Apparently some of the folks at A Voice for Men are afraid that, amidst all the eulogies for one of the greatest freedom fighters of our age, people may lose sight of the fact that Nelson Mandela was, in fact, a man. Not a man in the fallible human being sense, as he was and all of us are, but a man in the not a lady sense.
So AVFM Managing Editor Dean Esmay felt it necessary to remind the world of this fact:
The Horseless Hun decided to rub it in a bit:
Kukla, meanwhile, wasn’t all that impressed.
This, again, is a site that thinks of itself as the locus of the “Men’s Human Rights Movement.” It’s also a place where the death of a real human rights icon becomes just another excuse to talk shit about women.
@Philippe, the impact of racism making a child of colour feel crap about themselves and their race is not exactly comparable to a white person being unconscious of their privilege. The former is someone being oppressed, the latter is someone being so accustomed to being a member of the oppressing class that they don’t even notice when they are enablers of the oppression.
For a moment there until I scrolled further up I thought Moma Sita was back. So relieved she’s not.
True.
It’s still a real shame when victims of oppression absorb the ideals of their victimization.
RE: Sir Bodsworth
I faked being sick to get out of school and took off to see it.
That is the best reason to cut school ever.
RE: auggziliary
Also you guys have the luxury of living in less racist and more diverse areas.
I was raised in Confederate flag land, and I’ve spent the past three years in Boston. In my opinion, it may be less overtly racist here, but considering what I was raised with, that really isn’t saying much. (I spent a fair amount of my childhood honestly believing the Civil War wasn’t over slavery, and that that was Yankee propoganda.) I didn’t realize how much of the New England brand had soaked into me till I got out of here during my road trip and ended up in Ohio.
I’ve actually heard really nasty stuff about Boston in terms of race issues. No burning crosses, sure, but everyone I’ve ever known who’s spent time there who’s not white has been distinctly uncomfortable there.
RE: CassandraSays
Yup. It’s just that I was raised so racist, Boston looks comparatively… better. Not ‘good,’ just better.
Trying to desegregate the Boston public school system provoked a lot of resistance.
I was actually part of the effort to desegregate LA public schools by busing kids to new schools — as a kid, not a mover and shaker. I loved it. Got to meet a bunch of new kids just when I was most bored with the kids I’d been going to school with. And it really opened my eyes to how privileged I was previously attending a public school in a neighborhood with more resources. We had a small but cool library, the school clean, textbooks were new, we didn’t have to worry about crime on the school grounds, etc. Busing moved me to a school where none of that was true.
Since the topic’s come up…I’ve been working on the Borg 101 pages. Including the racism 101 one. But I’m pretty damn white — my experience is limited to “you did NOT just say that about my friend/relative” (anyone want to comment on Italian immigrant miners? No? Good)
But this means I’m wary of signing off on any of the 101 type pages that I’ve found. I mean, they sound good to me, but it feels so different than doing the GLBT section (particularly the trans* stuff). There I know what to look for to noptopus it, racism I don’t. Can someone less white than me vet it? I’ll give you back end access if you don’t have it already, or email me and I’ll send you what I have (feministborg or this nym, both are gmail)
Thanks in advance, and I hope this isn’t coming off all “I’m white, educate me!”
I’m sure the MRA will talk about the crimes of Winnie Mandela next and call her an example of feminism.
Argenti – I can take a look (plus I have access to said backend).
Question: is it wrong of me to absolutely ABHOR the term “person of color”? I know it’s the newest of the PC terms, but for some reason it pisses me off.
cloudiah: I was in a part of LA which wasn’t LAUSD, and so busing didn’t happen; because there wasn’t enough in the way of separate campuses in the Montebello USD to make it feasible,that and the racial mix was, as I recall it about 60/40 white/hispanic, with a VERY small percentage of blacks/asians).
I did spend my sophomore/senior years in an LAUSD school… it was different, and not in ways I’d say were good, because the PWT (bussed in) students were, by and large, tracked into less academically rigorous classes.
I actually have an amusing integration story.
Okay, so I was raised in [City], Texas, in [City] High School. Our sworn nemesis was a place called Westlake, which was rich white suburbialand that regularly trounced our asses in football every year. My high school compatriots had a game they would play whenever they got their hands on a Westlake yearbook. This game was called Find The Black Person.
