temporary setup in the bathroom of the still-extant Rialto Theatre in South Pasadena. (One of the several editors who abandoned the project was reportedly planted by the FBI.)

The FBI also deported the film’s star, Rosaura Revueltas, midway through filming (insert footage was subsequently and illegally shot in Mexico, where political pressure succeeded in banning the film’s production there as well) and after the movie managed to be completed, the industry’s projectionists’ union refused to screen it. After a handful of theatrical engagements in New York (where it was critically well-received), the film was promptly shelved until its “rediscovery” many years later. But in a twist of history (or was it?), the Library of Congress’ Film Registry celebrated the movie forty years later through its 1992 inclusion with the most “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant [American] films.”

The filmmakers intended the movie for a mass audience, so it’s quite accessible filmmaking, wearing its emotions and values on its sleeve. In fact, seeing it today could easily provoke bewilderment from viewers familiar with the film’s tortured history: why on earth would such a seemingly straightforward and melodramatic picture be treated with such vehement opposition? Recognizing this disparity reveals the astonishing extent to which anti-communist hysteria prevailed at the time.

The movie focuses on Ramon (Juan Chacon, a real-life union leader) and Esperanza (Reveultas) Quintero, a young married couple who illustrate the human side of racial inequality as well as gender tensions. As the company and local police put the heat on the male strikers, their wives volunteer to march the picket line in their places, creating a reversal of traditional gender roles: the women stage the rallies and spend time in jail while the men stay at home, wash dishes, and take care of the children. In many ways, the film is a progressive statement for the ’50s as several of the men begin whining about their domestic chores. (The film’s distributor, Organa, offers this QuickTime scene, which illustrates the growing friction between the conservative Ramon and the progressive Esperanza.)

The film’s style is social realist, with a mixture of professional and non-professional actors. The troublesome sheriff is played by blacklistee Will Greer, who many associate with his later portrayal of the grandpa in the television show, The Waltons. The underground nature of its production guarantees some rough technical edges (the sound suffers the most, with fluxuations in quality throughout) but also places it alongside the postwar masterpieces of Italian neorealism, even if Salt is more clearly rooted in Classical Hollywood style with its strong narrative, three-point lighting, and continuity editing. It’s not a film renowned for its aesthetics – adequately wrought though they are – but a movie valued for its political stance and historical significance. More than the typical Miramax/Tarantino extravaganzas, it’s films like this that establish the historical precedent and importance of truly independent American filmmaking.


[Read the rest of Cummings' review here]

refer to people as "orientals"

The first time I felt the full force behind the word “Oriental,” I was 13. My music teacher was explaining the phrasing of a difficult passage to my string quartet, and we all nodded. Suddenly he turned to me, the only Asian in the group, and said, “Oh, stop being so Oriental and nodding.” I felt like I’d been slapped in the face.

--Leaya Lee

New York's Governor David Paterson signed legislation last week banning a word that I still hear white people use sometimes. New York's new law forbids the reference in all state documents to any person of Asian or Pacific Islander heritage as an "Oriental." According to National Public Radio, the state of Washington took similar steps in 2002, when that state's governor was Gary Locke, a Chinese American.

Apparently some Asian Americans applaud attempts to banish the term, while others are cynical about the motives driving such efforts (no surprise there, given that Asian Americans obviously don't think with any more of a single, collective mindset than do the members of any other group).

In an NPR interview, SF Chronicle columnist Jeff Yang said he's glad about the news from New York, because the term Oriental "feels freighted with luggage. . . . It's a term which you can't think of without having that smell-of-incense and sound-of-a-gong thing going on in your head."

Yang also cited the term's imprecision -- "Orient" basically means East, which could be any place in that direction, and which "only really applies in a flat world. I mean, you keep on going East, you end up 'West.'"

When asked if the word isn't already dying out anyway, rendering such legislative moves against it a waste of time, Yang said he actually has heard the term applied to himself, and it felt wrong. He added that other Asian Americans also feel uncomfortable with it, "so to have it stricken from the public record just kind of makes sense in some ways. I think people probably feel a little kind of curious as to why it took so long."

In an old Usenet posting, circa 1993, Alan Hu takes a different view on efforts to ban the term. Hu blames such efforts on "exploitation-types," who he says "have realized that saying 'Asian' instead of 'Oriental' is the cool thing to do, without changing any of their stereotypes and misconceptions. (You can force a person to change his/her behavior, but you can't force a change in thought.)"

Hu also writes that the exoticizing usage of "Oriental" has survived a long time,

and it still frequently carries all of the exotic/foreign/inscrutable/mysterious connotations. These connotations happen to coincide with many of the stereotypes held of Asian Americans. Furthermore, by definition, the word "Oriental" is Eurocentric, referring to things east of Europe. For these reasons, some Asian American activist types decided that "Oriental" was a Bad Word, and that "Asian" was more accurate, less Eurocentric, and less loaded with strange connotations. No big deal, right?

Well, a lot of people didn't want to change their language usage. Some people grew up using "Oriental" and saw nothing wrong with the word. Others came from other parts of the world, where hip-activist-American-English-linguistic-evolution hadn't hit. Still others never encountered anyone aware of Asian American politics, so had never heard of this word usage change. Some people were exploiting the exotic mysticism connotations and resisted change. (Very early on, you would see articles about business and trade in Asia, whereas the travel articles would talk about visiting the Exotic Mysterious Orient.) Finally, some people were convinced that this was a typical case of left-wing-politically-correct-thought-police-mind-control (which it was) and decided in typical right-wing-politically-correct-knee-jerk-response that the word usage change was intrinsically evil and had to be resisted at all costs.

Over at Asian American Movement, an anonymous blogger calls New York's new law

largely a symbolic gesture–not unlike the US Government’s recent “apology” for the enslavement of Blacks (over 140 years after the fact), or the state of California’s apology for racist laws against Chinese Americans during the nineteenth century, or Bill Clinton’s apology for America’s illegal overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom in 1893.

These actions are ultimately designed to burnish the USA’s propaganda image. The American establishment loves these kinds of meaningless gestures, as they have very little cost politically and are a great public relations exercise.

Indeed, the election of Barack Obama should be considered a prime example of this type of political rebranding on a grand scale.

They don’t call it poli-tricks for nothing.

So what do you think?

Is the explicit and legislative rejection of the term "Oriental" usually a hypocritical PC ploy? Or is it instead a welcome attempt to describe a diverse group of people more accurately?

If you overhear someone describing another person as an "Oriental," do you consider it worthwhile to correct them?


For further discussion, see:

"What's the Matter with Saying 'The Orient'?," Christopher Hill, Japan Society

"Oriental: Rugs or People?," Leaya Lee, NYU Livewire

"What Does It Mean to Be Asian American?," Jeff Yang, San Francisco Chronicle

Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture (book), Robert G. Lee

make classist web sites

This photo is from the latest user-submitted photo blog to go viral, "People of Walmart [sic]." The caption there says, "I have to assume that this guy, in a fit of rage after a monster truck rally or tractor pull, ripped off his sleeves and then went to Wal-Mart to get a few cases of beer to enjoy on the couch on his front porch."

Can you count the classist stereotypes in that sentence? (I came up with six.)

CNN noticed the blog's popularity and posted a story about it, reporting in part:

It's a blog where people post, and make fun of, pictures of out-of-shape, poorly dressed and otherwise awkward people shopping at Wal-Mart.

And, in less than a month, with no marketing to speak of, it's become the toast of the Internet.

"People of Wal-Mart," a gag started by two 20-something brothers and their buddy to share crazy pictures with their friends, has gone viral. Promoted largely on sites like Digg and Funny or Die -- and linked ad nauseam on Facebook and Twitter -- the site picked up enough traffic to crash its servers on Wednesday.

"I'm still baffled -- I really am," said Andrew Kipple, 23, one of the creators of the site, who said his team was frantically working Wednesday to add enough server space to handle the surge in traffic.

Photos on the site, sent in by viewers all over the United States, frequently feature overweight people wearing tight clothes, bizarre hairstyles (with versions of the short-in-front, long-in-back "mullet" leading the pack) and fashion crimes ranging from furry leg warmers to miniskirts that leave absolutely nothing to the imagination.