Due to us being [City] High, we had a pretty variegated student population, racially and socially. You had the punks with safety pins through their anatomy, and the guy who wore his girlfriend’s clothes, and the refugees from Hurricane Katrina, and the trailer park kids, and so on and so forth. Our yearbooks reflected this accordingly. Westlake’s yearbooks, on the other hand, had a whole lot of smiling white kids in collared shirts and nice clothes.
Our school was okay with a budget, but you definitely saw the wear and tear; in marching band, I played a vibraphone that had a broken middle C and Eb keys, our textbooks tended to be a bit old and battered, that kind of thing. Westlake, of course, had plenty of money, and apparently are a pretty high-ranked school. (Though we at [City] High took pride in having higher test scores.)
Well, I found out that Westlake was opened SPECIFICALLY as backlash when [City] High School became integrated! It seems that the rich white folks didn’t take too kindly to this, so created their own goddamn school district deep in the heart of whitelandia so that they could keep their ritzy white environment.
Now, whether this spawned the hatred, I don’t know, but I thought it was educational.
Interesting Texas trivia for you!
Thanks Alice, and YMMV on terms. I think the census included “negro” in 2010 as people still use it to refer to themselves. I know I went to school with a girl of Jamaican descent whose mother despised the term African American because she wasn’t from Africa (not that she hated Africans or African Americans, but the easure of non-African PoC/blacks)
You should consider watching this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82vl34mi4Iw
Pecunium — I fucking hate tracking. So very much. My HS had -3, -5, -7, -9, level 5 being he standard and 9 high honors. Well, level 3 courses were special ed level courses, so what do you think happened when they did away with them? Parents of level 5 kids had a shit fit, and then those of level 7 kids and then my high honors math ended up answering the same questions for a week because dude, you just aren’t cut out for this!
Contra, I was on level 5 English for 9th and 10th grade cuz it was based on middle school grades and middle school English was like 20% spelling, and I cannot fucking spell. And 5 in 9th grade means 5 in 10th. Luckily my 10th grade teacher noticed that I sat in the back by the bookcase so I could read ALL THE THINGS while she read to the class (yes, seriously)
Tracking, bad all over the place.
Argenti – Personally, I read the term “person of color”, and I think “really? White’s not a freaking color anymore? *roll eyeballs*”. That’s what gets me — the fact that it still perpetuates the idea that white is not a color among many others, but a default setting that everyone else deviates from.
I still remember when there was this cute video of Bjork hugging Goldie, who she was dating at the time, when he turned up at a show and surprised her. The American reporter who I saw introducing the clip referred to Goldie as African American, which was weird because not only is he British, not American, he’s not African either (I think his parents are from Jamaica).
It’s way better than saying “non-white people,” though. That has a way more polarizing effect.
Ally – Okay, I did watch the video. I can now understand WHY the term comes to exist, but I still feel uncomfortable with the inherent assumption that white is not a color, that it’s a default.
It sounds really, really, really stupid. >_<
Ally – I guess? I wish there was a better way to express people who are disadvantaged by the racial hierarchy though that didn’t confer the idea that white is a default setting.
Alice, I think you are raising a good point. I have no idea how to address it, but it’s a good point, and I’m glad you raised it.
Cloudiah’s right, it’s a good point and I have no ideas. I use lighter/darker than me sometimes, with degrees thereof, but lots of white people are lighter than me (quarter full blooded Italian, with some Native American mixed in, so white enough to be read as white, but I don’t burn or anything, so lighter than me is a bit odd)
Maybe just lighter/darker skinned in general? That or straight “of African descent” // African, Chinese, Indian, etc. maybe?
Perceived race isn’t just about skin color, though. My skin tone is in the same range as a lot of Hispanic people, and some North African Arabs, and I’m sometimes read as belonging to one of those groups, usually by people who are themselves part of that group, but the thing is, as soon as I open my mouth and talk people change their perception to “white”, and I’m never going to suffer from the kind of racism that happens when people can’t see you either, because my name reads as white too.
A friend of mine recently told me that I’m technically a WOC, but I’m still not sure if the label applies to me. I mean, my skin is very white (the whitest in the family, in fact) and I grew up in a middle-class white household (my dad is Indian and dark-skinned, but he wasn’t around often for various reasons). But my facial appearance doesn’t really like “white” and my name is definitely not a typical white American name, and many people can tell right away that I’m mixed-race. Some people even guess correctly that I’m half Indian. So even though I’m technically not white, I’m not sure if I pass as white and therefore receive white privilege just like other white folks. And if I pass as white, I might be unjustly using the WOC label for myself. IDK, I’m confused.
Passing privilege doesn’t make someone not a PoC, Ally.