There's a guy enjoying a can of beer outside a Wal-Mart, a guy dressed as Captain America and another guy with a goat. Yes, a live goat.


Can you believe it? A live goat! Freakin' hilarious, dude!!! [/sarcasm]

I suppose that some people from any social class could laugh at this site's photos of "awkward" people (really, CNN? "awkward"? I doubt that's a word most of the site's fans would use). But when people who occupy higher rungs on the socioeconomic ladder laugh at them, their laughter is derisive, unsympathetic, and condescending. That's because the laughter is mostly triggered by connections that many of the photos make with the unexamined classist stereotypes firmly embedded in their heads.

It seems to me that much of the online CNN report is also largely written from an unidentified middle-class perspective, one that views working-class people from a safe, smug distance, and reduces them to a "crazy," "bizarre" spectacle. Which, despite my best intentions, is not unlike my own perspective at times on working-class people, as in a recent post about a car launch in Turtle Lake, Wisconsin.

Many commenters there pointed out my own classist perspective in that post, and for that I'm grateful. As I noted in a comment of my own, I think another blogger's post about my "car launch" post summed up well, just in its satiric title, the main problem with my post, and also with the "People of Walmart" blog. Jane Van Galen's brief post about my messed-up post is entitled "Those Curious Working Class Folks." I now think that her title is a valid imitation of my post's distanced, classist approach to the Turtle Lake car launch fans.

But then, maybe in labeling the People of Walmart blog "classist" instead of "funny," I'm just demonstrating that I have a PC stick up my posterior?

Or maybe, to put a finer point on it: depending on who's laughing at the people exposed by People of Walmart, some of the laughter it elicits is fine, and some of the laughter is classist (and, for some of the site's photos, racist, sexist, and heterosexist as well).

At any rate, I'm not the only one who finds this photo blog generally despicable. Much to its credit, CNN also reports that "not everyone appreciates the humor," adding that some say "the site goes out of its way to mock poor and rural patrons of the store, reinforcing stereotypes along the way":

"American culture likes to single out people who appear to be different," said Tim Marema, vice president of the Whitesburg, Kentucky-based Center for Rural Strategies. "Whether it's a joke or not, all depends on which side of the camera you're on."

Furthering stereotypes can strengthen the rifts between rural, urban and suburban residents and, in the worst-case scenario, can affect the way some people are treated by government and industry, he said.

Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer with more than 4,200 U.S. stores and over $400 billion in annual sales, may be more prominent in rural areas, Marema said, but to use that to stereotype its shoppers doesn't make sense.

"The reality is that everybody shops at Wal-Mart," he said. "If you want to find the guy in the golf shirt and khakis, he's there too."

It's not quite true that "everybody" shops at Wal-Mart, but I do agree with Tim Marema's point that associating it with working-class people, and then mocking those people, furthers damaging stereotypes.

As for the People of Walmart blog, who knows what the future holds? Maybe a blook?

So far, it doesn't seem that the site's creators are listening to their critics. The "About Us" page does suggest that the creators are alert to, and ready to block, ableism: "There is no reason to send us pictures of people that are seriously and unfortunately handicapped so don’t be an asshole."

But classism? Not so much, as evinced by this statement on that page -- again, can you count the classist (and heterosexist) stereotypes here?

It’s not everywhere that you can shop for milk at 10 a.m. next to a 400lb mother of 6 wearing a pink tube top, leopard tights, and hooker heels. Where else can one go to pick up underwear at 3 O’clock in the afternoon and spot the greatest mullet of all time paired with a mustard stained wife beater (which only accents the extreme amount of body hair) and camo pants that were actually used in Vietnam. And if you haven’t run into the 6’2” bull-dyke with a shaved head, rockin a wonder bra, flannel cutoff shirt, and jean shorts at 2 a.m. when you’re there to pick up frozen pizza, chips, and cookies, then you can get the fuck out right now.

How's that for classy?

complain about 'racism' against white people

This is a guest post for swpd by fromthetropics, who writes about herself, "I am mixed cultured, and always feel in-between -- both here and there, but neither fully here nor there."

Cardboard versions of "Mr. James" currently occupy every McDonald's in Japan

McDonald's new mascot in Japan, a geeky white American named Mr. James, who speaks broken, foreign-sounding Japanese, has ruffled the feathers of some foreign-born (white) residents there. They feel that Mr. James is a racist caricature, and that he therefore constitutes another example of Japanese discrimination against people like themselves.




A human rights group in Japan named FRANCA (Foreign Residents and Naturalized Citizens Association) has angrily written to McDonald's,

We wish to bring to your attention a sales campaign launched this month by McDonald’s Japan that we find extremely problematic.

The “Mr. James” character, representing the “Nippon All Stars” hamburger campaign, features a spectacled Caucasian narrating his love for Japan and Japan’s version of McDonald’s’ hamburgers. Our association finds the following things problematic:

* 1) The character speaks broken accented Japanese (using the katakana script, one used for foreign loanwords). The impression given is that Caucasians cannot speak Japanese properly, which is simply not true for the vast numbers of non-native (and Japanese-native) foreigners in Japan.

* 2) The character is called “Mr. James” (again, in katakana), promoting the stereotype that foreigners must be called by their first names only (standard Japanese etiquette demands that adults be called “last name plus -san”), undoing progress we have made for equal treatment under Japanese societal rules.

* 3) The image used, of a clumsy sycophantic “nerd” for this Caucasian customer, is embarrassing to Caucasians who will have to live in Japan under this image.

To illustrate the issue more clearly, would McDonald’s USA (or McDonald’s in any other country, for that matter) choose to promote, for example, a new rice dish with a “ching-chong Chinaman” saying, “Me likee McFlied Lice!”? Of course not.

Likewise, we do not think these attitudes perpetuating stereotypes of ethnic minorities within their respective societies should be promoted anywhere by a multinational corporation with the influence of McDonald’s. We ask that McDonald’s Headquarters review McDonald’s Japan’s “Mr James” Campaign and have it discontinued immediately.


My response, especially to the last point is: "Really?"

I often see ads like that airing in Australia without significant or even noticeable protest. The primary difference is that the stereotypes are about non-whites. And really, since when did Caucasians corner the market on the nerd stereotype? A lot of nerds are also portrayed as Asian Americans, and African Americans. Urkel, anyone? William Hung? Stevie, from Malcolm in the Middle?

I also find the outrage over the McDonald's 'Mr. James' caricature misplaced not only because the rest of us have had to put up with media-generated stereotyping for years and years, but also because most ads in Japan that feature Caucasians usually depict them in a highly positive light, as the central god or goddess-like icon of the commercial. Japanese companies routinely pay large amounts of money to top Hollywood stars for commercial appearances that portray them in very flattering ways. This fact makes the complaints about one such stereotyping a bit...well, petty.

How often do people who look Japanese get depicted in a positive light in U.S. ads? And did any of the foreign-born in Japan protest when a Japanese English school perpetuated the stereotype of native speakers of English as blue-eyed blonds like Cameron Diaz?




What’s that? This is harmless, you say? Tell that to the Asian Americans who speak nothing but English and still get passed over for an English teaching job in Japan because the school preferred, say, a blond German who speaks English as a second or third language.

The problem, you see, is not so much that one negative caricature harms the image in Japan of white people. The real problem is that the media-generated image of white people there, as in most of Asia, is already a stereotype -- an enormously positive one. It's an image of adored perfection, created by a barrage of thousands of ads like this caressing portrayal of Cameron Diaz (who, despite her last name, undoubtedly comes across in Japan as another white goddess).

One portrayal of a geeky white guy named Mr. James is not going to put a dent in the generally positive image of white people created by Japanese media. In fact, I wonder why FRANCA and other white residents of Japan don't complain about the other, seemingly positive images of themselves. Don't those images end up creating an even more unrealistic image of white people, one that is very difficult for most white people to live up to?

These complaints about Mr. James also sound hypocritical when the West is made out to be doing a much better job of not presenting stereotyped images of their migrant population. Whatever. You just don’t notice it when it’s being done to someone else. When Westerners go to Asia and complain about ‘racism’, the implied argument is that the West is more enlightened, civilized, and advanced because ‘it just wouldn’t happen back home’. And Asia is backwards, so we need to ‘educate’ them.

For example, white students who come back to Australia after finishing an exchange program in Japan complain about minor inconveniences there; that leaves me thinking, ‘You’re complaining about that?’ One such student told a Japanese lecturer to go watch Lost in Translation because it oh-so-perfectly describes what it's like living in Japan as a foreigner, as though she had just endured the most difficult thing at the hands of these Japanese beings.

I heard about this. So I went and watched that movie, wondering what in the world the student meant. After watching it, my conclusion was: I don't need to watch this movie to know how that feels -- its portrayal of life as an outsider in a foreign country is the story of my life. And it's a much milder version of the story of many migrant lives.

Obviously, life in a foreign country is hard and everyone deserves to be cared for. But it's hard to sympathize when white residents of Japan frame it as, 'Oh-my-gosh, the Japanese people are sooo [insert negative adjective], and oh-my-gosh, our struggles are oh-so-unique and difficult.' It’s hard to sympathize when they have little understanding of how many more foreigners, migrants, and POCs in their own country go through it too, often in much harder circumstances. Tell me your experience and I’ll empathize, but don’t try to ‘educate’ me about it because I already know.

But of course, over in the West the blame falls on POCs if we fail to assimilate. In Asia, if Westerners don’t feel comfortable, the blame falls on the host society…POCs can never win the argument, it seems.

Then there are the white folks who come back complaining about how the Japanese term 'gaijin' (foreigner) is derogatory. When someone tries to ‘educate’ me on this, it's an automatic give away that they have a superficial understanding of Japan. 'Gaijin' sounds awfully rude in Chinese due to the Chinese characters it uses. It means 'outsider' in Chinese. And the Chinese in Japan do have a hard time in Japan (considering their disadvantaged status in terms of power relations as defined by the current global economic structure), so it’s understandable if they get upset at it.

However, it makes little sense for Westerners to get upset about it. In Japan, 'gaijin' is used as a short form for the more formal 'gaikokujin' (person from a foreign country). And 'gaijin' is often synonymous with ‘white person’ (and all the positive images that come with being white) and is rarely used as a derogatory term in Japan, especially not when referring to white people. It has a completely different meaning from how it sounds in Chinese, even though they use the same characters.

The same goes for the word 'bule' in Indonesian. It means 'faded' and is used to refer to white people. But again, it is rarely used in a derogatory way. 'Bule', or ‘white person’, carries positive connotations, thanks to all the white-worshiping that Asia is so very good at.

I find that some white people who know how power relations work never complain about these things. They know that the general Asian image of them is not derogatory. But as the crocodile tears shed over McDonald's Japan's Mr. James mascot demonstrate, those who don't know how power relations work seem to bite deeply the first chance they get. They do so, in my jaded opinion, because for once they get to be the ones who cry, 'That's racist!'


See also:

Disgracian: "In McDonald's New Japanese Ad Campaign, The Wacky Foreigner Joke's on Americans" (reposted at Racialicious) & "We Don't Care about White People"

(Coco Masters) Time: "Not Everyone Is Lovin' Japan's New McDonald's Mascot"

Japan Probe: "Mr. James: McDonald’s Japan has a gaijin clown"

Jeff Yang (San Francisco Chronicle): "McRacism in Japan"

The official blog of Mr. James

wonder how to define racism

A reader named Pistolina left a question in a comment today that I'd like to bring up front here, because I overheard the exact same issue brought up today in a conversation between a black and a white person, and I'm now wondering about it. Please let us know what you think about this challenge to the definition of racism as prejudice + power.

But first, Pistolina's comment was in response to Robin F.'s excellent guest post here from last week, "Racism 101 for Clueless White People," where Robin offered the following explanation of the definition of "racism" that's commonly used in anti-racism discussions. I've also included Pistolina's comment below -- again, please do let us know your response to Pistolina's sincere query.

Robin F. wrote in part:

The first thing you really need to understand is that the definition of racism that you probably have (which is the colloquial definition: "racism is prejudice against someone based on their skin color or ethnicity") is NOT the definition that's commonly used in anti-racist circles.

The definition used in anti-racist circles is the accepted sociological definition (which is commonly used in academic research, and has been used for more than a decade now): "racism is prejudice plus power". What this means, in easy language:

A. Anyone can hold "racial prejudice" -- that is, they can carry positive or negative stereotypes of others based on racial characteristics. For example, a white person thinking all Asians are smart, or all black people are criminals; or a Chinese person thinking Japanese people are untrustworthy; or what-have-you. ANYONE, of any race, can have racial prejudices.

B. People of any race can commit acts of violence, mistreatment, ostracizing, etc., based on their racial prejudices. A black kid can beat up a white kid because he doesn't like white kids. An Indian person can refuse to associate with Asians. Whatever, you get the idea.

C. However, to be racist (rather than simply prejudiced) requires having institutional power. In North America, white people have the institutional power. In large part we head the corporations; we make up the largest proportion of lawmakers and judges; we have the money; we make the decisions. In short, we control the systems that matter. "White" is presented as normal, the default. Because we have institutional power, when we think differently about people based on their race or act on our racial prejudices, we are being racist. Only white people can be racist, because only white people have institutional power.

D. People of color can be prejudiced, but they cannot be racist, because they don't have the institutional power. (However, some people refer to intra-PoC prejudice as "lateral racism". You may also hear the term "colorism", which refers to lighter-skinned PoC being prejudiced toward darker-skinned PoC.) However, that situation can be different in other countries; for example, a Japanese person in Japan can be racist against others, because the Japanese have the institutional power there. But in North America, Japanese people can't be racist because they don't hold the institutional power.

E. If you're in an area of your city/state/province that is predominantly populated by PoC and, as a white person, you get harassed because of your skin color, it's still not racism, even though you're in a PoC-dominated area. The fact is, even though they're the majority population in that area, they still lack the institutional power. They don't have their own special PoC-dominated police force for that area. They don't have their own special PoC-dominated courts in that area. The state/province and national media are still not dominated by PoC. Even though they have a large population in that particular area, they still lack the institutional power overall.

F. So that's the definition of racism that you're likely to encounter. If you start talking about "reverse racism" you're going to either get insulted or laughed at, because it isn't possible under that definition; PoC don't have the power in North America, so by definition, they can't be racist. Crying "reverse racism!" is like waving a Clueless White Person Badge around.


After thanking Robin for her post, Pistolina wrote in a comment:

I am white, and while I have done a lot of reading and attempted to educate my fellow white people on issues of racism, there was one time that a PoC called me out that I could not figure out the appropriate response for, and did not want to demand that they educate me, so I apologized and stepped out of the conversation. Perhaps you can help?

In describing the definition of racism as prejudice plus power, this person accused me of infantilizing people of color by refusing to allow them to have power. I explained that I did not think that PoC were incapable of wielding power, but that in certain areas, such as North America, white people were in control and thus racism by the sociological definition was practiced by whites, not by blacks, Latinos, Asians, or other groups. I went on to explain that in a place where blacks were the group with institutional power, it would be possible for blacks to be practicing institutional racism. They continued to tell me that they found this definition offensive and that it was insulting to PoC.

Is there a correct way to address situations like this? I learned this definition because I understood that this was the proper definition to use when trying to address race issues, and because I want to be a good ally to PoC. I certainly never meant to insult anyone. The problem is that I don't really know how to engage in a conversation if I have people telling me that my language is perpetuating racist views when I try to use the language that I see anti-racists recommend.


Strangely enough, the conversation that I overheard between a black and a white person today was almost exactly the same -- the white person defined racism this way, and the black person said that was an insulting denial of non-white agency.

What do you think -- does the standard anti-racist definition of racism (prejudice + power) actually end up infantalizing people of color?

If it does, is there a better way to define and understand racism? If it doesn't, is there, as Pistolina asks, a correct or better way for a white anti-racist to say so to a non-white person?